There’s a genre of K-pop fan account that spends less energy hyping comebacks than begging the label to disband the group. Not because the fans hate the members. Because watching a flop drag itself toward its natural end feels worse than an ending would. I’ve followed enough of these accounts to recognize the tone when it surfaces: not grief, something closer to relief, the exhale of finally being right about how bad things had gotten.
Rockies fans have been wearing that same expression all week. Bob Nightengale reported for USA Today that Colorado made seven players available ahead of the trade deadline: Kyle Freeland, Michael Lorenzen, Tomoyuki Sugano, Antonio Senzatela, Mickey Moniak, Jake McCarthy, and Willi Castro. A last-place team announcing that almost nobody is untouchable should read as bad news. Instead the replies read like relief, because after three straight last-place summers, this fire sale isn’t really about what Colorado gets back for six or seven guys. It’s about somebody in the building finally admitting, out loud, what the fans have known since May, and for a fanbase that stopped trusting the front office to tell them the truth, that admission is the closest thing to hope on offer.
That’s not a small thing this July. Every contender in baseball is scanning the board for a reliever or a rental bat, and with the rest of the league bracing for deadline chaos, a seller finally naming its whole roster stands out. Nightengale’s read is that this year’s deadline is about nerve, not talent for a lot of front offices still deciding whether to blow things up or limp toward mediocrity. Colorado didn’t have to decide. The record decided for them months ago.
The names on the list cut against the idea that this is a sale of afterthoughts. Freeland is 33 with an ERA over 7.00 and more losses than wins on an expiring deal, a hometown arm nobody’s fighting over. Lorenzen, 34, carries a 6.53 ERA that isn’t drawing much buyer interest either. Sugano, at 36, is somehow the intriguing one, a 10-4 record that makes him a legitimate rental target for a club needing innings down the stretch. Senzatela has quietly been excellent out of the bullpen, 9-2 with a 3.53 ERA, though a $14 million club option for 2027 makes him a likely rental no matter what Colorado wants.
Moniak, McCarthy, and Castro complicate the story, because none of them are pending free agents. Moniak is hitting .277 with 16 home runs and will draw real interest on his own merits. McCarthy leads the team in average near .300, with 10 homers, 56 RBI, and speed that plays anywhere. Castro is the least individually exciting of the seven, a utility infielder and outfielder valuable mostly for what he can play instead of what he can hit. None of that reads like a rebuild-for-2027 mandate so much as a front office deciding this particular season isn’t worth protecting, not unlike the Mets’ own $369 million fire sale a few hundred miles east, minus the part where anyone spent $369 million to get embarrassed. Hunter Goodman, the two-time All-Star catcher, is pointedly not on the list, which tells you the front office still wants something to build around.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Colorado hasn’t had a winning season since 2018. Three consecutive 100-loss-caliber years followed, cratering into a 43-119 finish in 2025 that stands as the worst season in franchise history, and at 42-65 this team is on pace for a fourth straight. The front office pushed out GM Bill Schmidt that October, and the new regime already shipped reliever Seth Halvorsen to the Dodgers earlier this trade season, a small early signal that Colorado’s decision-makers might actually behave like sellers instead of pretenders. Making seven more players available is the same signal, just louder.
But that’s not even the most interesting part of watching this online. The instinct to celebrate a tank job can look, from outside, like fatalism dressed up as sophistication, fans talking themselves into losing because winning stopped feeling like a realistic outcome to hope for. I get the skepticism. There’s a version of “at least be honest with us” that’s just doomerism with better branding, a coping mechanism disguised as a front-office critique.
I don’t think that’s the whole story here, though. What I keep noticing in Rockies fan spaces isn’t fans asking for losses. It’s fans asking to be told the truth about what kind of season they’re watching, instead of being sold marginal upgrades as a bridge to a contention window that never opens. Here’s the full list making the rounds, straight from the source Nightengale first reported.
https://twitter.com/UnderdogMLB/status/2081366047404282179
What’s strange, watching that list circulate, is how little anyone’s arguing about the return. Nobody’s mad Colorado might get a middling pitching prospect for a 36-year-old rental. They’re just glad someone finally said the season is what it obviously already was.
I don’t know if that’s healthy, exactly, wanting your team to lose on purpose so the org chart makes sense again. But it’s the version of hope this fanbase has settled on for now, and after three years of the alternative, I understand the appeal of somebody upstairs finally agreeing with what they already knew.
