THIS IS A GUEST ROCKPILE BY HC WERNER
While a great many things need to go wrong for a starting pitching staff to rock a historically bad 6.65 ERA for the season, an outsized reason for the 2025 Rockies’ starting pitching woes was their over-reliance on bad four-seam fastballs.
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How bad was bad?
Fangraphs has a stat, wFB, which is used to measure how effective fastballs are against hitters. A positive number indicates how many runs above average were prevented, while a negative number demonstrates how many more runs than average were allowed by fastballs. The League average is zero.
Here are the starting staffs with the worst four-seam fastballs in baseball last year:
These numbers mean that, over the course of a full 162-game season, Rockies starters gave up almost a full run more than average every game from just their four-seam fastballs alone.
This is especially wild when you consider the rotation pitched the second fewest innings in baseball, averaging a just over 4.2 innings per start.
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Fastballs from Rockies’ starters gave up more than three times more runs above average than the next worse teams.
Too much of a bad thing
The league-wide numbers from 2025 show that the average MLB starter threw a four-seam fastball 47.5% of the time. Colorado starters snuck into the top 10 for usage, hurling four-seamers just over half the time (50.1%).
Not only did Rockies starters have truly gag-inducing results with their four-seam fastballs, they threw them more than league average!
Opposing batters could simply hunt for a heater, and they’d get it more than half of the time. Given the continued reliance on traditional fastball usage in the face of such poor results, it makes sense that league executives described the Rockies’ analytical approach as “in the Stone Ages” and “literally 20 years behind the rest of the league in terms of analytics, infrastructure, everything.”
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While much can be said for the difficulties of pitching at elevation and how pitchers can adjust their fastballs at altitude to find better success, there’s a relatively easy and quick fix for the 2026 starting staff to embrace: Stop throwing the damn four-seamers (as much).
A new direction
Luckily, new pitching coach Alon Leichman, coming over from the Miami Marlins, has some experience with diversifying pitch mixes. Marlins starters, with their relatively scant 40.1% four-seam usage, threw the second fewest four-seamers in the league. Additionally in 2025 the Marlins organization began tinkering with using analytics to call pitches from the dugout in both the minor leagues and the majors. If Leichman were willing to embrace analytics to such an extent that he’d break with over a century of tradition and call pitches from the dugout, surely he’d use data to better optimize the Rockies’ pitch mix in 2026.
Additionally, neither wFB or wFB/C are predictive stats: They describe what happened, but they don’t project how effective a fastball might be in the coming season. The Rockies are not necessarily fated to have the worst fastball in the league for the second year in a row, especially if they throw more offspeed pitches to keep opposing batters honest.
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Conclusion
With the hiring of Alon Leichman specifically (and the new, Paul DePodesta-led front office hires more generally), the Rockies finally seem to be joining the analytics revolution. We don’t know if Leichman will bring the dugout pitch-calling to the Rockies (he hinted it was possible at Rockies Fest last month), nor if they’ll embrace the so-called “Year of the Pitch Mix” (although the signing of Michael Lorenzen seems promising in this regard), nor if they can help Chase Dollander limit the longball (72% of his homers were off of his flaming four-seamer).
What we do know is that Leichman and the Rockies new front office will use and embrace pitching analytics in ways we’ve never seen with the club. We can only hope that means fewer four-seamers.
What do you think? Will the new direction for the staff allow Rockies starters to right the ship, or will the pain of a 6.00+ ERA continue for another season?
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Let us know in the comments below!
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