Rockies' youth movement still working through growing pains

DENVER -- “Youth is wasted on the young.”

That quote is attributed to George Bernard Shaw, the famed Irish playwright, literary critic and polemicist.

But prior to the Rockies’ 4-3 loss to the Cubs at Coors Field on Saturday night, it was uttered by Colorado’s interim bench coach, Clint Hurdle.

Hurdle wasn’t deploying it the way Shaw did, though. It was originally used to lament what Shaw considered a truism -- that the vigor and abilities of young people are wasted because they don’t utilize them wisely, and only learn their lesson too late, when they’re too old to make use of them.

No, Hurdle doesn’t see that in the Rockies, who, with an average age of 26.2 years for players on the active roster, are tied with the Nationals for the youngest team in MLB.

“They’re having great opportunities for growth now,” said Hurdle, the only person who can say he guided the Rockies to the World Series as their manager. “These reps the pitchers are getting, the reps in the field, the reps at the plate.

“We believe they’ll pay us dividends moving forward.”

Before they lost for the ninth time in 11 games on Saturday, the Rockies came out of the All-Star break looking like a different team -- certainly not the one that went 22-74 in the first half. Colorado won five of its first seven and 15 of 31.

It was a stunning turnaround for a club that was once on pace to shatter the Modern Era record of 121 losses in a season, set by last year’s White Sox.

Yes, the Rockies have stumbled of late, but the small sample of relative success demonstrated that there’s something in there waiting to be unlocked for a club that has already set a franchise record by having 13 players make their big league debuts this season.

“Growing pains are hard, they’re hard for anybody,” Hurdle said. “However, there’s value in them.”

The value can be incremental. It often develops over time. It can often go unnoticed to the untrained eye. But Hurdle has seen enough baseball over his nearly 50 years in the game to know that as painful as it is to watch the losses pile up, they come with moments that can translate to winning later.

Another example was proffered Friday, when the Rockies had eight extra-base hits but went 2-for-18 with men in scoring position.

A chance for youth to not be wasted on the young once again presented itself.

“Last night,” Hurdle said, “we have back-to-back innings where we have a guy on second base [via a leadoff double]. Eight pitches later, the first guy hasn’t moved. And then 15 or 16 pitches later, he still hasn’t moved.

“We didn’t meet the demands of the game.”

But how does that change?

Part of it involves the nexus between the coaching staff and the players, and that involves a two-way street of communication and understanding.

A manifestation of that arose in the eighth inning on Saturday, when the Rockies were down a run and had the top of the lineup coming to the plate -- Tyler Freeman, Mickey Moniak and Hunter Goodman.

That trio saw eight pitches, resulting in three ground balls for a 1-2-3 inning.

From the outside, it might be easy to question whether they should have seen more pitches. But interim manager Warren Schaeffer said they did exactly what he expected of them, albeit without the desired results.

Then he used a word that goes hand-in-hand with the word “growth” for young players: “Trust.”

“That’s Brad Keller in the eighth,” Schaeffer said of Chicago’s hard-throwing reliever, one who possesses an assortment of secondary pitches that includes a sweeper with a 47.5 percent whiff rate entering the game.

“You can’t let him get deep in the count,” Schaeffer said. “And you know, sometimes results like that are gonna happen. But Freeman, Moniak, Goodman -- I trust those guys to make good decisions.”

And they -- as well as other youngsters on the roster -- are starting to trust themselves as they wind down a trying 2025 campaign. It’s why they’ve already collected nearly three-quarters of their win total from the first half.

“It’s not rocket science,” Schaeffer said. “It’s just guys playing extremely hard every night … the type of game that we think succeeds. … Just all the things we talk about and are committed to as a club, and that we’ve seen results from doing as we march into the offseason.”