SI Scouting Report: Colorado Rockies

A converted starter fills the void at closer, but will he get leads to protect?

By Tom Verducci

The reduced workload of closing should keep Chacon fresher and make him a greater asset to the team. Mark J. Terrill/AP IN FACT Last year Todd Helton was the first player since 2000 to have 200 hits and 100 walks. He also did it in 2000. ENEMY LINES An opposing team's scout sizes up the Rockies "This is one of those teams that make you shake your head and wonder what the hell they're doing. Their 40-man roster is in shambles, and outside of Todd Helton and Preston Wilson everyone else in the lineup is on the downside of their careers.... Helton has looked fantastic. It appears he's put on 15 pounds of muscle and is hitting balls into the next stratosphere.... The pitching staff is going to be a major question mark. Jason Jennings doesn't have anywhere near the stuff he's had in the past.... [Infielder] Luis Gonzalez is a guy to keep an eye on. They picked him up in the Rule V draft, and he's shown an ability to hit the ball all over the field.... I don't buy into the idea that Coors Field is going to turn guys like Royce Clayton, Jeromy Burnitz and Vinny Castilla into better hitters. Burnitz has been a home-run-or-strikeout guy his entire career -- Clayton too -- and playing in Denver isn't going to change that.... You just get the feeling that it's not a happy camp, and if they get off to a bad start things could get ugly really quick."

Just when Shawn Chacon was relaxing at home in December, feeling good about a breakout season in which he became only the second Rockies pitcher to make the All-Star team, manager Clint Hurdle telephoned him to tell him that the club wanted to convert him into a closer. Chacon didn't know what to think.

"Surprised," Chacon says. "Very surprised."

A few of his teammates, however, said they knew exactly what to think.

"Two or three called me up and said, 'Man, they're trying to take money out of your pocket,'" Chacon says.

Good starting pitchers generally do earn more glue than closers because they throw more innings and are harder to find. Rockies general manager Dan O'Dowd said he even ran some salary simulations to show Chacon, 26, the difference. And if it wasn't about the money, why in the oxygen-depleted world of Colorado -- where no qualifier in the franchise's 11-year history has had an ERA better than 4.00 and only eight have come in under 5.00 -- would the Rockies turn a young starter with four quality pitches into a specialist?

"I know it might not make sense for 29 other franchises," O'Dowd says, "but we operate under a different set of parameters."

In Denver, where baseballs and leads vanish into thin air, O'Dowd says he believes that Chacon has more value as a closer because "he can impact the game more. Most of our games are decided in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings and by how and when you use your [setup] relievers. And you can't do that with any confidence without a closer you know you can count on."

Actually, Rockies starters earned the fifth-most decisions in the league last year -- even though their rotation threw fewer innings than all but two teams. Baseball at altitude, however, always has made the architecture of a winning team more vexing than anywhere else. The Rockies must constantly switch from a PS2 brand of baseball to the real stuff once they hit the road, and their alltime record reveals the duality: They're a .555 team at home and a .393 club on the road. Overall they've never won more than 83 games in a season and have suffered a dip in attendance seven straight years.

Coors Field is the Lourdes of baseball for hitters, having been the font of miraculous revivals for players such as Andres Galarraga, Dante Bichette, Ellis Burks and Jay Payton. Leftfielder Jeromy Burnitz (.299 OBP last year), shortstop Royce Clayton (.301 OBP) and -- back for a second shot of elixir -- third baseman Vinny Castilla (.310 OBP) are this year's supplicants.

Pitching in Denver has been like ordering the Rocky Mountain oysters at Coors Field: It's not for the fainthearted, and you're better off not dwelling on the ingredients. Busts Billy Swift, Greg Harris, Bret Saberhagen, Darryl Kile, Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle have scared the Rockies from spending big money on pitchers. "We're never going down that road again," O'Dowd says.

Instead O'Dowd has clipped coupons to patch a rotation with no legit No. 2 starter, never mind a No. 1. Behind nominal ace Jason Jennings (12-13 last year), O'Dowd is trying Shawn Estes, Scott Elarton, Joe Kennedy and Jeff Fassero, who combined for all of 16 wins last year and whose lack of recent portfolio seems to make Chacon's conversion all the more curious.

The Rockies converted Chacon partly because they were so closer-phobic last year, when Jose Jimenez lost 10 games and the confidence of his teammates. "It wore us down mentally," first baseman Todd Helton says.

Chacon also has had durability questions -- he's never won a game after July in the majors -- that gave the Rockies some pause about his long-term future as a starter. So they enrolled him this spring in Goose's School for Closers, bringing former closer Rich Gossage to camp as his private tutor.

"He's talked to me about having that personality that's got to match your stuff," Chacon says. "He said, 'If you've got electric stuff, you've got to have an electric personality. Hitters don't have to fear you, but they have to be leery of you. When you come in they have to think, O.K., this game is over.'"

It took Chacon one week from Hurdle's phone call to come around to the idea of closing. "I didn't want to make a decision about money," he says. "It's best for the team." This, after all, is Denver, where the rules are different for everything from boiling water to sending your best starter to finishing school.

Issue date: April 5, 2004