The Best Colorado Rockies Seasons and Every October Run
The best Colorado Rockies seasons by record and run differential, plus all eight postseason series since 1995, from the 2007 pennant to the wild-card exits, with the numbers that explain how the club won.
The Colorado Rockies have played 33 seasons through 2025 and own a franchise record of 2,364 wins and 2,818 losses, a winning percentage of .456. They have reached the postseason five times, always as a wild card, and they have never won a division title. One of those five trips ended in a National League pennant, in 2007. None ended in a World Series title.
That record makes the good years easy to list, and it makes them worth a close look, because a club that plays half its games a mile above sea level does not produce ordinary numbers. The best Rockies teams scored 780 to 860 runs and still allowed 715 to 760. Their records were built on totals that would look odd in most other parks, so the useful question is how a team wins when both sides pile up runs.
This article walks through the club's seasons by era: the expansion crowds, the first October in 1995, the long middle stretch, the 2007 run, the 2009 comeback, the two wild-card years of 2017 and 2018, and the collapse that followed. Every record and series result comes from the historical record, through the 2025 season. For the park itself, see the Coors Field guide; for the whole story of the franchise, see the Rockies franchise history.
How to judge a Rockies season
Winning percentage alone is a blunt tool for this club. A team that scores 961 runs and allows 964, as the 1996 Rockies did, finishes 83-79 even though almost every game was a high-scoring one. So this article pairs each good season with its run differential, runs scored minus runs allowed, from the historical team table. Differential tells you whether a record was earned by the whole team or squeezed out of close games.
By that measure the club's good years are rare. The Rockies finished with a positive run differential in only 10 of their 33 seasons: 1995 (+2), 1997 (+15), 2000 (+71), 2001 (+17), 2006 (+1), 2007 (+102), 2009 (+89), 2010 (+53), 2017 (+67) and 2018 (+35). Five of those ten teams reached October. The other five missed it, including the 2000 team that went 82-80 and the 2010 team that went 83-79: a positive differential in this park is common to good teams and merely decent ones.
The second adjustment is the calendar. The 1994 season was cut short by the strike, and the 1995 season began late and ran 144 games rather than 162, so the 1995 team's 77-67 is a .535 finish and has to be compared as a percentage. Third, there is a quirk in how the books are kept: when two clubs finish tied for a playoff place, the tiebreaker game counts as a regular-season game. That is why two of the best Rockies seasons show 163 games, 90-73 in 2007 and 91-72 in 2018. The first of those ended with the club in October. The second ended with a loss that sent them to the wild-card game rather than the division series.
1993 and 1994: the biggest crowds the club has seen
The Rockies entered the National League in 1993 and played their first two seasons at Mile High Stadium, a football stadium shared with the Broncos. They finished 67-95 in the first year, sixth in the new NL West, with 758 runs scored and 967 allowed. That is a bad record, and a run differential of -209 to go with it, but it was an expansion team's first year and nobody in Denver seemed to mind.
The historical record lists 4,483,350 fans at Mile High Stadium in 1993, the highest season attendance in club history. The best year at Coors Field is 3,891,014, a number most clubs would be happy with that still falls well short of the opening season.
The 1994 season was cut short by the strike. The Rockies were 53-64 when play stopped, third in the division, and the club had a manager in Don Baylor who would stay through 1998. Baylor's record with the club was 440-469 across six seasons, a .484 mark that is better than the club's own all-time record of .456.
1995 to 2001: Coors Field and the first October
The club opened Coors Field in 1995 and played there from that year forward. The Rockies' 785 runs scored and 783 allowed in the shortened 1995 season put them at 77-67, second in the NL West, and that finish earned the first wild card in the history of the new playoff format. It was only the third season of existence for the club.
The first postseason series was a division series against Atlanta, and the Rockies lost it three games to one. The Braves were one of the great teams of the decade, and a club in its third season took a game from them in October. The 1995 series sits first in the table at the end of this article, and it is the only appearance by the franchise in the 1990s.
The seasons that followed were close to .500 and never reached the playoffs. The 1996 team went 83-79 and finished third. The 1997 team also went 83-79, and in 1997 Larry Walker won the National League's Most Valuable Player award, the only MVP in club history. The Rockies' career leader lists from this period are full of that lineup: Dante Bichette's 1,278 hits and 201 home runs with the club, Vinny Castilla's 239 home runs, and Walker's .334 average, the best in Rockies history among players with 3,000 at-bats.
Yet the pitching stayed expensive. The 2000 team scored 968 runs, the highest total in club history, and went 82-80 because it allowed 897. The 1999 team went 72-90 after allowing 1,028 runs. Everything the Rockies did at the plate in those years had an equal and opposite reaction on the mound, and the club never finished above third from 1996 through 2001.
The long middle, 2002 to 2006
Between 2002 and 2006 the club won between 67 and 76 games each season and finished fourth or fifth every year. The one bright spot of 2002 was individual: pitcher Jason Jennings won the National League Rookie of the Year award, the only such winner in club history, though the team's record was 73-89.
The more lasting change was in how the club handled the park. Beginning in 2002 the Rockies stored their game baseballs in a humidor, a chamber that keeps them at a controlled humidity so they do not dry out in the thin Denver air. The humidor did not change the elevation, but it took some of the carry off the ball, and it is the reason the Coors Field of the 2010s is not quite the park of the 1990s. If you want the mechanics, the Coors Field guide goes through them.
This was also the period when Todd Helton was the lineup. He played 17 seasons for the club, from 1997 through 2013, and finished with 2,519 hits, 369 home runs, 1,406 runs batted in and 1,335 walks, all franchise records. He and Walker are the two Hall of Fame players with four or more seasons in a Rockies uniform. Helton's career overlapped two of the club's October trips, 2007 and 2009. In between, the 2006 team, which went 76-86 with a run differential of +1, shows how little room the roster left for error.
2007: the pennant
The 2007 season gave the Rockies their only National League pennant, and it was a late arrival. The club finished 89-73 over the first 162 games, tied with San Diego for the wild card. It won the tiebreaker game in extra innings, which is how the 90-73 record in the books came about. The run that followed has a name in Denver, Rocktober, and the numbers behind it are simple to state: the Rockies won 14 of their last 15 regular-season games and then won their first 7 games of the postseason, 21 of 22 in all.
The 2007 Rockies scored 860 runs and allowed 758, a run differential of +102, the best of any Rockies team in the historical record. That is not a dominant team by the standards of the league's great clubs, but it was a team whose lineup carried its weight while the pitching staff kept the park from swallowing it. They finished second in the NL West at 90-73 and went in as a wild card.
The postseason sheet shows the rest. They swept Philadelphia 3-0 in the division series, then swept Arizona 4-0 in the NLCS to win the pennant. Then came the World Series against Boston, and Boston swept them 4-0. A club that had won 21 of 22 lost the last four in a row, and the title went elsewhere. Some fans point to the long wait between the NLCS sweep and the first World Series game, and it is a fair thing to wonder about, but nothing in a database can answer it. What the numbers do say is that the 2007 club is the only Rockies team to win a series beyond the first round.
2009: a manager change and a second October
The 2009 Rockies are the best season in club history by winning percentage: 92-70, second in the division, a .568 finish. They scored 804 runs and allowed 715, a +89 differential, and they got there after a change at the top. Clint Hurdle, who managed the 2007 pennant winner, left during the 2009 season and Jim Tracy took over. The sheet lists both men with the club in 2009, and the record split is striking: the Rockies went 18-28 under Hurdle that year and 74-42 under Tracy, which adds up to the 92-70 final line.
That second half was one of the best in the National League. The Rockies took the wild card and met Philadelphia in the division series, the same Phillies they had swept two years earlier. This time Philadelphia won it three games to one. The 2009 team had Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez, who ended up in the club's top eight for home runs with 188 and 227. It was the last postseason series for the Rockies for seven seasons.
Hurdle's own tenure deserves a fair note. His 534-625 record from 2002 to 2009 looks poor beside Tracy's 294-308 over four seasons, but it includes the only pennant in club history.
2010 to 2016: the slide
The next seven seasons produced no playoff games. The club finished 83-79 in 2010, third in the division and +53 in run differential, then dropped to 73-89 in 2011 and 64-98 in 2012, one of the worst finishes in the club's history to that point. The 2014 team went 66-96, and the 2016 team went 75-87. The lineup in those years was built around Charlie Blackmon, who finished with 1,805 hits as a Rockie, second only to Helton, and Nolan Arenado, who hit 235 home runs in eight seasons with the club.
Pitching remained the problem, and the sheet shows why. The club's career leaders in wins are Jorge De La Rosa with 86 and Aaron Cook with 72. The best career ERA among Rockies pitchers with 1,000 innings is De La Rosa's 4.35, followed by Cook at 4.53, Kyle Freeland at 4.54 and German Marquez at 4.67. In a park that adds runs, ERA over 4.00 is not an insult, but it does mean a Rockies pitcher cannot be judged on the raw number alone. Park-adjusted measures such as ERA+ exist for exactly that reason.
2017 and 2018: two wild cards and a tiebreaker
The Rockies returned to October in 2017 under Bud Black, who managed the club from 2017 through 2025. His 544-689 record is the most games managed in club history. The 2017 team was 87-75, third in the division, with a run differential of +67. It earned a wild-card place and played one game at Arizona, which it lost.
The 2018 team was better. It went 91-72, second in the division and the second-best winning percentage in club history, with 780 runs scored and 745 allowed. The Rockies finished the 162-game schedule tied with the Dodgers for the division lead and lost the one-game tiebreaker, then went to Chicago for the wild-card game and won it in 13 innings. That is the only series win outside of 2007. The division series against Milwaukee went to the Brewers in three straight games.
Seen together, 2017 and 2018 are the only back-to-back playoff appearances in franchise history. They also show the limit of the club's model: a lineup that produced 780 to 824 runs a year could not make up for a pitching staff that, in the park it had, allowed 745 to 757.
2019 to 2025: the collapse
After 2018 the club fell back fast. The 2019 team was 71-91, and the 2020 team went 26-34 in the shortened season. The club went 74-87 in 2021 and 68-94 in 2022, then dropped to 59-103 in 2023 and 61-101 in 2024. In 2025 the Rockies finished 43-119, fifth in the division, with 597 runs scored and 1,021 allowed, a run differential of -424. That is the worst record in club history and the worst winning percentage of the 33 seasons.
The managerial sheet shows the end of an era. Black's tenure ended partway through 2025, and Warren Schaeffer managed the remaining 122 games, going 36-86. The club's career strikeout leader is German Marquez with 1,069, and his years with the club ran from 2016 through 2025, a span that covers both playoff teams of 2017 and 2018 and the 119-loss season.
Every series in one table
| Year | Round | Opponent | Result | Games |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Division series | Atlanta | Lost | 1-3 |
| 2007 | Division series | Philadelphia | Won | 3-0 |
| 2007 | NLCS | Arizona | Won | 4-0 |
| 2007 | World Series | Boston | Lost | 0-4 |
| 2009 | Division series | Philadelphia | Lost | 1-3 |
| 2017 | Wild-card game | Arizona | Lost | 0-1 |
| 2018 | Wild-card game | Chicago Cubs | Won | 1-0 |
| 2018 | Division series | Milwaukee | Lost | 0-3 |
Add the columns up and the Rockies are 10-14 in postseason games, with three series wins in eight tries. Seven of those ten wins came in October 2007, and the other three are one each in 1995, 2009 and 2018. Outside of that one October, the club has played 13 postseason games and won 3.
Common questions
Have the Rockies ever won the World Series? No. They reached it once, in 2007, and lost to Boston in four games. The 2007 pennant is the only one in the franchise's 33 seasons through 2025.
Have the Rockies ever won a division title? No. Every playoff appearance came as a wild card: 1995, 2007, 2009, 2017 and 2018. Their best finish in the NL West is second place, which they managed in 1995, 2007, 2009 and 2018.
What is the best Rockies team by record? The 2009 team at 92-70, a .568 finish. The 2018 team at 91-72 and the 2007 team at 90-73 follow it. By run differential, the 2007 team (+102) stands above the 2009 team (+89).
Why do Rockies teams score so many runs? Denver sits at 5,190 feet, and the thin air lets a batted ball carry farther and a pitch break less. Visiting teams benefit from the same conditions, which is why the club's pitchers allowed so many runs as well.
What was the worst Rockies season? The 2025 team finished 43-119, with 597 runs scored and 1,021 allowed.
Where to go next
For the club's own story, read the Rockies franchise history, and for the players behind these seasons, the best Rockies by position. To compare the rest of the division, see the Dodgers franchise history and the Diamondbacks franchise history. For current results and the next game, use the Rockies team page, Coors Field or the Rockies topic page.