Colorado Rockies

So ugly you can’t look away, the Rockies have reached the absolute nadir.

The Angels obliterated Colorado on Saturday at Coors Field, 25-1, in the Rockies’ worst loss in franchise history.

Los Angeles rapped out 28 hits in the baseball bloodbath and set a franchise record for runs. The Rockies, meanwhile, were ripped into infamy by the visiting lineup as Chase Anderson and Matt Carasiti combined to give up a club-record 13 runs in the third inning.

A red-dotted crowd of 45,274 was on hand for the infamous performance, and they gave a raucous standing ovation to mock the home club when Carasiti finally recorded the third out of that nightmare third.

After the Angels tacked on eight more runs off Noah Davis in the fourth, their 23 runs scored before the fifth inning were the most in the first four frames of any MLB game in the last 50 years.

The grisly details will no doubt make for bullet-points on the keynote slide for the year-end Where Things Went So So Wrong powerpoint as this summer’s Rockies continue to make a strong case as the worst team in franchise history. Colorado’s first 100-loss season is on the table now more than ever.

Anderson started the disastrous third already down 2-0 and proceeded to yield homers on three straight pitches to Mike Trout, Brandon Drury and Matt Thaiss. The combined 1,287 feet worth of dingers in the less than two minutes gave Los Angeles a 5-0 lead. Trout’s homer to center was off a fastball, Drury hammered a cutter to the left-center bleachers and Thaiss took a hanging curve over the right-field out-of-town scoreboard.

But the rout was just getting started as the Angels stomped out all the feel-good fuzzies from Friday’s series opener, when Elias Diaz’s grand slam with two outs in the eighth inning lifted the Rockies to a 7-4 comeback victory and negated back-to-back dingers by Shohei Ohtani and Trout off Kyle Freeland earlier in the game.

That felt like a distant memory as the Angels sent 16 batters to the plate in the third, a Colorado record, and ended up with four dingers in the frame after Mickey Moniak’s two-out, 409-foot shot to left-center off Carasiti. That tied a Rockies single-inning record, as did the Angels’ 10 hits.

When the carnage was over, the crooked number on the scoreboard said everything about a club mired in an identity crisis. Beset by injuries, a lack of bona fide talent and practically zero true starting-pitching depth, Saturday is what happens when the game catches up to a major-league club that consistently rolls out a minor-league lineup.

The defeat topped the previous worst losses in Rockies history, both of which came in the inaugural season of Coors Field: a 26-7 defeat to the Cubs on Aug 18, 1995, and a 17-0 shutout at the hands of the Marlins on Sept. 17 of that year. Colorado’s lost nine of its last 10 and reminds mired in the cellar of the National League West with the second-worst record in the league at 30-49.

Brenton Doyle finally gave the crowd something to genuinely cheer about with his leadoff homer in the eighth, a 426-foot blast to center field off Angels southpaw Kolton Ingram to avoid the shoutout. Without Doyle’s stroke, the Rockies were staring at the largest shutout defeat in modern MLB history, since the Philadelphia Quakers won 24-0 in 1887.

DENVER, CO – JUNE 24: Elias Diaz #35 of the Colorado Rockies looks on as Eduardo Escobar #5 and David Fletcher #22 of the Los Angeles Angels celebrate after a 2-run Fletcher homerun in the fourth inning of a game at Coors Field on June 24, 2023 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Dustin Bradford/Getty Images)