DENVER -- Dan O’Dowd spent 15 years trying to figure out how to win consistently as the general manager of the Rockies.

He arrived in Colorado in 1999 with optimism for the future. He left in 2014 haunted by reality.

“There are a ton of baseball people who you’ll talk to who will have answers and solutions and, ‘Why don’t they do this?’ and ‘Why don’t they do that?’” he said. “And I’m telling you, until you walk in the people’s shoes who are actually attempting to do it, it’s just really hard to quantify and wrap your arms around.

“Quite honestly, I don’t know if I’m any closer to the truth than I was 25 years ago. My experience of altitude baseball is just completely one of humility.”

The difficulty of pursuing sustained success in the mile-high climate of Denver is so complex that even a Hall of Fame manager resigned after one season at the helm for the Rockies.

“When I was there, the ballpark really beat up the manager and the pitching staff,” said Jim Leyland, who managed the club in 1999. “It was just so wearing on the pitchers, as well as really the whole club, I think. I was a pitcher’s manager and I just didn’t feel like I was gonna be very good at managing a pitching staff there.”

Anyone who has tried to manage a game at Coors Field can understand Leyland’s lament, watching as batted baseballs slice through the thin Colorado air and, when they don’t land over the fence, often find grass in the largest outfield in the Major Leagues. Pitchers get hit hard and hitters, when they leave Denver for sea level, have to contend with pitches that suddenly move differently.

As you can imagine, that combination isn’t exactly ideal for winning.

It’s not that the Rockies can’t win -- they reached the playoffs in 1995, 2007, ’09, ’17 and ’18. In ’07, they went on perhaps the greatest late-season run in baseball history, winning 21 of 22 games to reach the World Series.

No, it’s that they haven’t figured out how to win for an extended period of time. And that inability is inextricably linked with the unique obstacles they face with a home park situated 5,280 feet above sea level.

There has been a surfeit of theories for solving the Coors Conundrum over the years. The search has been extensive, but the desired result has been elusive.

Will anyone find an answer? Is there an answer?

Since 2018, there have been six consecutive losing seasons, with the last two being the first two in franchise history in which the club lost 100 or more games. Bill Schmidt, who had a hand in drafting players on four of the five Rockies postseason teams, is the general manager. Bud Black, who skippered the 2017-18 playoff teams, is the manager. But they are flummoxed by the current malaise.

Amid all the uncertainty posed by this one-of-a-kind baseball setting, one thing is certain: the problem is a Rubik's Cube at the intersection of physics, physiology, psychology and sport. And it’s far more layered in its complexity than many realize.

“In the history of the game of baseball, there’s skill and there’s luck,” O’Dowd said. “Anybody who tells you there’s no luck in baseball hasn’t been around the game of baseball. Truly there is luck. The larger the sample size, the greater the impact of skill.

“Except for Colorado.”

The physics of baseball a mile high

The first recorded baseball game played in Denver took place on April 26, 1862, exactly 133 years before the first regular-season game was played at Coors Field. Presciently, the final score of that first baseball contest in the Mile High City was 20-7.

About a decade earlier, a German physicist named Heinrich Gustav Magnus observed a phenomenon that he surely never connected to the fledgling American pastime. But more than 150 years later, the Magnus Effect is still foiling the best laid plans of pitchers and pitching coaches at Coors.

In essence, the Magnus Effect is the result of unequal pressure on either side of a rotating object moving through fluid or air. In the case of a baseball, the spin and velocity of the ball out of a pitcher’s hand, combined with the resistance of the air through which it is traveling toward the plate, creates that unequal pressure on either side and results in movement -- it’s why we get curveballs, cutters, sliders and sweepers, etc.

When the air is thinner, such as in Denver, the resistance is diminished, leading to balls that don’t break as much as they do at sea level.

How much does this impact pitches in Colorado?

Let’s start with fastballs. In 2024, pitchers for the Rockies averaged 13 inches of induced vertical break (a measurement that eliminates gravity from the equation in order to isolate movement created by the pitcher's ability to spin and manipulate the ball) on their four-seamers at Coors Field.

When Rockies hurlers went on the road last year, the average induced vertical break on their four-seamers was 16.4 inches -- in other words, their four-seamers had only 81% of the rise they got at sea level when thrown at Coors. That makes sense, since atmospheric pressure and density are, on average, about 20% lower at Coors than at sea level.

How about breaking balls? Well, the average horizontal movement of the Rockies’ curveballs at home last season was 5.5 inches toward the glove side. On the road, it was 7 inches toward the glove side. The induced vertical break at Coors was -7 inches, whereas on the road, it was -8.5 inches.

For changeups at home, Rockies pitchers averaged 10 inches of armside movement. Away from Coors, they averaged 13 inches of armside break. As for induced vertical break, the average movement at home was 4.8 inches. On the road, it was 7 inches.

In short: pitches lose a lot of movement at Coors. And it’s a problem. In the immortal words of Pedro Cerrano from the movie “Major League”: “Straight ball, I hit very much.”

Now add the cavernous outfield to the mix. Coors Field has an outfield that measures 117,800 square feet -- that’s the largest in MLB by 2,600 square feet, and it’s 9,000 square feet larger than the average park’s outfield.

The ballpark’s dimensions were designed based on the notion that a larger outfield would help offset the climate’s impact on offense. And it did, in one sense. Contrary to popular perception, Coors is not an extreme home run park -- over the past three seasons, it ranks eighth in home run park factor, per Statcast. But it's not just about homers. Coors is the runaway leader in park factor for hits of any kind, ranking as the friendliest park by far for singles and triples, second only to Fenway for doubles.

As a result, Coors regularly has the highest batting average on balls in play of any park in the big leagues (.330 last season; Arizona’s Chase Field was second at .316).

The plight of pitchers at Coors has been well-known and well-documented. But what has been a bit obscure -- though it’s received more attention in recent years -- is the difficulty hitters have after leaving Denver. They call it the “Coors Hangover.”

Take the difference in pitch movement described above and consider what it means for hitters. At Coors, it’s paradise, but what happens on the road?

“When I went to Colorado, the thought process of the challenge for me was always about the pitching,” said O’Dowd, who is now an MLB Network analyst. “So when the hitting part of it came up, it was really humbling for me.

“If you think about it, baseball is a game of muscle memory. So you have a six-game homestand and you get more at-bats in Colorado than you get anywhere else in the game. You get on a plane, you fly to San Francisco. You’re now at sea level. You see the same pitch out of the same hand. You track it identically. And the last 10-15 feet, the ball moves. You do everything the same as you just did over the last week, but your calibrations are off just a little bit.”

And that little bit makes a big difference.

Since the Rockies’ inaugural season in 1993, no club has a lower road OPS than Colorado’s .683. With luminaries like Andres Galarraga, Larry Walker, Todd Helton, Matt Holliday, Troy Tulowitzki, Charlie Blackmon, Nolan Arenado, Trevor Story and others over the years, it certainly hasn’t been a personnel issue. It’s been a physics issue.

The reality is that even when the Rockies win, they have to do it despite poor offensive production on the road -- in each of their postseason years, their road OPS was below the MLB average (.700 in 1995, .730 in 2007, .718 in ’09, .703 in ’17 and .665 in ’18).

But all of that is just the tip of the iceberg (peak of the mountain?) when it comes to adversity at altitude. Next, we go from the physics to the physical.

‘I felt like I had gotten run over by a train’

When the Rockies signed All-Star left-hander Denny Neagle to a five-year, $51 million contract in December 2000, it raised eyebrows. After all, these were the Rockies, who played in a ballpark where pitchers’ ERAs tended to skyrocket, especially in the pre-humidor era.

When Colorado signed another left-hander four days later -- this one the reigning NL Championship Series MVP who was a year removed from a runner-up finish in NL Cy Young Award voting -- to what was at that time the largest contract in baseball history, jaws proceeded to drop.

Mike Hampton was awarded that record-breaking eight-year, $121 million deal, and when he arrived in the Mile High City, he was confident. Over his first two months in a Rockies uniform, that confidence seemed well-placed and the signing was looking like a brilliant move by O’Dowd, who had one year in the GM’s chair by that point.

Through his first 11 starts, Hampton owned a 2.68 ERA over 77 1/3 innings. That included a pair of gems at Coors in which he combined to throw 17 1/3 scoreless frames -- an 8 1/3-inning masterpiece on Opening Day against the Cardinals and a shutout of his former club, the Mets, on May 9.

But there was a troubling omen after that Opening Day performance.

“My very first start for Colorado, I went into the ninth inning against St. Louis,” he said. “That night, I was feeling on top of the world. The next morning, I felt like I had gotten run over by a train. I really did not understand how many parts of my body could hurt from just pitching.”

From June 5 through the end of that season, Hampton’s ERA was 7.09. The accelerated wear and tear from athletic performance at altitude, combined with the different styles he felt he needed to employ at home vs. on the road due to the differences in pitch movement, undid what had been a promising season.

Following another difficult year in 2002, Hampton was traded to the Braves.

“It was a challenge that I wanted to go after,” he said of pitching in Denver. “I thought that if anybody could be successful there, it would be me, with my style of pitching down in the zone and doing those types of things.

“I was wrong about that, obviously.”

O’Dowd said that the physical strain that altitude places on the body made it virtually impossible to predict performance when trying to build a roster -- and Hampton is Exhibit A.

“Everybody forgets that Mike Hampton was an All-Star in his first year with us,” O’Dowd said. “He had a great first half, but then he physically fell apart. And then when he physically fell apart, he lost the feel for his sinker. So how, in any of your predictive modeling -- because his sinker characteristics would profile very, very well for us; his athleticism was off the chart; he had a pretty clean injury history -- how could you know how that player is going to react to the stimulus that you’re faced with every single day?

“So you can look for players who profile well with their skillset and how they play the game, but you just have no idea how those players are going to hold up.”

Hampton’s philosophy when faced with adversity was to work harder. So he hit the weight room harder, ran harder and did everything he could to condition himself better.

But that only made things worse.

“The harder I worked,” Hampton said, “the results just didn’t get there. It wasn’t from lack of trying.”

Keith Dugger has been with the Rockies organization since its inception, and he’s been Colorado’s head athletic trainer for the last 21 years. He said that while it may be counterintuitive, training harder can be counterproductive in the Coors climate.

“You don’t want a player to overwork or over-practice when you’re at altitude,” Dugger said. “We’ve learned over the years that your glycogen levels burn faster at altitude. The way I’d describe glycogen is like your fuel tank for an athlete.

“You need to keep that fuel tank going all through the game, right? So that’s why you’d see Charlie Blackmon eating protein bars in the middle of a game, along with some kind of electrolyte. We want to keep the fuel tank on a higher octane, at a higher level.”

As the season wears on and the temperatures heat up, players at altitude tend to wear out.

“When you get fatigued and it starts getting hot, you lose your appetite and now your fuel tank is low and you’re just exhausted because you don’t want to eat,” Dugger said.

On top of that, Dugger says that players competing at Coors Field can “never get truly acclimated” to the climate because it takes at least two weeks for the body to adjust. The longest homestand in a season is typically 10 games.

Dugger said that the body’s red blood cells aren’t carrying the same amount of oxygen at altitude, and as a result, muscle recovery following the breaking down of muscles during athletic competition is slower than at sea level.

That explains why Hampton, who was known as a tremendous athlete, had a hard time despite his athleticism.

“I was in the greatest shape of my life when I was in Colorado,” he said. “There was no one who could handle me physically.”

As if all of those factors didn’t make things difficult enough, there’s more.

“We’re in our own time zone in the West division,” Dugger said. “We’re part of the NL West, so when we play night games on the West Coast, we’re getting back to Denver at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. It may not sound like a big deal, but it’s hard to sleep anyway because you wake up earlier when you’re in altitude. So now you’re sleep deprived.”

Dugger said the Rockies work with world-renowned experts on sleep and other areas of need unique to their environment. Some of the suggestions have included not having a full workout on the first day back from a road trip and individualized routines for different players given that each player’s body may respond differently.

Schmidt, the Rockies’ current GM, said that “rest is a big part of it,” and that personnel decisions are at times made with that specific element in mind -- such as the signing of veteran utility infielder Kyle Farmer this past offseason. Farmer was acquired for depth, and his versatility means he can give multiple infielders a break when needed.

“That’s why you add a Kyle Farmer,” Schmidt said. “It’s to try and rest our starters because I think over the course of a season, anything we can do to keep guys off their feet is important, especially when it gets hot and the ball starts really flying and you get those long, high-scoring games.”

Third baseman Ryan McMahon wore down in each of the past two seasons after playing in 152 and 153 games, respectively. Shortstop Ezequiel Tovar played in 153 games in 2023 -- his first full MLB season -- and 157 games last year. The Rockies want to prevent him from experiencing fatigue similar to McMahon’s.

The physical challenges of playing in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, combined with the physics of how the baseball behaves at altitude, can give rise to another major issue: the effects on the psyche.

‘Your head’s spinning’

After spending five seasons in the Orioles’ front office and then nine as assistant GM in Cleveland from 1991-99 -- a period over which the club went from 105 losses to a pair of World Series appearances in ’95 and ’97 -- O’Dowd arrived in Denver with a sterling pedigree and a lot of ideas.

Things were much different than he anticipated, even knowing coming in that Colorado presented unique challenges. And just as with the physical element, something else that can’t be projected threw everything off.

“What you can’t do in Colorado,” he said, “is the human analytical part of player evaluation. When you’re playing in environmental conditions that are ebb-and-flow and changing all the time, you don’t know how a player is going to mentally respond to that.”

The mental grind of playing regularly at Coors Field is perhaps the most maddening aspect for players, managers and executives alike.

Hampton can attest.

“For a portion of the second half of 2001, and then all of ’02, that was where I was at the lowest mentally,” he said. “There are times where you really question yourself. You look for answers and your head’s spinning.”

Jeff Bridich, who succeeded O’Dowd as Rockies GM from 2015-21, said that a major factor in the mental challenges players face when trying to perform at altitude is something Dugger touched on: going back and forth between the rarefied air of Denver and sea level during the season.

“A lot of pitchers and hitters who don’t play at altitude don’t feel great all the time as it is,” said Bridich, who was with the organization for 17 years. “They’re doing the best they can at sea level and not always 100%, so the Rockies’ guys feel less than 100% and then have this hanging over their heads, too.

“And then the constant going back and forth in and out of altitude -- for some guys, it is just as much a mental thing as a physical one, like, ‘Man, I know I don’t sleep well when I go back to Denver; I know that for the next week I’m going to be getting less sleep than I’ve been getting in San Francisco or L.A. I know my body doesn’t recover as quickly in Denver and my stuff won’t be the same, etc. It takes a mentally strong individual to tackle those thoughts repeatedly throughout a long Major League season.”

Hampton said that the back-and-forth between Denver and sea level caused him to make significant mechanical adjustments that wore on him mentally -- adjustments that would be challenging enough for any pitcher to make without having to consider Coors.

What do you do when you don’t know what the ball is going to do?

“In Coors Field, I’d try to break my curveball right on top of the plate,” Hampton said. “It’s going to carry and not break as much. You go down to sea level, and you’ve gotta find a different arm slot. When you’re throwing bullpens in Colorado, the ball’s not gonna move the same. The changeup might cut. My cutter might sink. Then you go to sea level and you get different cut, different break.”

Hampton felt he had to tinker, but that contributed to him losing the feel -- and arm slot -- for his sinker. It was devastating given that it was the sinker that the Rockies hoped would make him dominant in Denver.

Jeff Francis, a left-hander who was a key member of the 2007 squad that reached the World Series, said that another issue in the back of pitchers’ minds is statistics.

“You have to realize that your ERA while playing for the Rockies might not be as low as it would be somewhere else,” Francis said. “That could be hard because when a player gets paid, you’re measuring his numbers against players around the league, and if a 4.50 ERA playing for the Rockies is going to be measured against a 4.50 ERA playing somewhere else, it’s going to weigh on a pitcher’s mind.

“It’s not fun. You don’t want to go out there and give up four or five runs in nine innings and think you’re a good pitcher.”

What would success look like?

The problem is so enigmatic that the idea of finding a solution more than 30 years into this grand experiment almost seems fanciful. But if it was to be solved, how would that look?

The logical place to turn would be the five years in which the Rockies reached the postseason -- 1995, 2007, 2009, 2017 and 2018.

Given that the 1995 club played an abbreviated season before the humidor was installed at Coors, we’ll exclude them here.

The 2007 Rockies made history with a late-season run for the ages. On Sept. 15, following a 10-2 loss to the Marlins, Colorado was 4 1/2 games out of the sole NL Wild Card position with three teams to leapfrog and 14 games remaining. The Rockies went 13-1 and beat the Padres in a tie-breaking 163rd game to surge into the playoffs, where they swept their way to the World Series, which they lost to the Red Sox.

Clint Hurdle was the manager of that club, and a man who is known for his ability to motivate and inspire saw his team collectively assume his persona.

According to Hurdle, the stepping stones toward consistent winning in Colorado include a pitching staff with unique characteristics focused on the strength of each individual, fundamentally sound defensive play and a clubhouse chemistry that thumbs its nose at the altitude.

The pitching, of course, is the greatest challenge.

“We just met pitchers where they were,” Hurdle said. “Each one had a Major League weapon in their arm.”

O’Dowd, who presided over that pennant-winning team as general manager, agrees. But with a caveat. He said that the idea is to take unique pitches and pitch shapes that have been successful at Coors -- Aaron Cook’s sinker, Ubaldo Jiménez’s four- and two-seam fastballs, Jason Jennings’ breaking ball, as examples -- and identify pitchers who have similar stuff.

The trouble, O’Dowd said, is then trying to figure out whether those pitchers can withstand the physical and mental rigors involved in going from altitude to sea level and back throughout a season.

Defensively, Hurdle preached something that you don’t usually hear in Denver.

“Our mantra was ‘Keep the ball off the ground,’” he said, reflecting an obsession with defenders catching the ball cleanly when they could get to it.

While fielding percentage doesn’t have the cachet it used to, given the advanced defensive metrics we have at our disposal today, it does illustrate a point with the ’07 Rockies, who weren’t all that gifted defensively but made all the plays that needed to be made.

That club’s .989 fielding percentage set an MLB record (the current record is .991, held by the 2013 Orioles).

They say pitching and defense win championships. But you’ve got to hit a little, too, right? What about hitting, particularly on the road, where the Rockies have struggled so much throughout franchise history?

Ryan Spilborghs, who was a member of the 2007 and ’09 clubs that reached the playoffs, says one of the big keys is patience at the plate -- drawing more walks and chasing less, to be more specific.

“Even if the environment changes, your strike zone never changes,” Spilborghs said. “I’ve never seen altitude impact someone’s strike zone. If that’s the case, I’d like to see it. Walks travel. If you go back to those Rockies teams that had higher walk rates on the road, we had a group of guys that believed in the strike zone and swinging at certain pitches.”

The highest team walk rate the Rockies have ever produced on the road came in 2009 (a walk every 9.8 plate appearances). Tied for second was the ’07 club (a walk every 10.8 plate appearances). Both were postseason teams. The other three Rockies teams to make the playoffs ranked 12th (2018), 15th (1995) and 18th (2017) out of 32.

Following the incredible 2007 run, the Rockies regressed the following season but bounced back and made the playoffs in ’09 with much of the same roster.

From there, it would be another eight years before Colorado would taste postseason baseball again.

Certified organic

The Rockies have often referred to themselves as a “draft and develop” organization. But for Colorado, much more rides on that part of the organization’s strategy than for other teams.

How else do you condition young players to contend with altitude as they grow rather than trying to foist it upon veterans when they arrive in free agency?

“When we won there, of the 25-man roster, 20 were homegrown kids,” O’Dowd said of the 2007 group. “It was an entire evolution of: ‘This is what you have to expect, this is where you have to play the game a certain way,’ etc. But in reality, it still took something that was extraordinary for us to win there. And your windows are shorter because of the physical and mental wear and tear of playing a mile above sea level.”

O’Dowd’s successor, Bridich, is the only general manager on whose watch the Rockies made back-to-back postseason appearances. Those came in 2017 and ’18, with rosters laden with homegrown talent, much of which was drafted and developed during O’Dowd’s tenure as GM and Bridich’s time as farm director.

Bridich agreed that cultivating a group of players who come up through the Minor Leagues together may be one of the keys to solving the Coors Conundrum.

“I think part of it was just sheer numbers,” he said of the success from 2017-18. “Obviously, those guys were very talented -- there were a lot of drafted and developed guys that all came up at a similar time. You have this grouping of new big leaguers who are talented, young and athletic, and are in their prime or are about to be in their prime together. Not only are they learning together about what the Major League level is like and what they need to do to succeed, but they’re also pushing each other through healthy competition -- the ‘iron sharpens iron’ element was real.”

Blackmon and Arenado made their MLB debuts in 2011 and ’13, respectively. A couple of years later, a wave of prospects arrived and thrived -- Jon Gray, Trevor Story, Germán Márquez and Kyle Freeland all reached the big leagues between 2015-17, when it began coming together for Colorado.

The Rockies lost to the D-backs in the 2017 NL Wild Card Game. The following year, they pushed the Dodgers to a tie-breaking Game 163 for the NL West crown, ultimately settling for another Wild Card berth. They beat the Cubs in the NL Wild Card Game before being swept by the Brewers in the Division Series.

The manager of those clubs is still at the helm, and as he tries to shepherd the team into its next window of contention, he’s of the mind that the growth must be organic.

“No doubt,” said Black. “It’s imperative. It’s something we always talk about as an organization, preparing these guys for Denver. We talk about identifying those guys who are built the right way -- both pitchers and position players -- to withstand the rigors of this.”

Schmidt, who spent 14 years as the Rockies’ vice president of scouting prior to becoming GM, said that he has two big questions in his mind when evaluating whether an amateur player might be a fit for the demands of Denver.

“I ask how and why,” Schmidt said. “How and why did they get the way they were? Ultimately, at the end of the day, you’re looking for a guy with mental toughness. Because if you don’t have it, this place will chew you up and spit you out.”

Can it be done?

The Rockies are now hoping a new crop of homegrown players ushers in the next competitive era. Tovar, Brenton Doyle, Michael Toglia and even prospects who have yet to make their Major League debuts, such as Chase Dollander, now carry the hopes of cracking the Coors code in the years to come.

If they somehow manage to do what hasn’t been done in over three decades of Rockies baseball -- create a sustained period of winning -- they’ll have reached the peak of what has to this point been an unscalable mountain.

But if you ask those who have tried the climb before, they still hold out hope that it can happen.

“For anyone who cares about the organization or loves baseball here in altitude, it’s probably a question that gnaws at them,” Bridich said. “But I absolutely think it can be done.”

MLB.com Rockies reporter Thomas Harding and analyst Mike Petriello contributed to this report.