The Rockies Are Historically Bad, But the A's Are Somehow Worse? It's True.

Three-Dot Monday 6.2

Yep. (Illustration courtesy: DraftKings/Facebook)

The Colorado Rockies are 9-50, the worst 59-game start in MLB history since 1901. The only two teams with worse records than them at this point were the 1884 Kansas City Unions/Cowboys and the 1876 Cincinnati Red Stockings, both teams already covered extensively in my write-up about the worst 50-game starts… you remember that because the Altoona Mountain Citys were involved…

The most amazing part about the Rockies is that they are 2-16 in their last 18 games, and that’s not the worst record in MLB in that particular stretch.

On Sunday, I saw that the West Sacramento Nomads, (aka the not-Oakland A’s), blew an 8^th inning lead to the Toronto Blue Jays and dropped to 23-37 on the season. Which is pretty bad, but certainly not Rockies awful.

And I stopped whatever else I was doing. I said to myself, “Wait a minute…. Weren’t the A’s at 22 wins going into the series with the San Francisco Giants at Oracle Park three weeks ago???”

So, I looked it up. And they were.

The A’s are 1-17 in their last 18 games. The Rockies, on pace to be the worst team in modern baseball history by a very wide margin, are 2-16 in their last 18.

Yeah, the A’s have been worse recently than that team. At one point not too long ago the A’s were 22-20, their best post-April record in several years and being talked about as fringe playoff contenders- well, I wasn’t, but some people were.

They have won a single game since then. They are now skidding towards 100 losses, although they will still finish with a much better record than the Rockies- it will be quite some time before Rockies even get to 23 wins, which is where the A’s are now.

(Unfortunately, these two disasters played each other in the first weeks of the season, and the A’s won two of three. It would have been much better for calamity purposes for this series to have been much later in the year. Though the Rockies do host the Chicago White Sox, the newly-crowned most-losses champions, on 4^th of July weekend and I regrettably cannot attend.)

I have insisted in this space several times that the A’s would give up on Sacramento and just move to Las Vegas after this season and wait for the ballpark to be built… or they get sold and move to insert-your-city-here (Portland, Nashville, back to Oakland, etc.).

Nobody believed me at the beginning of the season when they started well, and Sacramento was hyped to have major league baseball. Well, that stove has cooled considerably. Visiting teevee broadcasts have openly mocked the facilities since day one. Visiting players have not hesitated to say the grounds are hideously sub-par. They have drawn slightly more fans per home game than they did last year in Oakland, but ownership was doing everything but spit on the fan base at the time, so I wouldn’t exactly count that as a win.

So now, with this debacle happening right before our eyes, I’m getting more and more people telling me, “You know, I think you’re right- this only lasts a year.” Yeah, kinda saw that coming.

It’s not going to hit me that the best sports teevee show of all time with one cast, “Inside the NBA,” had its last broadcast on TNT until those four main guys show up on their new home, ESPN. And I suspect one or all of them will have some sort of cameo during the upcoming NBA finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers.

According to reports, the Phoenix Suns are down to two head coaching candidates. One of them is a Michigan State graduate who happened to go to Michigan State, the alma mater of Suns owner Mat Ishbia. So, who are we fooling here? The Suns have had exactly one coach per season since Ishbia bought the team three years ago, churning through them almost as often as the Rockies lose. And we’re going to pretend that Ishbia isn’t going to hire a guy that he’s known for more than 15 years to be the next one? Get out of here. Which is what Kevin Durant ought to be saying when this hire inevitably becomes official. The guy’s name is Jordan Ott, by the way. These dots weren’t that hard to connect either.

A coaching hire that I have forgotten to mention in this space is former Kansas Jayhawk basketball legend Jacque Vaughn getting an assistant coach gig at his (and mine, and perhaps your) alma mater a few weeks ago. More than a few people have already figured out this is likely the Bill Self succession plan. And I’m a little lukewarm on the idea, to be honest. Vaughn was the best college player I ever saw in person, considering we were both at KU at the same time and I was at nearly every home game he ever played.

But as a head coach? Admittedly his experience has been almost entirely in the NBA, but he took an assistant job at Kansas for a reason, and that reason was not overwhelming NBA coaching success. After his playing career ended, he spent three years as an assistant for Gregg Popovich in San Antonio (as nearly everybody does, apparently) before becoming a very young head coach for the Orlando Magic for three years, and that went about as well as you would expect.

He then eventually became an assistant coach for the Brooklyn Nets, and this is where things get weird. He became their interim head coach during the pandemic, and when Steve Nash was hired as head coach at Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving’s insistence, Vaughn became an assistant coach again. Then when the Nash tenure was the complete and abject failure that many suspected it would be and he was fired just a month into the 2022 season, Vaughn became the full-time head coach. A year later, Irving and Durant were traded (this is a trend), and a year after that Vaughn was fired.

And this is the guy that’s going to keep Kansas at the top of the heap after Bill Self retires? Maybe he’s going to be great at recruiting and navigating this new college realm. But guys don’t ask to be traded in college, they just leave. If he couldn’t keep Durant and Irving happy after they basically hand-picked him to be their coach, how is he going to keep 18-year-olds content? Admittedly those two are pretty rough on coaches. But still…

You know what’s rough on coaches? Going 1-17. You know what might be worse? Going 9-50 and seeing no lights at the end of the tunnel. I wonder how many managers the Rockies will go through before the season is over? For that matter, where are the A’s going to finish the season ? And It’s only June 2^nd.

Sure? (Courtesy: Kansas Athletics)