2026 Team Previews: Colorado Rockies
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 Colorado Rockies
Link and Explanation Page Here
Podcast Version
Highly recommend you download the Substack app (download it for iPhone here). It is awesome, and it has a great podcast player. And since most of these team previews will be paywalled, I won’t be posting all of the podcast versions on Spotify/Apple feeds. You’re best served listening to the podcasts with the Substack app.
Back for another year! And hopefully better than ever. I have begun the long, arduous journey of analyzing and ranking every fantasy-relevant name ahead of main draft season. Most fantasy baseball bro’s take a few days or weeks or do their rankings. That’s lazy, sophomoric stuff. You aren’t a real man unless you’re grinding player ranks from October through February. I mean, imagine how ashamed of me my kids would be if it were February 1st and I hadn’t been neglecting them for three months already, writing thousands of words about Mickey Moniak, Zebby Matthews, and Shea Langeliers.
If you’re new here, you should click that link above and read about how this goes down. But if you don’t have that kind of patience, I’ll get you the TL;DR:
Every year I go team-by-team, player-by-player, analyzing them closely and ranking them one-by-one. I repeat that process hundreds of times through every player I think could be relevant for normal(ish) fantasy baseball drafts next year, and when it’s all said and done I have a rankings list I can truly call my own, as well as strong analysis on every player.
If you’re asking yourself, “Why would he start this so early?”, I would ask you to shut up. You try doing this stuff, man! It takes a long time, and you can only stare at screens and charts and numbers and type out words for so many hours a day. If I want any chance of doing a decent job at this, I’ve gotta use all of the four months that are available to me.
And hey, your fantasy baseball content enjoyment gets stretched out a bit longer. Or not if you choose to wait until March to check all of this out. That would be fine, too, but for the real dedicated sickos, I have your back.
We begin with the worst team and work our way up the standings toward the best. That means we’re here today looking at the Colorado Rockies. This post and the next one or two will be free for all, so everybody can get an idea about how it goes. If you like it, I hope you’ll become a paid subscriber and get the rest.
But that is enough in terms of introduction; it’s time to get going.
Rockies Introduction
The Colorado Rockies are about as pathetic an organization as I can remember. It seems to me like the gap between the best and worst teams in the league gets wider every year. And we are looking at the worst team here.
The offense was below-average, but it’s not as though this team suddenly could not score runs even in Coors Field. They tallied 682 runs last year. That was more than ten other teams. A middle-of-the-pack offense, you could say.
The issue has always been the pitching. But things hit rock bottom on that front in 2025.
It’s hard to believe a team could play 162 games and end up with a team ERA around six.
We can’t put all the blame on Coors Field. Granted, you probably cannot possibly post a team ERA better than the league average while playing the schedule the Rockies have to play every year. What’s happened is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Or a snowball effect. Whichever metaphor works better, probably the second one.
The Rockies know they won’t be able to prevent runs. Everybody else knows the Rockies won’t be able to prevent runs. So no good pitchers want to go there if they can help it. And then the Rockies somewhat give up even trying to acquire good pitchers. In 2025, they were left with these names, pitching the bulk of their innings:
Kyle Freeland 163 IP
Antonio Senzatela 130 IP
German Marquez 126 IP
Chase Dollander 98 IP
Jimmy Herget 83 IP
Tanner Gordon 75 IP
Those were the only six names above 75. Ten different pitchers made double-digit starts for the club. Of those names, only Kyle Freeland kept it under a five ERA (4.99).
The main reason I ordered this series worst to first in last year’s records is that I know the worst teams won’t change all that much throughout the winter. The Rockies will barrel right into another horrible season next year. I will have to adjust this post very little by the time rosters become clear.
I can also really ease into this year. I only have to write half the post when it’s the Rockies. They don’t generate pitchers that you want anything to do with in fantasy. There might be a road streamer every once in a while from this team when you’re desperate, but if you go into your fantasy baseball draft being unable to name a simple Rockies pitcher, you are no worse for it.
We will mention the case of Chase Dollander this year because he can at least throw the ball with some level of skill. But we’re focusing on the hitters in this one. Let’s kick it off.
Hitters
I am not as big into home/road splits as a lot of baseball writers out there. But you cannot ignore them when you’re writing about the Colorado Rockies. It was another ridiculous year in that regard:
Road: .203/.259/.331, .590 OPS, 228 Runs (2.8 per game)
Home: .270/.325/.440, .765 OPS, 369 Runs (4.6 per game)
They used to be a very good lineup at home. In recent years, they’ve just been about league-average lineup there while being historically bad on the road.
It’s really hard to do anything positive for a fantasy team when you’re on a real-life team scoring 2.8 runs per game in half your games. That’s what you get when you put a Rockies player on your fantasy team. It’s generally only advisable in situations where you can easily avoid playing these guys on the road.
Ezequiel Tovar
Age: 24
Pos: SS
I had some high hopes for Tovar in 2024. I drafted a good bit of him. Injuries kept him off the field for the first time in his Major League career. He played just 95 games. That kept him in single-digits in both home runs and stolen bases.
The injuries were primarily a left hip contusion and a left oblique strain. Here is our first case of ChatGPT helping out:
It’s hard to play baseball when you’re battling injuries. Despite that, Tovar was doing some of his best work while on the field.
He had posted xwOBA values below .300 in each of his first three seasons. That popped way up to .330 in 2025.
Remember that the two things behind xwoBA are
Exit Velocity
Launch Angle
From those two things, many metrics spawn! Tovar’s EV90 stayed right where it has been (between 103 and 104).
But he started lifting the ball like he hadn’t been able to in years prior. His sweet spot rate spiked to an elite mark of 45.2%, the fourth-best in the league.
That sort of thing gives Tovar a nice hit tool grade in the fScores that Tim Kanak and I put together.
Tovar is a well-known player at this point. He debuted very young, and every year I’m struck by how young he is. But we now have parts of four different seasons with the guy doing the same thing. He goes up there hacking, he gets a bunch of balls in play, and he racks up base hits because of it. The career batting average is still mediocre at .253, but he has a 26-homer season under his belt already, and we love to see the hit tool improvement we saw last year. He was more in control of his launch angles, and that’s a pretty big deal.
I do think Tovar has a .270, 20-homer season in him. The steals haven’t been there in his career thus far, but he has above-average speed, so it’s not out of the question that he could make that a bigger part of his game at some point.
The team context is bad, and it holds the counting stats down (he scored just 83 runs in 695 PAs two years ago), but this guy will be in the lineup every single day while he’s healthy, slump or no slump. They have nobody else. Tovar is one of the faces of the franchise at this point. That’s pretty depressing for a guy with a career 82 wRC+, but that’s where we’re at.
Projection
Once the projections are out, I’ll start putting the basic line here. The first run of projections will be out by mid-December, but they won’t be fine-tuned and super useful for draft purposes until we get into Spring Training and have a better feel of how the rosters and lineups will play out.
Ranking
Once we’re a handful of teams in, I’ll start showing the ranks, and I’ll give paid subs access. But for now, we’ll talk in very general terms.
Tovar gets to be the honorary #1-ranked player for a little while. He’s the first player on the list.
I do think I will be high on him again. The ADP will drop this year after the injury-riddled bust season that was his 2025 season. And I’m not counting that against him long-term. Tovar is a disaster in points leagues, don’t forget that. But for 5x5 roto, he’s not a bad option at all. With health, you’ll grab 75 runs, 20 homers, 10 steals, and a .260 batting average with age-driven upside.
Hunter Goodman
Age: 26
Pos: C/DH
Goodman was the lone positive story on the 2025 Rockies. Maybe you could make a case for Mickey Moniak, who we’ll get to, but Goodman was the only player who really gave Rockies fans any reason for hope.
In his age-25 season, he belted 31 homers and drove in 91 runs. Nobody else on the team drove in more than 68.
It was steady production from Goodman. I was fully expecting the wheels to fall off all season, but they never did.
There was only one month (May) with an OPS below .700. He hit multiple homers in each month and slugged above .500 for each of the final four months.
You even saw above in the home/road splits table that Goodman was slightly better on the road than at home. Eighteen of his 31 homers came on the road.
Hunter Goodman Home/Road Splits, 2025
Road: .248/.288/.515, .803 OPS, 18 HR, 29.5% K%
Home: .307/.356/.526, .881 OPS, 13 HR, 23.2% K%
Let’s check on the fScores:
There’s no speed here (one steal in each of the last three seasons), and he’s not a guy who takes walks (career 5.7% BB%), but everything else checks out. He’s stayed on the field, and he makes enough contact to hold up that big power. Let’s check on some of the underlying metrics:
Zone Contact: 83.5%
Swing%: 55%
Barrel Rate: 12.8%
xwOBA: .329
xBA: .247
90th Percentile EV: 107.5
Sweet Spot: 35%
Big power, a strong launch angle profile, and only a light red flag in the contact department.
But I can’t help but remember Nolan Jones in 2023 and then Michael Toglia in 2024. It seems to me like we get one of these breakout younger Rockies bats every year, and it pushes them up draft boards a bit, only for them to be massive duds the next year. But let’s keep our wits about us.
2023 Nolan Jones: 29.7% K%, 75% Z-Contact%
2024 Michael Toglia: 32.1% K%, 80.3% Z-Contact%
2025 Hunter Goodman: 26.3% K%, 83.5% Z-Contact%
The stolen base was part of Jones and Toglia’s games, and we liked that for fantasy purposes. That’s not the case with Goodman, but the plate discipline stuff does suggest that Goodman has a way higher chance of repeating than those two.
Goodman offers you 25+ homers at the catcher position with the potential for a useful batting average. You don’t get that with many catchers. He’s going to rightfully be drafted as a top ten catcher this year.
My take is that there are a ton of players in the fantasy baseball game. There are still a lot of young catchers with offensive upside in the league. I don’t find it necessary to dip into this Rockies lineup for help on my fantasy team. The home/road stuff with the elevation and the constant changes and the demoralizing effect playing on this team can have seems to bring more volatility.
There’s a lot of volatility in fantasy baseball. We have to deal with that and lean into it intelligently. But the intelligent way to go about that is not by buying high on a guy after a breakout career year.
Goodman is not going to be a guy on my “do not draft at any cost” list. I don’t have this kind of list, and you probably shouldn’t either, but if I did make one, Goodman wouldn’t be on it. I’m just not going to go out of my way to get him.
Projection
still to come
Ranking
In a preliminary look at the catcher position, it’s going to be very tough to keep Goodman out of the top eight. I want to be lower than the field on him, but even then, I can’t push him out of the top ten after we saw 30 bombs and the strikeouts mostly under control.
Mickey Moniak
Age: 27
Pos: OF
The former #1 overall pick finally had some success in the Majors in 2025. The Rockies are Moniak’s third team after spending time with the Phillies and the Angels.
He had some success in that 2023 season, but it was mostly a mirage. He wasn’t fooling anybody with that 35% K% and 2.8% BB%, and it all fell apart as expected. 2024 was a disaster in LA, and he ended up at the bottom of the barrel with the Rockies.
But he was a bright spot for Colorado, slashing .270/.306/.518 with 24 homers and nine steals. I mean, it didn’t help the team that much since they only won those 43 games, but at least Moniak gave them some moments.
The main thing to highlight is this plate discipline progression.
It’s not surprising to see a 40% K% come down. That’s the only direction it can go. But to drop it from 35% to 24% in two years is impressive, and he got the walk rate away from the league’s lowest.
The home/road splits are pretty wild. I’ve added those to the Hitter Profile pages so you can see them quickly right below pitcher hand splits:
A 173-point gap in SLG with a four-point difference in strikeouts. Coors Field is a helluva drug.
As a former 1.1 pick, the guy must have tools.
81st percentile sprint speed and 73rd-percentile bat speed. He also hit a ton of line drives with a 37.6% sweet spot rate. The Statcast page is pretty enticing.
The issue has always been a lack of plate discipline, as we’ve already seen. But I want to reiterate that. This guy went for a 47% chase rate from 2021 to 2023. It got a little better this year, but at some level, the leopard can’t change its spots.
Chase% Leaders, 2022-2025
Francisco Mejia 53%
Oscar Gonzalez 50%
Christian Bethancourt 48%
Ceddanne Rafaela 47%
Salvador Perez 47%
Javier Baez 47%
Harold Ramirez 47%
Yainer Diaz 47%
Ezequiel Tovar 46%
Edmundo Sosa 46%
Tomas Nido 45%
Pete Crow-Armstrong 44%
Mickey Moniak 44%
Harold Castro 44%
Raimel Tapia 43%
I put the active players in bold. I guess it’s not fair, because I didn’t dunk on Tovar for his chase rate. You notice that these free swingers typically don’t have a ton of success, but it’s almost not a death sentence. If you pair a good zone-contact rate plus power and speed, you can be fine. Moniak’s improvements in strikeout rate and zone-contact rate are a big deal, and they make you believe that, at minimum, he can stay in the lineup next year and hit some homers and have some big weeks while he’s at it.
Projection
still to come
Ranking
We’re done with standard league (by standard leagues, I mean drafts of about 300 players) players after Tovar and Goodman. But Moniak is a deep league target. The floor is that he flails his way to the bench or to another DFA, but there’s enough power to make it possible that he provides some value next year.
Brenton Doyle
Age: 27
Pos: OF
Doyle was one of the bigger busts in the fantasy game last year. He followed up a 23-30-.258 season with 15-18-.233. Disaster. He missed a little bit of time due to injury, playing 138 games. The strikeout rate was mostly the same, but he lost two points in the walk rate and started hitting more ground balls.
Rockies bats are going to be cheap this year. My gut reaction is to buy low on a guy like Doyle in five outfielder leagues. Despite all of the troubles, he maintained a double-digit barrel rate and an EV90 above 105 last year.
It was a season of streaks for Doyle. The guy was useless for the first three months (.190/.243/.310, 6 HR, 8 SB). And there’s a case for completing fading any hitter who is capable of having three months like that. But he really got it going in July and August.
But then he sputtered to the finish line with a .473 OPS in September.
Again, we aren’t talking about a guy you’ll have to think about drafting in a 300-pick draft. We are firmly in the 400-pick territory here, where you’re rostering 5+ outfielders.
And that sets the bar pretty low for him. It seems reasonable to think Doyle gives you a 15-15 floor, given he stays healthy. The strikeout rate has never been great, but it’s not a huge problem, so he can hang in there in batting average. And the centerfield defense is still elite (94th-percentile fielding value last season and he’s won two gold gloves already), so he’s going to get as much playing time as he can take.
I’m down for some Doyle in deep leagues. I almost pulled a full alliteration there.
Projection
still to come
Ranking
I’ll be fine with drafting Doyle in a five-outfielder league where playing time is the most important thing. I do think he will be one of the cheaper bats with legitimate 20-20-.260 ability. But the counting stat ceiling is extremely limited for everybody in Colorado.
Jordan Beck
Age: 25
Pos: OF
I really like these fScores (shout out Tim Kanak) for quickly learning about a player’s profile. Let’s hit those with Beck right away:
Good speed, nothing awful, and overall about a league-average player. His first season as a full-time big leaguer looked like this:
.258/.317/.416, .732 OPS, 29.6% K%, 7.3% BB%, 16 HR, 19 SB
Only three Rockies hitters went above a .320 OBP last year in at least 50 PAs. It’s bad.
Beck is speedy (83rd-percentile sprint speed) and decently aggressive on the bases with a 20% attempt rate. He also cleared the 105 EV90 mark we like to see, albeit barely at 105.3.
Quick look at the ball in play profile:
That’s about average across the board, besides the .351 BABIP, which got his actual average (.258) more than 20 points above his expected (.233). Beck hit .303 at home and .205 on the road.
The issue is the strikeout rate (29.5% K%, 77% Z-Contact%), and that makes him a potential killer on a fantasy team’s batting average. You can still be a good fantasy player with those numbers, but it pretty much has to come with elite power marks rather than the league-average-ish numbers Beck has.
But this guy is young enough to add power. He flashed us a 25-homer season back in 2023 (most of that coming in A+ ball). His bat speed landed in the 66th percentile. I think you have 20-20 upside with Beck if he can continue to develop.
But it seems like no players actually develop in Colorado. When is the last time you saw a Rockies player come into the league and blossom into a really good player as they got more and more experience? It seems to go the opposite way.
I don’t know if that’s the elevation stuff, or the organization’s alleged lack of analytics, or just the overall culture, or just total randomness. It’s probably a mixture of all of those things. But the history makes it challenging to bet on player development in this particular situation.
Projection
still to come
Ranking
You’ll probably get a full season’s worth of playing time from him, and that would translate to a 15-15 season as a floor. But the batting average could be a disaster, and there’s also the chance that he falls off the map completely, like so many other young Rockies bats we’ve seen. I won’t have much interest in drafting Jordan Beck this year.
Zac Veen
Age: 24
Pos: OF
Veen has long been one of the Rockies’ top hitting prospects, but he’s had trouble staying on the field, and that has delayed his arrival.
He did appear in 12 games early on in 2025 before getting sent back to the minors. The .118/.189/.235 slash line with the 38% K% could not keep him in the lineup that early in the season. But he did have a nice go of it in AAA:
.289/.354/.468, 20% K%, 8.5% BB%, 11 HR, 15 SB
Veen’s calling card has always been speed. His fSpeed score is cranked up to 176.
It’s strange then that he stole only 16 bags in his 102 combined games last season. It was the lowest attempt rate of his career.
Zac Veen SB Att% by Year
2021: 37%
2022: 44%
2023: 48%
2024: 35%
2025: 20%
He had a couple of different spells with an ankle injury last season, and that is likely the reason for the lowered steals stuff. It’s fair to expect him to pop back to 30-40% on that attempt rate next year once he’s back to 100%.
But speed isn’t enough to get us interested for fantasy purposes. We need at least a little bit of power or some serious batting average to go with it.
Veen’s 86% Z-Contact% and 32% Sweet Spot% in the minors last year - those are good signs. The fPower score is at 100, so we’re talking about a guy with double-digit homer upside in the Majors. If that comes with a 50-steal pace, we’ve got something cooking.
It will all come down to whether he can make contact against Major League pitching. His contact rate against breakers in the minors last year was poor at 64%.
The verdict for 2026 fantasy leagues is that you just completely ignore him at first. We’ll get some looks at him during the spring, and that might give us some hint about his contact abilities against MLB pitching. And if he wins himself a starting job and plays to at least a .310 OBP or something early on, we can be aggressive on adding him early in those roto leagues where the steals specialist is valuable.
I do not view this guy as having the power or batting average upside to be anything more than that kind of fantasy option.
Projection
still to come
Ranking
For draft-and-holds, it makes some sense to take a flyer on Veen. There’s an outside shot that he steals 30 bags in the Majors next year. He could be useful in roto leagues for that reason. That’s how I’d view him, a potential steals specialist. But I wouldn’t worry about drafting him in any standard league.
Pitchers
Chase Dollander
Age: 24
I don’t think anybody is going to draft Chase Dollander in anything resembling a standard league this year. But he is interesting for other reasons, so I’m giving him some words.
He was the #9 overall pick in the 2023 draft. In hindsight, that’s looking like a bad pick. The Rockies seem like a waste of pitching talent. But it’s much too soon to write this kid off.
In the minors:
→ 32% K%
→ 10.2% BB%
→ 2.62 JA ERA
→ 1.65 WHIP+
All great numbers. So he gets called up to the Majors early on in 2025 and proceeds to do this:
→ 19% K%
→ 11% BB%
→ 4.45 JA ERA
→ 2.43 WHIP+
And CHA BOY spent some real FAAB money on him in a points league. I knew the ratios weren’t going to be anything special, but I thought he’d at least remain a strikeout pitcher. He has really strong stuff.
The fastball averaged 97.9 and graded well above average in the Stuff+ business. But there was something wrong with it, because it got smashed.
→ .403 xwOBA
→ .556 SLG
Let’s look at the pitch mix and split it up between home/road.
Overall:
Home:
Road:
You can see that you lose serious Stuff+ just by pitching in Coors Field. A two-point gap is a massive difference in my model (that model is brand new and will probably be refined to spread it out a bit, but for right now, two points is a ton).
And no doubt the travel and the up-and-down and all of that stuff we’ve been talking about this whole post have effects even on the road.
If Dollander were to get moved to another team, he’d immediately be extremely interesting. But it seems impossible to overcome this stuff unless you’re truly one of the best arms in the league.
There’s some hope, I think. His fastball has a ton of life, and the curveball has shown some potential with the 16.1% SwStr%. He’ll be a real modern-day Coors Field test. He has to be the most talented arm the Rockies have had in the Statcast era, right? So can they figure something out with him? Could you he maybe a 150 strikeout guy to get some streamer interest? Some 15-team points league value? We’ll see. If I were the Rockies, I’d give the kid every chance I can next year. And then if it tanks again, try to trade him to a sharp organization for a nice hitter prospect package.
I will start the SP ranks with Dollander, and we will watch him slide down the ranks a long, long way as we go through this.
Projection
still to come
Ranking
No chance he ends up in the top 100 SPs, but he’s a guy I could see taking a shot at in super, super deep points leagues where the ratios don’t mean as much and you just want innings and strikeouts.
Closing Thoughts
I’ve elected to make things a little bit easier on myself this year by only writing up the guys I think will be in the top 400 (or so) in ADP this year. There will be some exceptions for top prospects or other guys that stand out to me, but generally, I’m not going to write up types like Tyler Freeman and Kris Bryant, while last year I was writing up those guys. Anybody well outside of the top 350 in ADP (which is unknown at this point, but I have some general ideas before I even see it) will be covered in other draft-and-hold leagues content. This series will be tailored to the top 400 (or so) players. I think that will make it easier to ingest and will heighten the quality since I’m not overwhelmed by a list of 500 players to cover.
That said, if there is any player you think I should have covered that I did not, please leave a comment, and I will see what I can do. Also, do not hesitate to correct mistakes I make. I try to look up each player’s contract situation and all of that, but I miss stuff all the time.
Prospects
Tim is well ahead of me in covering each team’s top 20 prospects, so I will link to all of those podcasts at the bottom.
That does it! I love writing this series, and I do think this year will be the best one yet. I’ll be back soon to cover the Chicago White Sox.
Nice Jon. I really enjoy how you spread out the team reviews and drop some early in the draft season. Gives me some great material to read and start getting back into draft mode.
Nice. I love the team previews. Glad the football stuff ain't getting in the way :)