Rockies part ways with pitching coach Alon Leichman after one season

What happened

The Colorado Rockies have parted ways with pitching coach Alon Leichman after one season, MLB.com's Thomas Harding reported. The move was first reported by Ken Rosenthal and Keith Law of The Athletic.

Leichman joined the Rockies staff ahead of the 2026 season and departs having spent just one year in the role. The parting comes as Colorado closes out a season that, by any honest accounting, did not go the way anyone in the organization had hoped.

Why it matters

Pitching coach turnover is one of the more consequential offseason decisions a club can make, even when it surfaces quietly at the end of October. The pitching coach is the primary architect of a staff's development philosophy — the person who shapes how young arms are built, how workloads are managed, and how a pitching identity gets constructed over years, not months. One season is a short runway to build any of that, and the brevity of Leichman's tenure is notable on its own terms.

For a franchise in Colorado's position, the stakes of that role are particularly pointed. The organizational challenge of developing arms who can perform both at altitude and on the road has defined — and often confounded — Rockies roster construction for a long time. Whoever steps into this role next inherits that same puzzle, along with a staff that will need significant development to move the club in a different direction.

The timing of the departure, with the regular season now complete, is standard for coaching staff evaluations. Clubs typically conduct those reviews in the days and weeks following the final out, and moves like this one tend to surface in the first wave. What is less standard is the brevity of the tenure. One season is a short enough run that it invites natural questions about fit, philosophy, or simply the direction the organization wants to take as it shapes its next chapter. Those questions do not yet have public answers.

It is also worth noting that the pitching coach search does not happen in a vacuum. The broader question of how Colorado intends to construct a competitive staff going forward will shape what kind of candidate the front office pursues and what development philosophy they want installed at the major-league level. The club has not addressed that publicly, and the desk will not speculate on it. Attribution, when it arrives, will tell that story.

Where the club stands

Colorado finished fifth in the NL West at 58-104 (.358), 42 games out of first place. The Rockies were eliminated from both the division race and the Wild Card race, and they enter the offseason with the kind of record that makes the coming months as consequential as any stretch of games on the schedule.

The club's Wild Card ranking of 12th, sitting 30.0 games relative to the cut line, underscores the distance between where Colorado is and where it needs to be. That gap is not closed in a single offseason, and it is certainly not closed by any one hire. But the search for a new pitching coach will be among the first and most visible decisions the organization makes as it shapes what comes next.

A 58-104 record does not indict any single coach in isolation. Pitching performance is shaped by roster construction, player development pipelines, and the particular demands of a ballpark that has humbled far more decorated staffs than this one. But a record like that does create the conditions under which an organization asks hard questions about every part of its operation, and pitching coaches are rarely exempt from that accounting. The Rockies' front office is now in full evaluation mode, and this move is the first visible result of that process.

The club enters the offseason carrying a one-game losing streak and a final record that places them at the bottom of the NL West standings. The gap to the division leader — 42 games — is the kind of number that reframes every personnel decision made between now and spring training as part of a longer project rather than a short-term fix.

What we don't know yet

The Rockies have not announced a replacement for Leichman, and no timetable for that search has been reported. It is not yet known whether the club will conduct a broad external search, promote from within the organization, or pursue a candidate with a specific developmental profile.

The circumstances surrounding the parting — whether it was a mutual decision, a front-office-driven move, or something else — have not been detailed in the reporting from Harding, Rosenthal, or Law. The announcement, as reported, is the fact on the table. The texture behind it remains unaddressed in the available material.

Whether additional changes to the Rockies' coaching staff are forthcoming has also not been reported. Coaching evaluations at season's end tend to be comprehensive rather than surgical, but the desk will not get ahead of what has actually been attributed. When further moves are reported, they will be covered on their own terms.

What to watch

The Rockies' search for a new pitching coach will be one of the more closely watched staff moves of the offseason, both because of the unique demands of the role in Colorado and because of what the hire will signal about the organization's development philosophy going forward.

The front office is now working through its evaluations roughly a week removed from the end of the regular season. The pitching coach search will run alongside whatever decisions the club makes about its roster — free agency, arbitration, and the broader question of how Colorado intends to build toward competitiveness from a 58-104 foundation.

One season is a short tenure by any measure, and the next hire will carry the weight of that context. The desk will update as the search develops and attribution becomes available.