Of all the odd moments of a well-packed sports weekend, maybe the oddest was the debate between what is more unusual: one MLB team beating another 24-2, or an accomplished professional basketball team beating a slightly less accomplished one, in the playoffs, by 51 points. If it helps, it’s about a tie.
But the sneaky third option might have been the Colorado Rockies winning the second game of their punishment doubleheader with the Washington Nationals. Here was one team with an excruciatingly bad bullpen facing a team with an excruciatingly bad everything else; by rights such a matchup should end up with each team losing once, and it did. But putting it like that diminishes the Rockies’ status as an all-time cornea-searing disaster.
The Rockies have been something like that for much of the reign of the Monfort family, which has been defined by nepotism, inscrutable executive impulse, and institutional inertia above all else. In fairness they have not been quite at this level of That, but while this year’s team has been much worse than anticipated, they are likely to remain some version of bad until the moment that the Monforts sell or alter the course of their lives or value systems such that they are moved to spend money for the betterment of the company. “We are not here to belabor the obvious,” the author said while in the midst of a rant of pure belaboration.
No, we are here to ask a different question, and not the one we are keen to pose, which is this: Why hasn’t manager Bud Black been fired yet? Not because he should be fired, mind you. He is almost certainly the best thing about this team and is almost universally hailed as a fine fellow in all venues. Nobody doesn’t like Bud Black.
But Black is in his ninth season as the team’s manager, and firing coaches is the cheapest and laziest way for an owner to exercise his entirely performative pique at his unaccomplished employees. Hell, the crosstown Nuggets did it with a coach who helped them win a title and whose winning percentage in town was a sprightly .590, and they waited until Game 79 to do it. In other words, firing the coach has always been a crutch, and now it is one that can be deployed at any time, even in a timeout huddle if Jimmy Dolan decides to have a snap at Tom Thibodeau.
Yet Black survives, as he has for nearly a decade now. Indeed, his name is almost never mentioned on the equally lazy hot-seat lists that crop up on slow news days, or days when the White Sox are playing the Twins. And that is a more remarkable thing, because the Rockies are bad, and Black hasn’t overseen a winning season since 2018, and the team seems like a lock to lose more than 100 games for a third straight year. And again, we are not advocating for Black’s firing just because his record in Denver is a bit whiffy; quite the opposite. He gives this undignified team an air of dignity, which is to say that even with a 4-17 record, things could be worse.
This is more a statement about the Monfort regime, and even at that we’re not sure what that statement is. Do the folks currently running the Rockies dirtward agree that Black is doing the best he can with what little they have given him to work with? Do they believe that he is too good a fellow to be dustbinned so cavalierly, especially when their next idea will almost certainly change nothing and, because it is their idea, might actually be worse? Do they know that a firing might attract the town’s attention at a time when it has been blessed with both NBA and NHL playoff teams, both of which have started their journeys with wins? Do they know that they own the team at all?
Let’s say for the sake of killing a few paragraphs and some of your lunch break that the Rockies are not firing Black because they have actually decided he doesn’t deserve it—a generous reading, but not one that can be refuted except by the examples of all other owners with all other teams. In doing this, the Rockies are choosing not to do the thing their compatriots on the Scrooge McDuck plantation all do with zeal and alacrity to divert attention from themselves, which makes the Monforts almost admirable when everything else about them seems so relentlessly blah that it borders on the ethereal.
Say what you want; this is still a remarkable thing. Rather than be a convenient scapegoat for an owner with a short attention span or just a short temper, Black has survived, quite probably because of that rarest of reasons—the fault authentically lying elsewhere. The other 17 coaches in the six major team sports that have lasted as long as Black have either won a title, competed for a title, or reached a conference final. That he remains in his job and apparently secure is, well, it is something. The problem, as we’ve established, lies in figuring out what that something is.
You either believe Black is too good a fellow to be blamed by his superiors for the sins of those self-same superiors, or you believe his superiors aren’t sufficiently involved in the stupid thing to do the stupidest thing. We’re not sure how Bud Black feels about all this, but we’re good with him remaining where he is until he decides that he’d rather be somewhere else. Lots of other coaches have deserved a similar latitude, but it’s not his fault that he is the one that won the job security lottery. He just happened to find the one place in pro sports where the duties of being the manager doesn’t resolve to being blamed for other people’s inertia. When there’s no blame being distributed across the organizational table, you can at least be left to do your losing in peace.
