Free falling from playoff contention toward rock bottom, if the Rockies make a big move in 2014 it will be to trade shortstop Troy Tulowitzki or outfielder Carlos Gonzalez.
“If one of us gets traded, you never know what’s going to happen. One of us might end up winning a World Series,” Gonzalez told me as he sat in the Colorado clubhouse.
Tulo and CarGo are the Rockies. But their team seems doomed to failure. It has left them frustrated and open to a change of uniform.
The two Colorado stars, whose combined salaries total nearly $27 million this season, understand what immense value they could have on the trade market. In separate interviews Thursday, Tulo and CarGo talked frankly about the possibility of leaving Denver.
“In Todd Helton, there’s someone who’s easy to look at his career here and how it played out. I have the utmost respect for Todd, but at the same time, I don’t want to be the next in line as somebody who was here for a long time and didn’t have a chance to win every single year,” said Tulowitzki, reviewing the 17 years Helton spent as the face of a franchise that never won a division title. “He played in a couple postseason games and went to one World Series. But that’s not me. I want to be somewhere where there’s a chance to be in the playoffs every single year.”
By almost any metric, CarGo and Tulo rank among the most talented 25 players in the major leagues. Their highly competitive natures, however, have been severely tested by a sad stretch that saw Colorado lose 28 of 38 games, with a rash of bad-luck injuries and wretched starting pitching the ruination of a once-promising season.
Combine his usual golden touch at shortstop with one of the NL’s hottest bats, and Tulo- witzki profiles as the league’s No. 1 candidate for most valuable player except for one glaring deficiency: His team stinks.
“What people need to understand about me is: Winning’s my main priority,” Tulowitzki said. “I’ve been around the game a little bit now, and I understand those years where we did win, how much more fun I had. And then there are years such as this.”
Gonzalez, a former batting champ, has been limited to 52 games and a disappointing .255 batting average by a nagging knee injury and a finger growth that required surgery.
“It has been terrible,” said Gonzalez, who hopes to be back in the lineup before the all-star break. “I think the most important thing when I get back on the field is to just be me. Obviously, I was playing through a lot of pain and I wasn’t playing the way I can play. … I was playing bad.”
With summers of endless Colorado sunshine and a groovy party deck as distractions, the Rockies’ ability to sell tickets seems remarkably bulletproof against chronic front-office mismanagement.
But Tulowitzki, whose nickname is chanted by the crowd when he steps to the plate, might be the one player Rockies owner Dick Monfort would have difficulty trading.
“I don’t see Tulo going away from here, unless he asks for it,” Gonzalez said. “Tulo is a guy who got drafted here. He grew up in the farm system. He doesn’t know anything except purple. … It’s easier for them to trade me than him.”
When St. Louis explored a trade for Tulowitzki late in 2013, with the names of Cardinals pitcher Shelby Miller and first baseman Matt Adams, among others, prominently bandied about in rumors, I am convinced Colorado’s reluctance to pull the trigger had as much to do with a genuine affection for Tulo and fear of an adverse impact on marketing as it did with a baseball evaluation of the deal’s pros and cons.
The terms of Tulowitzki’s contract give him broad power to veto any trade, allowing the 29-year-old shortstop significant control of where he plays the remainder of his career. Nevertheless, Tulo is uncertain what the future holds through the July 31 trade deadline and beyond. “If you hear, let me know,” Tulowitzki said.
Gonzalez was also unsure.
“I think it’s easier for me to deal with than Tulo, because Tulo has been here for his entire baseball life. I’ve already been traded twice,” said Gonzalez, a member of the Arizona and Oakland organizations before making his Rockies debut in 2009. “The first time I got traded, it was hard. The second time, it was even harder. But I’ve learned. Once, I thought it was a team didn’t love the way I played. Now, I know baseball is a business, and anything can happen from one day to another.”
Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or twitter.com/markkiszla
