The Colorado Rockies are off to one of the worst starts in MLB history

“Something I’ve noticed about the Rockies is that Rockies fans show up regardless of how the team is performing,” said Scott Powers, an assistant professor of sports analytics and statistics at Rice University. “But if revenue doesn’t depend on performance, there’s certainly less incentive (for team owners to improve the team).”

And there might be a touch of bad luck in the misery so far this year.

While Colorado’s run differential of -89 (106 runs scored and 195 surrendered) is the worst in the MLB, the Rockies’ Pythagorean winning percentage — a formula that roughly estimates how many wins a team should have, based on its runs scored and surrendered — puts them a hair short of eight wins out of these 34 games.

That formula, and variations on it, is important to the work many major league front offices do, said Powers, who was an assistant general manager of the Houston Astros.

“The big thing is simply that win-loss performance over the first 34 games of the season, you’re going to get some outliers, and those outliers are going to be due to some combination of performance and luck,” Powers said.

But does that mean there’s hope for the Rockies?

“It depends what you mean by hope,” Powers said. “If your hope is to run away with the division and have a bye in the first round of the playoffs, then that hope might be misplaced. But if your hope is to avoid losing 120 games, then I think it’s a very low probability at this point, that the Rockies have the kind of season that the White Sox had last year.”