SAN FRANCISCO — Managers and players will spend the entire season spouting the same cliches ahead of their matchups with the Colorado Rockies. You treat every opponent the same and every day the same. Anyone can beat anyone on every given day, etc., etc., etc.
That’s the best way to get through 162 games, and it’s certainly the best way to put yourself in contention for a division title. But … the situation in the NL West this season feels like it’ll be different.
Everyone will say all the right things, but the reality in this division is that it’s mandatory to win every series against the last-place Colorado Rockies, and it might be borderline necessary to sweep them. The top four teams are so bunched together that the division title and playoff spots might actually come down to who fares best against the worst in the West.
The Giants are back home for four against the Rockies, who have just five wins in their first 30 games. Colorado has been swept five times already, including by both the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, with the latter being a string of three straight shutouts at Petco Park earlier this month.
The first series against the division’s worst team couldn’t come at a better time for the Giants, who dropped both of their games in San Diego. This weekend feels like a time to make up ground, and the Giants know it, even if they don’t want to talk about it too much. Willy Adames came closest Tuesday when he said the team wanted to come out and win Wednesday and then go home and “sweep the Rockies, or win the series at least.”
Manager Bob Melvin doesn’t want to separate the four Rockies series from others, though. He said there’s no added pressure to take advantage of these games.
“Every Major League team can beat any other team. We don’t take anybody lightly,” Melvin said Wednesday. “The [Los Angeles] Angels beat us two out of three and I think that was the only team on that road trip that we had a losing record against. I don’t think there’s more pressure on it. I think you just individualize each game and have an expectation to win and that’s the best way to look at it.”
The Atlanta Braves got a reminder of that Wednesday at Coors Field, when the Rockies scored two early runs off Chris Sale and held on for a 2-1 win that snapped an eight-game losing streak, which was their third skid of at least six games already. The Rockies will come to Oracle Park on pace to go 27-135, which would shatter the losses record that was set just last season by the Chicago White Sox. On the road, the numbers are even uglier.
The Rockies are 1-14 away from Coors and are hitting .186 with a .539 OPS. They have struck out in about 30 percent of their road plate appearances, and on the other side of the ball, they rank 26th in road ERA.
In a division where four teams currently have at least a 45 percent chance of making the postseason, per FanGraphs, every win is going to matter. The Giants learned that in 2021, when they went 17-2 against a 110-loss Arizona Diamondbacks squad and 15-4 against the fourth-place Rockies. The Dodgers, who won 106 games but finished in second, went 29-9 against the two worst teams in the West that year, and that ultimately made a difference.
The 2025 season is only a month old, but the Rockies already are 15 1/2 games out of first place. With 46 games left against the other four West teams, though, they will impact the division race in their own way. They can play spoiler all season long, something the Giants will try to avoid this weekend.
“At the end of the day, we have to go out there and compete, it doesn’t matter who it is,” Heliot Ramos said Wednesday. “It doesn’t matter if they’re good. It doesn’t matter if they’re a great team. We have to go out there and compete and give everything that we’ve got.”
