Considering the Colorado Rockies’ 2026 infield

The cupboard, as they say, is bare.

Renee Dechert

31 Oct 2025 — 5 min read

Kyle Karros and Ezequiel Tovar

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Earlier yesterday, Patrick Saunders posted this on X:

So that means that the speculation will drag on into next week. Unless something leaks over the weekend — which is possible — I would assume we can expect an announcement on Monday.

Also, this point from Anthony Franco of MLB Trade Rumors is worth noting:

Colorado doesn’t have any free agents who’d receive consideration for a qualifying offer. Their option decisions are easy calls to buy out Kyle Farmer and Thairo Estrada. It’s not a big deal not to have a GM for either of those moves. However, the first five days of the offseason see plenty of waiver activity as teams are required to get their rosters down to 40 without the injured list. Colorado has top waiver priority as the worst team in the league. It would be ideal to have a permanent baseball operations leader for those opportunities, but it doesn’t appear they’ll be in place for that rush. The GM will also need to oversee a managerial search process that could take weeks. Guardians assistant general manager Matt Forman and Diamondbacks AGM Amiel Sawdaye are among the finalists to replace Bill Schmidt in the GM chair.

The Rockies need to get moving.

All of that is to say that when the new Colorado Rockies president of baseball operations/general manager is announced, they will have a great deal of work to do very quickly. One of their first issues will be dealing with the 40-man roster.

As a reminder, eligible players become free agents the day after the World Series; players must be added to the 40-man roster by November 18 to be protected from the Rule 5 Draft; and contracts must be tendered to arbitration-eligible players by November 21. The general manager meetings are November 10-13.

I’ve been poking through the 40-man roster, trying to divine what the new PBO/GM might be planning, and I was struck by the Rockies’ dearth of infielders.

Remember last April when the Rockies brought back Alan Trejo so that they could field an infield given injuries to Ezequiel Tovar, Thairo Estrada, and Aaron Schunk. Utility player Kyle Farmer had begun to have back injuries, so they needed to act. When the Rockies sent Ryan McMahon to the New York Yankees — the right move to be clear – their infield depth was even further decimated.

But let’s consider what the infield might look like in 2026. Here’s the current 40-man roster.

Infielders on the Rockies’ 40-man roster

Let’s start with some easy subtraction. I agree with Anthony Franco: Orlando Arcia will become a free agent, and the Rockies appear unlikely to claim their mutual options with Estrada and Farmer.

That takes a list of 11 infielders and shaves it down to eight.

There’s no sense that Aaron Schunk will be part of the Rockies’ future. (Read more about his 2025 season here.) I have my doubts as to whether he will remain on the 40-man given the Rockies’ willingness to DFA him in the past. That would put the list down to seven.

Then there’s the Michael Toglia issue. It seemed that Toglia had figured things out in 2024, but 2025 saw a return to his free-swinging ways, and he spent much of the second half of the season in Triple-A Albuquerque. My guess is that the Rockies will not tender him a contract. That moves the infield roster down to six.

Here’s who that leaves:

Adael Amador
Warming Bernabel
Blaine Crim
Kyle Karros
Ryan Ritter
Ezequiel Tovar

Crim was a late-season pick-up from the Texas Rangers, and while it’s easy to see why the Rockies claimed him (in the most-Bill-Schmidt move ever), like Schunk, it seems unlikely he has a future with the Rockies.

As you can see, the infield options are getting thin.

I am confident that Ritter and Karros have places going forward, and maybe Bernabel. Amador is young, so perhaps he’s part of the future, too, but he has not been impressive during his MLB outings.

The short version is that the Rockies do not have a lot to work with at the MLB level going into 2026. In case you’re interested, the only infielders listed on the Isotopes’ roster are Owen Miller and Jose Torres, so there’s not a lot of help waiting on the farm.

At this point, the Rockies have a couple of options.

Maybe the new PBO/GM will decide that 2026 is a wash for the Rockies anyway and will put their attention to building the farm and the Rockies analytics systems. If the Rockies want to develop young players at the MLB level who are inexpensive, working with this roster would certainly accomplish that goal even if not all of them appear to have an MLB future.

Maybe the new PBO/GM will sign a couple of veteran free agents to play first and second for a year or two to help bridge things over until the next crop of youngsters is ready. Here’s MLB Trade Rumors’ list of 2025-26 free agents with players like Josh Bell and Cavan Biggio a couple of names that would fit the bill. (Brendan Rodgers will be available, so there’s that.)

Maybe the new PBO/GM will make some trades though that seems to me more likely to happen with the starting rotation than with infielders.

Maybe the new PBO/GM will decide to trade Ezequiel Tovar, which seems to me a reasonable move. (Look, the Yankees could use an elite shortstop.) I would expect something like that to happen before the trade deadline, though, and not during the offseason.

The Rockies have enough outfielders that being short-staffed isn’t a problem. The infield, however, is another matter and one the new front office director will need to deal with sooner rather than later.

The way in which they deal with this will give fans a sense of what to expect in 2026.

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What I’m Reading

Questions GM candidates Matt Forman, Amiel Sawdaye need to be asking | Denver Post — Patrick Saunders cuts to the chase, but the real question is how much autonomy the new person will have.
Injury woes behind him, Feltner sets sights on 2026 | MLB.com — This is clearly not the season Ryan Feltner wanted. In this interview with Thomas Harding, Feltner looks to the future.

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