Are the Rockies an MLB owner's dream?

Time once again for 50 random thoughts — as always, if you would like to be a part of this circus, just send me some of your own random thoughts, questions, ideas or predictions for what my next book is about.

1) I’ve been thinking a lot about the Colorado Rockies … and whether or not they, more than any other team in baseball, are the true model of what many (most?) baseball owners want.

The Rockies are horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. They lost 20-1 to the Blue Jays on Wednesday — a lovely score that goes well with their 17-2 loss to Milwaukee in April, their 21-0 loss to the Padres in May, their 13-5 loss to the Mets in June, and their 18-0 loss at Baltimore in July. They had already lost to the Blue Jays 15-1 a couple of days ago, but this loss was a bit more decisive. You know: For the fans.

It doesn’t even look like these Rockies are going to give those fans the pleasure of a record-breaking season. They’ve been playing just badly enough to probably lose 118 or 119 games this year, but it doesn’t seem like they have the fortitude to go the distance and break the White Sox’s one-year-old record for losses.

2) So why do I say they’re the true model of what so many baseball owners want? The Rockies are still drawing about 30,000 fans a game. They’re currently outdrawing the Tigers, Mariners, and Cardinals. This is because Denver is a fantastic sports town, and Colorado summers are a slice of heaven, and Coors Field is one of the best places on earth to catch a game. It simply doesn’t matter how bad they get; the fans will come.

I can’t imagine more of a dream scenario for the lousy owners — I’m sure the big guys in Pittsburgh, Washington, Chicago, Miami, and various other places look at Rockies owner Dick Monfort and are green with envy. Look at this guy! He gets to be grossly incompetent and hire equally incompetent people and build a historically terrible team and offer exactly zero reasons to believe, and the fans still come out in droves!

I’ll have what he’s having!

3) Not only do the fans still come out, but the other day I got an email from something called Dimers — which appears to be a betting site, maybe? — and they used countless amounts of the Earth’s resources to have AI scour Reddit comments to determine the most despised baseball owners in order. I can think of worse uses of AI for sure, and here are the five most loathed:

No Dick Monfort? No Charlie Monfort? Huh? Nope. The Monforts are ranked sixth — one slot ahead of, get this, Boston’s John Henry. The Monforts are essentially tied with the guy who has brought the Boston Red Sox FOUR WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS.

I’m telling you: Dick Monfort could have a “How I do it” seminar at the Owners Meeting this fall, and at least half the owners in baseball would show up for it.

4) By the way, the least-hated owner according to this poll? Kansas City’s John Sherman. The site mocks him by saying

“The Magic: Bought the team in 2019. Hasn’t had time to screw up yet. Give it a few years.”

But I actually think that snarkiness is off. Kansas City fans like John Sherman because they sense he’s a fan, they see the team trying hard to win (within its small-market means), and they watched pretty terrible ownership with David Glass and company for almost two decades. Obviously, fans want owners to spend money, that’s No. 1. But there’s more to it than that.

5) Brilliant Reader Dan thinks we all should be spending a lot more time rooting for new Mets relief pitcher Tyler Rogers — and he’s absolutely right.

Tyler Rogers is just wonderful. He’s 34 now, he pitched at Austin Peay back in the early 2010s, he throws like Dan Quisenberry, he has a twin brother in the major leagues named Taylor Rogers and, here’s the best part: He has the slowest fastball in the game — 83.3 mph.

He throws that fastball three-quarters of the time, so batters know it’s coming. And yet, year after year, he’s among the league leaders in lowest average exit velocity. It’s just like Quiz — magical, almost. The ball sinks and batters whack into the ground, and more often than not, they find themselves cursing and walking back to the dugout.

I love that his twin brother Taylor — who, this is weird, is the same age — throws about 10 mph faster than his brother but isn’t quite as good. Close. But not quite.

6) The greatest cheer in the history of sports comes from the time when playground legend Fly Williams was scoring at will, and the fans used to shout out: “The Fly is Open! Let’s go Peay!”

7) Here’s something personal and weird — on Tuesday, our older daughter’s car battery just died. It sort of made sense; her car is almost five years old, and batteries don’t last forever. What made it weird is on Wednesday, our YOUNGER daughter’s car battery died — suddenly and with the joyful smell of sulphuric acid.

We are wondering if there’s a new supervillain out there draining car batteries.

😎 I’ve decided to just live with the fact that when I type 8) into this list, the 😎 emoji just appears.

9) On Wednesday, Shohei got his 1,000th big-league hit — a massive 30 for 30 homer to left-center — and also struck out eight batters in his four dominant innings. He does ridiculous stuff like this so often that we don’t even think anything about it anymore.

Ohtani’s next homer will be his 40th of the season — he’s on pace for 55 this year. He also has a 2.37 ERA in eight starts and has struck out 25 in 19 innings.