I wonder if the effects of pitching at altitude has scared off any decent starter. Has the quality of free agent starters the Rockies have signed gone downhill so much and that's why the Rockies stink?

Coors Field opened in 1995, and in the two years before that, Mile High Stadium played as just as much if not more of a hitters' park.

After the Rockies landed O'Dowd, they went out and signed Denny Neagle and Mike Hampton. This ended up being a colossal waste of money from which the franchise just extricated itself this year.

Since then, the only notable free agent starter they've signed was Shawn Estes, who was mysteriously 15-8 with an 86 ERA+ in 2004. Wisely, the Rockies decided not to outbid Arizona to retain Estes.

So why are they bad? Well, in my understanding the team topped itself out payrollwise with diminishing won-loss returns while building around veteran slugger types in the mid-to-late 90's. They rightly figured there was no way they were ever going to win a playoff series with no decent starters, so they foolishly committed a lot of money to Hampton and Neagle. That went so disastrously that now the team is completely unwilling to lay out any money whatsoever for free agent starters, and perhaps free agents themselves are loathe to sign in the ERA-destroying rarified air of Denver.

So they're building from within, which they really should have done in the first place. Ownership has decided after his failure as a big-market free agent recruiter to let O'Dowd try his hand as an organizational guy. He seems to have a more coherent plan than the franchise has ever seen before, which is not saying much. There's a few more years left before guys like Matt Holliday and Jason Jennings reach free agency, so O'Dowd has until then to start producing results on the field.

The team's payroll has gone rather rapidly from about $80 million three years ago to around $40 million now. The product on the field however is no worse and perhaps even a little better (the team was really massacred by injuries last season, which you wouldn't expect from so young a team but there you have it). The hope is that two or three of the Jennings/Aaron Cook/Jeff Francis/Ubaldo Jimenez/Dragon Lo group become legit major league starters before Todd Helton gets bored, and then they'll have some money to spend to fill the holes they have no answers for in the system (fifth starter, power-hitting outfielder, catcher if Chris Ianetta doesn't pan out).

I doubt Clint Hurdle will be the manager when and if the Rockies start contending, but O'Dowd has a good chance to stick around. Under the current regime's spending mandates I don't see how anyone else could do any better. They even re-signed Byung-Hyun Kim, making him before the season even starts the single greatest free agent starting pitching acquisition in franchise history. Yes, the bar is low.

Also, their payroll hasn't fluctuated as much as that, though it dipped quite a bit last year:

Yr Payroll
1993 $10,353,500
1994 $23,887,333
1995 $34,154,717
1996 $40,179,823
1997 $43,559,667
1998 $50,484,648
1999 $61,935,837
2000 $61,111,190
2001 $71,541,334
2002 $56,851,043
2003 $67,179,667
2004 $65,445,167
2005 $47,839,000