The Rockies just fired their head of analytics after seven months on the job

The Colorado Rockies aren’t playing baseball right now due to the MLB lockout.

That doesn’t keep them from making headlines for puzzling reasons.

According to The Denver Post, the Rockies fired Scott Van Lenten on Tuesday, seven months after hiring him to lead their “beefed-up” analytics department. Van Lenten’s official title was director of research and development for the team. He was reporting to new general manager Bill Schmidt until he was dismissed.

The team confirmed the move to the Denver Post, but wouldn’t comment any further. One source told the newspaper that Van Lenten and the club had “major disagreements” over his role with the team.

The Rockies lost several employees in the analytics during the COVID-19 pandemic, and were supposedly aiming to revamp it under Van Lenten. Clearly those plans changed.

Owner Dick Monfort is currently one of the main faces of baseball trying to settle the lockout, with no deal in place yet. His son, Sterling, was also recently promoted to director of professional scouting for the team.

I’m not going to pretend to know why Van Lenten was fired, but the optics are certainly not good. With Monfort taking heat for his role in the labor dispute, mere months after promoting his son, fans are not happy. Firing Van Lenten does nothing to quiet critics of the organization that say its dysfunctional.

Why hire a guy in the fall if he can’t even make it to Opening Day? Shouldn’t Van Lenten’s role have been defined from the jump, so both parties knew the expectations of him?

It’s another head scratching move from a franchise that has made a handful of them the last few years. Here’s hoping to better days ahead for the Rockies, and baseball as a whole.

***