The Rockies Won 15 More Games Than Last Year and Still Lost 104. Here Comes the Hard Part.

The 2026 Colorado Rockies season ended the way most of them have lately: a 4-2 loss to the White Sox in the finale, per Yahoo Sports' recap. The final ledger reads 58-104. That is a bad baseball team, full stop. It is also, by the only measuring stick that matters for a franchise two full rebuilds deep, a genuinely better one than the group that went 43-119 a year ago.

The improvement is not a talking point manufactured by the team's communications staff. It shows up in the numbers.

The gap between 2025 and 2026 is real

Consider the raw production. Last season, Colorado scored 597 runs and allowed 1,021 — a run differential of minus-424. That is historically bad territory. In 2026, the Rockies scored 752 and allowed 944, a differential of minus-192. That's a 232-run improvement in a single year, driven by roughly five more runs scored per week and a pitching staff that, while still bad, stopped hemorrhaging at quite the same rate.

The win column moved accordingly: 43 wins to 58, a 15-game jump. To put that in perspective, the 2024 club won 61 games with a minus-247 differential, so the 2026 team's underlying profile actually resembles the 2024 group more than the 2025 disaster.

The power-ranking models noticed. Colorado finished 2026 at a -1.32 rating against an average team — still 29th in the league, but a meaningful jump from a -2.402 prior-season rating. The gap between "worst team in baseball" and "merely very bad" is not nothing when you're rebuilding from rock bottom.

The offense showed up; the pitching never did

The team batting line — .253/.322/.416, a .739 OPS with 183 home runs — is the most functional Colorado has fielded in years. It's not going to scare the Dodgers, but it's a lineup that can score.

The mound is another story. A 5.81 team ERA, a 1.55 WHIP, 214 home runs allowed, and a bullpen that posted a 4.57 ERA with just nine saves. The Rockies used 25 pitchers; none of that depth translated into a competent staff. Until that changes, the floor raising has a ceiling.

Now the awkward part: what happens this winter

The compelling subplot heading into the offseason is the one Paul DePodesta has to answer. MLB Trade Rumors' offseason outlook was blunt: the Rockies "won't be trying to compete in 2027," and the central question is how aggressively the front office shops major-league talent for prospects.

That question runs straight into Kris Bryant. The former MVP spent all of 2026 on the 60-day injured list, and he still has roughly $52MM owed to him through 2028. Purple Row's season-review series framed it as an ending, not a chapter: "It's time to end the Kris Bryant chapter of Rockies baseball." Whether that's a buyout, a creative salary dump, or simply another year of waiting, it's the single largest drag on the club's flexibility.

There's also genuine optimism inside the organization for the first time in years — the prospect pipeline got mid-season rankings treatment, DePodesta has spoken publicly about the patience-and-development plan, and the roster churn of 2026 demonstrably raised the floor. The Rockies are not a playoff team in 2027, and the championship futures markets have priced them accordingly, at the longest odds on the board.

But there's a distinction between a team that's circling the drain and one that's actually pointed somewhere. For the first time since the Arenado era, Colorado can plausibly claim to be the latter — 104 losses and all. The hard part isn't stopping the bleeding. It's proving this was a step forward rather than just a less-steep step back.