But despite this scenario, one veteran member of the Rockies organization could be having his finest year ever: Drew Goodman.
The play-by-play announcer for Rockies TV, 62-year-old Goodman has long been a top talent in a sport whose leisurely pace may put a larger demand on broadcasters than any other. The degree of difficulty is even more pronounced when a team is getting eviscerated, as has been happening to the Rockies regularly. Yet at such moments, Goodman almost always hits the perfect tone. He's empathetic but also realistic, clear-eyed, capable of sly humor and, above all else, professional.
In describing his approach, Goodman undersells his achievements. "I have great respect for the fan base," he emphasizes, "and great respect for my job, which is to be an informative and, I hope, occasionally entertaining component as part of our television team. People who've been busting their ass all day come home and want to watch a ball game, and they want the home team to win. I hope to be a non-intrusive accompaniment to that whether they win or not."
That modesty feels excessive to Goodman peers such as Chip Caray. The grandson of the late Harry Caray, iconic voice of the Chicago Cubs, and the son of Skip Caray, a fine announcer for the Atlanta Braves who died in 2008, Caray is a third-generation baseball broadcaster; he calls contests for the St. Louis Cardinals. Given that the Cards haven't excelled of late (they last won a playoff game in 2020), he can identify with the difficulties Goodman is facing.
"Let's be honest: Times haven't been so great for the Rockies in recent vintage," Caray says. "When the team's at its worst, you have to be at your best. And I've never seen a day when Drew wasn't prepared, and I've never seen or heard a highlight where he's taken a pitch off. He's exceptional at what he does."
Each game, the challenge for Goodman is considerable, just as it can be for home viewers trying to figure out how to watch the Rockies in action. But the meet-up with the New York Mets on Friday, June 6, at Coors Field was different from any he'd yet faced in this dreadful season — because the Rockies were on a winning streak.
Drew Goodman and broadcast partner Cory Sullivan in the broadcast booth right before the start of a Rockies game on June 6.
Michael Roberts
Case in point: Days before, Stephen Colbert had pointed out during his CBS late-night show that Colorado was "the third fastest team to reach fifty losses in MLB history, making it the worst team in the last 125 years. In response, the team announced that at future games, they're changing 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' to "Take Me Out Behind the Shed and Kill Me.'"
A less comic blast against the Rockies sounded on the June 5 episode of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption, when cohost Michael Wilbon said that teams as extraordinarily lousy as the Rockies and Marlins were "bad for baseball."
Goodman, who was watching, says he likes and respects Wilbon, but calls that "a throwaway kind of statement. In any sport, you can look at the bottom teams and say, 'Is it good for the sport?' But somebody's got to lose, and you just have to hope it's not your team."
Diehard Rockies loyalists didn't have many reasons for optimism this spring. But the threepeat against the Marlins offered an opportunity to prove they could compete against a good opponent — and the Mets qualified. They came into Coors Field leading the National League East and boasted some of the biggest stars in professional baseball, including Juan Soto, Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor. Plus, that night's Mets pitcher, Kodai Senga ,came to Colorado with the lowest earned run average in the National League — a stark contrast with right-hander Antonio Senzatela, scheduled to toss for the Rockies, who'd allowed 98 hits, the most of any NL hurler.
While these stats made a loss seem not only likely but inevitable, Goodman gave the Rockies a chance, just as he does every game — and this tendency toward bullishness doesn't endear him to cynics in the audience. Rockies boosters fed up with losing want its ownership group, led by Dick Monfort, to sell the team to someone willing to spend what's necessary to return the team to respectability — and even if they know Goodman's paychecks come from Major League Baseball, they're frustrated that he won't join the anti-Monfort chorus.
Goodman doesn't consider himself an apologist, but he can't help pushing back against what he sees as false narratives — like that the franchise is cheap. "The Rockies' payroll has always been commensurate with its market size," he says. "I think they had the eleventh highest payroll a few years ago, and they've definitely handed out some big contracts. They just haven't always paid off."
And then there's the team's location. "The Rockies have the most difficult path to sustained success in baseball because of the altitude factor," he explains. "It's not only that pitchers don't want to come here because the ball doesn't move as dramatically. It's that athletes have to deal with going from altitude to sea level and back again. That isn't Rocky Mountain bias. It's a fact."
Still, Goodman isn't blind to the Rockies' shortcomings. "The Rockies have some really good players," he notes, citing the likes of Hunter Goodman and Ezequiel Tovar. "They just need more of them."
"You want to be honest so that you have credibility. But I'm not going to go on the air and bash individuals, whether they be players or management. That's not my job."
Drew Goodman is interviewed by sportscaster Jon Tritsch for a live spot on 9news about ninety minutes before first pitch.
Michael Roberts
Not that Goodman is a Luddite. During broadcasts, he uses a laptop, an iPad and his phone, sometimes simultaneously. But he still scores the game by hand, just as baseball lovers did a century ago. "From a technical standpoint, I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be in 2025," he says. "But with my notes, I still like to write them." TV partner Ryan Spilborghs uses more modern tools, "but every time I've thought about transitioning, I've chickened out, because of how I learned to do it."
New York was Goodman's original home. "I grew up in northern Westchester with my older sister, but my father was from the Bronx and my mom was from Brooklyn," he recounts. "My dad grew up three blocks from Yankee Stadium, but he hated the Yankees. He'd walk across the Harlem River to the Polo Grounds. He worked there as a teenager and went to virtually every home game in 1951. He was at the game where Bobby Thomson hit the shot heard 'round the world."
The event that shook young Goodman most profoundly was his mother's death in an automobile accident. At fourteen, he was a passenger in the crash that killed her. He describes the incident as "godawful — the worst day of my life. It's been 48 years, but I still think about my mom every day."
To deal with the tragedy, Goodman dove even deeper into sports, a shared obsession with his dad. (He has the same connection with his own sons, Jacob, Zach and Gabe, with whom he is closer than close.) At a height that barely exceeded five-six, he wasn't an imposing figure, but that didn't prevent him from participating in both football — "I was a smaller strong safety"— and baseball, for which he mainly played catcher. He was good enough to earn a slot in his high school's hall of fame and subsequently made the baseball roster at well-regarded Ithaca College. But after a year and a half there, his coach told him "he had other plans that didn't include me," Goodman recalls.
A part of Goodman wishes he'd transferred to another college to prolong his playing career. But he doesn't regret pivoting to broadcasting, another deep-seated passion; he'd even recorded simulated play-by-play sessions as a kid. On a ski trip to Aspen during his senior year at Ithaca, he made a contact at a local TV station, KSPN, and was hired in 1985. He worked in Aspen for over a year before moving to Denver and contributing to KSPN owner Joyce Hatton's attempt to launch a TBS-style superstation in conjunction with United Cable.
In 1988, this project morphed into Prime Sports Network, where Goodman became a jack-of-all-trades. He emceed a wide array of college football and basketball games and even some NFL contests in the early 1990s. Then, in 1994, he became the Denver Nuggets' lead announcer, beginning a ten-year run in which the team's success bookended its failure.
"The Nuggets went to the playoffs my first year and my last year," he says. "But the eight years in-between, they didn't go, and in 1997, they were so historically bad that it looked like they were going to set the modern record for fewest wins. [The Nuggets ended up with eleven victories, narrowly surpassing the nine executed by the 1972 Philadelphia 76ers.] And now I'm involved with a team that has struggled at a historic level in a different sport."
In his words, "I have a Ph.D. in handling losing seasons."
Prime Sports eventually became Fox Sports, and in 1997 — four years after the Rockies played their first game and two years after Coors Field opened — Colorado's Major League team joined the lineup. Five years later, the play-by-play position opened up and Goodman got the rare opportunity to fill the role while acting in the same capacity for the Nuggets. He did double-duty for two years before Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke launched his own channel, Altitude, in 2004. That forced Goodman to choose between the Nuggets and the Rockies — and given his lifelong love affair with baseball, "the decision was simple," he says.
Most of the twenty years since then haven't been easy for the Rockies. The team experienced a magical run to the 2007 World Series before falling to the Boston Red Sox and had a smattering of shorter playoff runs. However, the Rockies' last winning season was 2018, and the die is already cast for 2025. Emblematic of the in-progress calamity was the May 10 game in which Colorado knelt to the San Diego Padres 21-0.
Blowouts aren't as agonizing as they were prior to the advent of the pitch clock, which has shortened games substantially. "I think Drew's the most underpaid guy in the history of the game when you think of all the four-hour marathons he had to do in Coors Field before the pitch clock came in," Caray says.
Still, Alison Vigil, who's been producing Rockies games since 2014, says Goodman readies himself for each game as if it could go on indefinitely. "There aren't a lot of times I can surprise him with a story he's not already aware of," she says. "He's so well read and with so many deep relationships in the game. Drew's work ethic is second to none."
After completing phase one of his research, Goodman headed to Coors Field at 2:30 p.m., about four hours before first pitch on June 6, and quickly tracked down Ryan Ritter, the evening's big storyline. Ritter was making his major-league debut after tearing up the Pacific Coast League as an infielder on the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Rockies' Simpsons-monikered AAA affiliate. Ritter was deferential to Goodman as he revealed that twenty friends and family members were present to see his Rockies bow.
By 3 p.m., the rest of the broadcast team had joined Goodman in the dugout, including his booth partner for the evening, former Rocky Cory Sullivan, plus pre- and post-game producer Nicole Gates and cohorts Jeff Huson, another ex-Rocky, and commentator Marc Stout. Moments later, Rockies interim manager Warren Schaeffer, who'd taken the helm in May after his predecessor, Bud Black, became the designated scapegoat for the team's putridness, arrived for a pre-game chat. He told reporters about an unusual pitching strategy he'd be deploying: Since Senzatela had recently stumbled in first innings, Ryan Rolison would start the game before Senzatela's entry in the second.
This scheme didn't make much sense. After all, the second inning would be Senzatela's first, and he'd have to pitch later to Soto and Alonso (Lindor, who had fractured a pinkie toe, wasn't in the starting lineup). But given how brutal things were going for the Rockies, anything seemed worth trying.
When the Rockies players took the field for warmups, clad in their dopey-looking powder-blue uniforms, Goodman headed to the batting cage and palavered with recently returned catcher Braxton Fulford and a handful of his teammates, as well as support staffers such as Rockies legend Vinny Castilla and World Series skipper-turned-interim bench coach Clint Hurdle. Virtually all of them towered over Goodman, but he was as muscled as most. A workout monster, his upper body is so inflated that when he stands with arms akimbo, he resembles an inverted triangle.
Next, Goodman headed to the broadcast booth on an upper level of Coors Field, where he joined Sullivan, camera operator Sam Heraison and audio pro John Mickity. Also present was stats guru Doug Marino, whose approach to conveying data is as retro as Goodman's; he had already generated a stack of Post-Its covered with scribbled tidbits.
After going through scads of graphics created in advance of the game, Goodman and Sullivan went to the cafeteria for a pre-game meal with Mike Santini, MLB's vice president of production for local media. As he gabbed with Sullivan and Santini, Goodman also highlighted Rockies and Mets game notes, occasionally taking a break to chew before going back to the booth.
There'd been rain during the afternoon. But as the seconds to gametime ticked down, the sky had cleared and the view of the city and distant mountains was spectacular.
Goodman has a pre-game chat with pitching coach Jordan Pacheco outside the batting cage.
Michael Roberts
"Always good to be back home," Goodman said to start the show, then added, "Don't look now, but the Rockies are unbeaten this week" with an enthusiasm that was positively contagious. His tone raised hopes that maybe, just maybe, the Rockies' mastery of the Marlins would result in the sort of momentum that had been in short supply this season.
Goodman isn't a wordsmith along the lines of seminal gabber Vin Scully. His style is punchy, slangy and familiar; a hit is a "knock" and a locked-in batter is "raking." Such terms might seem hackneyed coming from some announcers, but not Goodman. Rather than keeping audience members at a distance, his lexicon invites them to join the fun.
Good times for the Rockies were plentiful at first. Schaeffer's nutty pitching plan worked: Rulison gave up a single to Soto but got out of the first inning with no damage, and Senzatela kept the Mets scoreless over four innings — and when he got into trouble in the sixth, reliever Jake Bird decisively shut the door. In the meantime, Rockies right fielder Mickey Moniak put one over the fence in the third, giving Goodman a chance to trot out his signature home-run line: "Take a good look! You won't see this one for long!"
Then, in the fifth, Ritter, in his second at-bat, laced a ball to the left-field wall. "First major league hit is a triple!" Goodman exalted, as proud as any of Ritter's loved ones in the stands.
Predictably, the Rockies' 1-0 lead didn't hold up; the Mets erased it in the seventh by way of two runs doubled in by Alonso. The two-bagger triggered chants of "Let's go, Mets!" that were louder than previous cheers of the Colorado faithful. For years, fans of visiting teams have often outnumbered Rockies rooters, and the hefty percentage of Mets lovers among the 34,000-plus people in attendance proved no exception.
In their half of the seventh, the Rockies knotted the score at 2-2 thanks to a Sam Hilliard triple and a Moniak single. But Moniak was tagged out at second, squelching the chances for a bigger inning and leaving the door open for the Mets. The New Yorkers strode through it in the ninth, when Lindor came off the bench and smacked a two-run double. After the Rockies went 1-2-3 in their half of the ninth, the Mets notched a 4-2 win.
As the Mets celebrated, Goodman said, "Tough one for the Rockies."
But not for Goodman. Once again, he was at the top of his game.
