(To those who are unfamiliar with the Rockies announced status as a Christian ballclub, see this post and my followups here and here.)

Before we look at how they're doing, I would like to emphasize that I keep returning to this subject not out of any particular animosity towards Christians or Christianity (or ballplayers who happen to be Christian), but because I'm appalled that a professional baseball team would make decisions about how to run their team (which players to retain or release, for instance) on any other basis except those pertinent to baseball. It's bad enough that monetary issues play a significant part in a general manager's decisions in the modern game, to overlay religious criteria on top of that is wrong, just as wrong as the the banning of black players prior to Jackie Robinson.

So, how has a commitment to being a Christian team worked out for the Rockies? It certainly hasn't been a recipe for success in any absolute way, as a look at their stats will show:

• currently: 59-65 / 6 games under .500 / division: tied for last (3rd) place, 7 games behind the Dodgers / wild card: 4-way tie for 4th place, 5 games behind Cincinatti.

That's worse than the other times I checked on them:

• May 30 (when the USA Today article came out): at .500 / division: last (5th) place, 4.5 games behind / wild card: 7th place, 3.5 games out



• July 9 (All-Star Break): 1 game over .500 / division: 3rd place, 3.5 games behind / wild card: 2nd place / 1.5 games behind



• August 8: 3 games under .500 / division: 4th place, 4 games behind / wild card: 4th place, 2.5 games behind

Things are not getting better for the Rockies, they're getting worse.

Of course, there are other ways to measure success. Compared to last season , for instance -- when they finished in last place in the NL West, 15 games behind the Padres, with a sub-.500 winning percentage (.414), and tied for dead last in the Wild Card, 22 games out -- they're actually not doing nearly as badly.

Also, they may have figured out how to survive playing baseball in the high altitude of Denver, where thin air allows balls to travel farther and prevents pitches from breaking. The Rockies pitchers usually have one of the worse earned run averages in baseball because of this, but this season that seems to have changed for some reason -- before the Mets' series, the Rockies were leading the entire NL in team ERA with 4.06, with the Mets right behind them at 4.11. (They've swapped places now, with the Mets at 4.05 and the Rockies at 4.08, but that's still fairly amazing considering the conditions they have to play their home games under.)

So... all is not lost, it's still possible (if increasingly improbable) that the Rockies could squeak into the post-season, but the evidence does seem to be mounting that choosing to shape and run your team on Christian principles rather than baseball principles is not a good winning strategy. That doesn't mean that baseball players and managers and management shouldn't live their lives by their moral codes, whether coming from religious belief or not, it just means that if your goal is to win baseball games, you'd better do the things that help you to win baseball games.

Update: Hello to folks visiting here from Unscrewing the Inscrutable -- please feel free to look around the place. (And thanks to ARB for the link.)

Update (8/28): More from Sane Wailings here and here.

Uodate (8/29): Apparently, at least part of the Rockies' improvement this year over their performance last year is not due to their devotion to god, but to the humidor the balls are kept in so they don't get dried out -- except that the humidor's been in use for the last five years.

More: 24-Sept