Rockies part ways with pitching coach Alon Leichman after one season

What happened

The Colorado Rockies have parted ways with pitching coach Alon Leichman, MLB.com's Thomas Harding reported, ending his tenure after just one season in the role. Ken Rosenthal and Keith Law of The Athletic were first to report the move.

Leichman arrived with the kind of mandate that pitching coaches in Colorado have always carried — which is to say, an unusually demanding one — and departs after a single campaign with the club finishing 58-104.

Why it matters

Pitching coach turnover is one of baseball's quieter offseason rituals, the kind of move that rarely generates the same heat as a free-agent signing but carries genuine operational weight. A pitching coach shapes how a staff is developed, how pitch mixes are constructed, and how young arms are managed through the long grind of a major-league season. In Colorado, where the altitude creates conditions that exist nowhere else in the sport, the role carries an additional layer of complexity that no analytics model fully irons out. The desk does not envy the whiteboard session where someone tries to normalize spin rate for elevation.

For the Rockies, the decision to move on from Leichman after a single season signals that the organization was not satisfied with the direction of the pitching staff, though the specific reasoning behind the parting has not been detailed in the reporting from either MLB.com or The Athletic. What is clear is that the club finished 58-104, fifth in the NL West and 42 games back of the division leader — a record that leaves little ambiguity about how the season went, for the pitching staff or anyone else.

Evaluating a pitching coach's contribution in isolation is genuinely difficult. A staff's performance reflects player health, roster construction, and the particular environmental challenges of pitching at altitude, none of which a coach controls entirely. The Rockies have not publicly attributed the decision to any single factor, and the reporting does not characterize it as anything beyond a parting of ways.

The one-season tenure is notable on its own terms. Pitching coaches who last a single year are not unheard of, but the brevity does suggest the organization felt that waiting another full season to reassess was not the preferred path. Whether that reflects dissatisfaction with results, a philosophical mismatch, or something else entirely, neither MLB.com nor The Athletic has specified.

Where the club stands

Colorado finished the season 58-104 (.358), sitting fifth in the NL West and 42 games behind the division leader. The club ranked 12th in the Wild Card standings, 30.0 games relative to the cut line, and was eliminated from both the division race and the Wild Card race well before the final weeks of the season. The Rockies closed the year on a one-game losing streak.

Those numbers frame the offseason work ahead in plain terms. A 58-104 record is not a foundation that asks for minor adjustments; it asks for structural decisions, and the pitching staff is one of the most visible places to begin making them. The departure of Leichman is the first publicly reported move of what figures to be a consequential offseason for the organization.

The fifth-place finish in the NL West and the 30.0-game gap to the Wild Card cut line also speak to the scope of the distance between where Colorado is and where it would need to be to compete. That context does not fall entirely on a pitching coach, but it does explain why the front office would feel urgency about getting the next hire right. In a division that has not been shy about spending and developing, the Rockies are operating with a significant gap to close, and the coaching staff is one of the levers available to them before the roster itself is rebuilt.

It is also worth noting that the .358 winning percentage is the kind of number that tends to accelerate organizational timelines. Patience has a shelf life, and a 58-104 season has a way of shortening it considerably — for coaches, for front-office approaches, and for the broader philosophy the club wants to install going forward.

What we don't know yet

The reporting does not detail why the Rockies and Leichman parted ways beyond the fact of the separation itself. No mutual agreement language, no specific performance benchmarks, and no organizational statement explaining the decision have been included in the coverage from MLB.com or The Athletic.

It is also not yet known who the Rockies will pursue as Leichman's replacement, what the timeline for that search looks like, or whether the club plans broader changes to the coaching staff alongside this one. The reporting covers the departure; the next chapter has not been written yet.

What the Rockies want from a pitching coach philosophically — whether they are prioritizing a development-first approach for a young staff, a heavier analytics integration, or something else — has not been addressed in the available reporting. That question will likely answer itself when the hire is made, but for now it remains open.

What to watch

The obvious follow-up question is who Colorado targets as its next pitching coach, and whether that hire signals anything about the organizational philosophy the front office wants to install. Pitching coach searches tend to move quietly and quickly in the early offseason, before the managerial carousel and the free-agent period fully consume the industry's attention. The Rockies, finishing where they finished, are not in a position to let that search drift.

Beyond the coaching search, the club faces a broader set of roster and development questions heading into the winter. A 58-104 season, fifth in the division, 42 games back — that is an organization confronting some fundamental decisions about its direction, and the pitching staff's trajectory under new leadership will be one of the more telling indicators of which way things are leaning.

The desk will be watching for any announcement on a replacement hire, and for any additional reporting from Rosenthal, Law, or Harding on the scope of the changes Colorado is considering this offseason. One coaching departure, in the Rockies' experience and in baseball's generally, rarely travels entirely alone.