LOS ANGELES — The Colorado Rockies’ history books are littered with elite offensive names and gaudy statistics. Players like Todd Helton, Larry Walker, Matt Holliday and Nolan Arenado, putting up .379 batting averages, recording 150 RBIs, hitting 59 doubles — the numbers are, at times, cartoonish.
Yet none of the greats — not a single one — had better offensive statistics on the road than in the hitter-friendly confines of Coors Field. Hardly any of them even had a one-off reverse-splits season.
Those outsized averages and statistical totals were built on a Mile High foundation, as the game’s highest-altitude ballpark delivers one undeniably consistent truth: You will hit better there than anywhere else.
That’s what makes Hunter Goodman’s 2026 season so mysterious. Of the 26-year-old catcher’s 31 home runs entering Tuesday’s game, 18 have come away from Denver.
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The phenom has a .226 average and .791 OPS at home, compared to a .282 average and .964 OPS on the road. This can’t be chalked up to a small sample or a rounding error. Even after Goodman’s three-homer home performance on Sunday and his game-winning homer on Tuesday, the numbers tell a story that makes little sense.
“I’m not even going to try to explain that, because it would be a word salad,” said Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer. “In any game he can do anything.”
Goodman’s anomalous season raises a fascinating question for the Rockies and their star catcher, who, importantly, is still earning a league-minimum salary: Do they trade him?
Despite being one of the game’s most anonymous standouts, Goodman’s value would likely be astronomical, in part, because he’s not considered a Rocky Mountain merchant. And while he’s set to earn a raise in arbitration next season, he’ll remain very affordable until hitting free agency after the 2029 season.
In a mid-July interview with The Athletic, Rockies president of baseball operations Paul DePodesta stopped short of speaking in absolutes, but made clear what he was thinking.
“When you have good players that you think can be a part of a championship team,” DePodesta said. “I think you’re loath to part with them.”
They’re currently in the process, he said, of identifying which players are foundational for them moving forward, and whether those players could comprise genuine building blocks of a championship roster.
Hunter Goodman made his second straight All-Star Game in 2026. (Dustin Bradford / Getty Images)
DePodesta, in his first year with the club, has overseen a stark turnaround. The Rockies finished 43-119 last season. And while a 40-62 record entering play Tuesday won’t be good enough to make the playoffs, it does offer hope that this young core can grow into something more, if the right pieces are kept in place.
The Rockies have yet to broach extension talks with Goodman, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. He’d be open to that conversation, the source said.
“It’s out of my control, there’s nothing that I can really do or say about it that will change anything,” Goodman said when asked if he had any preference about whether he was traded or not, before later adding that he’s really enjoyed his time with the Rockies.
And, this year, he’s done his damage away from a home ballpark that’s been a statistical asterisk throughout its 32-season existence. It will certainly make him even more attractive to other teams — perhaps the Yankees, the club most closely associated with him in trade rumors — because acquiring him will be viewed as less risky.
DePodesta hypothesized that playing catcher at altitude can potentially influence a hitter on offense, lending credence to the idea that his game might be more complete elsewhere.
The best hitters in Rockies history have not been catchers. Though, notably, Colorado’s catcher of eight years, Chris Iannetta, saw two seasons in which he was better away.
Other sluggers? Not so much. Helton was a .345 hitter in Coors, while hitting .316 for his career. In 1995, Dante Bichette hit 31 homers in Denver, and nine on the road, finishing second in MVP voting. Fifteen years later, Troy Tulowitzki would have an OPS nearly .200 points higher at home. In his lone All-Star season, Eric Young Sr. hit .412 at home and .219 elsewhere.
Household names, and some that aren’t, have made their careers on the backs of this ballpark.
“I think guys, over time, have been bothered by it,” said Schaeffer, the second-year skipper who has spent 20 years in the Rockies organization. “We’ve had some really good, top-level, Hall of Fame-caliber players here. And maybe some stuff has been said about them that’s not fair, because they play at Coors Field. It’s still a baseball game.”
That’s what makes Goodman’s season so mysterious, and potentially so significant as the deadline approaches.
He seemed almost perturbed by his inexplicable reverse splits, and said he tries not to think about it. Goodman even noted that Coors Field is not in the top five home run hitter parks by Baseball Savant’s park factor metric.
He’s right; it ranks eighth.
Still, it’s rated as the best hitter’s park overall by a significant margin, even if he can’t crack that code.
“I’m hoping it will start to even out,” Goodman said. “I’m hoping that the performance on the road stays the same.”
Goodman was very vocal in the weeks leading up to the All-Star Game about wanting to be in the Home Run Derby, to showcase himself on a stage that his small-market team doesn’t really offer.
He made his second straight All-Star appearance, but the league didn’t call about the Derby. He said he wasn’t bothered by it. “If we were in first place, I have no doubt he would be in the derby,” DePodesta quipped.
The question now, however, becomes whether or not DePodesta will put Goodman on a first-place team. Or at least a club still in the mix.
As a whole, he’s one of the game’s best power hitters. Yes, he’s one of the game’s most strikeout-prone hitters, but so are most good sluggers in 2026. Goodman’s max exit velocities rank in the top 2 percent of all players. His hard-hit percentage is 46.2, way above the 37.1 percent league average.
Those numbers are on the back of hitting in every ballpark except his own. But the Rockies, at least as of now, don’t want him playing anywhere else.
“Enormously important,” Schaeffer said, when asked how significant Goodman’s presence is to this team’s future. “He’s a dangerous hitter in the middle of the lineup. Plays with energy. Plays with fire. Believes in what we’re doing. A leader day in and day out.
“Just the way he goes about his business is what we’re trying to do. He embodies that.”
