The Rockies Have Never Won the West. Nobody’s Mad About It.
The Colorado Rockies have existed since 1993. In thirty-three seasons, they have never won the National League West. Not once. They share this distinction with the Miami Marlins, whose own founding year was, coincidentally, 1993, which means that the entire history of expansion baseball produced two franchises that could not, between them, be persuaded to win a single division title in a third of a century. The Rockies have made the playoffs five times, all as a Wild Card. Last year, through their first fifty games, they went 8–42, the worst start in major-league history. They are, as of this morning, 15–23 and unlikely to challenge the Dodgers for first place anytime ever.
And yet. A 2025 social-media analysis — over 100,000 tweets, scored for negative sentiment toward each franchise — produced a top-ten list of the most-hated teams in baseball. The Rockies did not appear on it. Not at #5, not at #9, not at the cellar of the survey at all. The list, in order, was the Dodgers, Yankees, Astros, Mets, Braves, Cardinals, Phillies, Red Sox, Padres, and Royals. Five of those teams have won a World Series in the last decade. Two won at least four division titles in the last five years. The Mets, fourth on the list, have not won a World Series since 1986 but spend like a team that just did. Every team on the hate list shares one trait: they are threatening.
The Hate Index, Loosely Constructed
| Rank | Team | Recent Status | Why People Are Mad |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Los Angeles Dodgers | 12 div titles in 13 yrs | Highest payroll, bought a championship, deferred half the money to 2040 |
| 2 | New York Yankees | 23 division titles since 1993 | The historic answer. Hated for being the Yankees. |
| 3 | Houston Astros | 7 ALCS in 8 yrs | Trash cans. Banged. 2017. |
| 4 | New York Mets | 14–23 today; $248M payroll | Cohen money, perceived arrogance, the audacity of being in last place expensively |
| 5 | Atlanta Braves | 7 NL East titles in a row | Won 11 straight 1995–2005; haven’t stopped since |
| … | six more teams, all of them feared by somebody | ||
| — | Colorado Rockies | 0 division titles, 33 years | (unranked; nobody is mad) |
| — | Pittsburgh Pirates | 3 winning seasons in 17 yrs | (unranked; gentle pity, mostly) |
| — | Miami Marlins | $34M payroll | (unranked; you forgot they existed) |
What this list demonstrates, with admirable clarity, is that hate in baseball is not a function of how badly a team plays. It is a function of how often a team threatens to take something from someone else. The Dodgers are hated because they keep winning World Series the rest of us would have liked to win. The Astros are hated because they cheated on the way to a championship and were not, in the eyes of most fans, sufficiently punished. The Mets are hated because they spend like a contender every winter and then act, in November, surprised when fans expect contention. None of these teams are hated for being bad. They are hated for being arrogant in proportion to their badness, or for being so good that other fanbases find them tiresome.
The Rockies are bad and not arrogant. They have never been good. They have never threatened anyone. They have a beautiful ballpark, a humidor for the baseballs, and a roster of players who, taken individually, you would have nothing against. They lose, mostly to the Dodgers, in the manner of a small Western municipality losing a zoning fight to a neighboring city. And so the Rockies, who by any measure of organizational dysfunction belong on the wall of shame in baseball, escape every fan’s personal hate list. They are not on the radar. They are not in the way.
The Asymmetry Principle
Sports rivalries, sociologists have long argued, require perceived stakes. A rivalry between two teams is not a function of geography (although geography helps) or of historical wins (although those help too). It is a function of how often, in the recent past, one team has stood between the other team and something the other team wanted.
This explains why Mets fans hate the Braves and the Braves do not, particularly, hate the Mets back. The Braves have spent the last twenty-five years standing between the Mets and the NL East title. The Mets have spent the last twenty-five years finishing somewhere behind the Braves and, occasionally, the Phillies. From the Atlanta side, the Mets are not a rival. They are the team that finishes second when the Braves finish first.
It also explains why nobody hates the Rockies. Nothing the Rockies have ever done has stood between any other fanbase and any prize that fanbase wanted. Hate, here, requires that you have something worth wanting taken from you. The Rockies have not taken a thing.
A Compliment You Don’t Want to Earn
It is tempting to read the absence of Rockies-hate as a sign of mercy — a kindness extended to a hapless franchise by the better-natured fans of more successful clubs. It is not. It is the opposite. To be hated, in any meaningful sport, is a backhanded compliment. It says: we have been paying enough attention to you to develop feelings about it. The Rockies do not get that. The Pirates barely get it. The Marlins, who are 17–21 with a $34 million payroll, are functionally invisible outside of South Florida and the Bronx, where Yankees fans still occasionally remember them for the 2003 World Series.
This is the part that should sting any Rockies fan still reading. The team has been bad, in public, since 1993. They have failed in eight or nine distinguishable ways: the Coors-altitude-pitching problem, the inability to sign or develop pitching, the curious decision to extend Kris Bryant for $182 million in 2022, the broader pattern of expensive contracts that did not work out. None of it has made them a villain. Their failures do not hurt anyone. They have been failing alone, in public, on a beautiful field, for a third of a century, and the rest of the league has not bothered to look up.
Compare that to the Mets, who are also bad right now and who are, simultaneously, the fourth-most-hated team in baseball. The Mets’ failures hurt people. They hurt their own fans, certainly, but they also hurt rival fanbases who watch the Mets sign Soto and Lindor and Alonso and stew about which of their own players the Mets might come for next winter. The Mets matter, even when losing, because the Mets spend. The Rockies do not matter, even when losing, because the Rockies do not, in any meaningful sense, threaten the equilibrium of anyone else’s rooting interest.
“If your front office’s greatest achievement is escaping rival fans’ attention, you are not the lovable underdog. You are the wallpaper.”
— The Columnist, on the steep cost of being uninterestingWhat the Hate List Is Actually Measuring
The hate index, then, is not a bad-team list. It is a list of teams whose actions have been, in some recent period, consequential. Five of the top ten have won a World Series since 2017. Two more were a missed bullpen appearance away. Of the remaining three — the Mets, Cardinals, and Royals — the Mets are the league’s biggest spender, the Cardinals are the most consistently competitive franchise of the last quarter-century, and the Royals are coming off a surprise 2024 playoff push. None of these are nothing teams. The Rockies, in this framework, are nothing.
There is, finally, a small consolation here for the people who follow baseball’s harder-luck franchises. To be hated by the rest of the league is not to be respected, exactly, but it is to be seen. The Mets are seen, and resented, and dunked on. The Yankees and Dodgers are seen, and resented, and dunked on. They will all, this fall, play playoff baseball or come close. The Rockies, who will not, are not seen at all. They will lose ninety games in a half-empty stadium full of tourists and relatives and the lingering hope of a humidor that is not, in fact, going to fix any of this. And nobody will say a word about it. Not even an angry one.
