Keeler: Rockies’ Bud Black has the best job in baseball, thanks to Dick Monfort, Bill Schmidt, no accountability. Why would he ever leave?

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The Rockies are the Alila Big Sur of failing upward. A retreat from analytics, attention and accountability. Why would Bud Black ever want to leave?

Fans and scribes blame the Monforts. Out-of-town pundits blame the 5,280 feet. Metrics nerds blame GM Bill Schmidt and a front office stuck in 1998 thinking with 2008 tech.

“There’s a motivating part of this where I want to see (winning) happen, right? I want to see it happen here,” Black told me during a chat in his office at Salt River Fields earlier this month.

“And that’s the thing that drives me, and the coaching staff, and our players — our present group of players, and our players that are coming — that we think are getting closer.”

Buddy is one of MLB’s good eggs. He’s also sitting in one of the kindest, cushiest jobs in baseball. And he knows it.

Managing the Rockies these days is a little like captaining The Pacific Princess on the old TV show “The Love Boat.” You’ve got three regular ports of call (San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego). You’re supervising a cast of delightful crew members. You regularly interact with internationally renowned guest stars — Shohei Ohtani! Manny Machado! Blake Snell! — more famous and talented than the ones in your posse. Wacky hijinks inevitably ensue. And Kris Bryant always gets hurt in the fourth episode. I blame Gopher.

Don’t make waves, and you’ve got a job for life.

Assuming it doesn’t kill you first.

Black turns 67 in June. Last summer aged him in dog years. It wasn’t just his first as a big-league skipper with 100 or more losses (103). It was his first with a hundy in The Show as a pitcher, coach or manager — a baseball card that goes back five decades.

“But you can look at it and know why it happened,” Black said of 2023, when injuries sent a troubled campaign spiraling into the worst season in franchise history. “But I think what keeps you going is the long-term and the people that you’re with, right? The coaching staff, the front office, the players.

“We all went through it together without fracturing, without diving for cover. Man, we all went through it together.”

In a Daytona 500 division, Buddy’s been given a ’74 Gremlin and told to make a race of it. He can’t. Nobody could. Bobby Cox couldn’t. Casey Stengel couldn’t. Connie Mack would’ve chewed a hole through one of his straw hats just trying to keep Bryant on the field.

That said, the whispers of giving the guy who just lost 100 games for the first time an extension the very next year presents some … curious optics, to put it kindly. Although nobody does “curious optics” quite like Dick, Charlie and the gang on 20th & Bleak.

There’s fishing and golf and family out there — a bridge to sanity, just over The Rooftop bar. There’s also a darn good chance Black turns 70 before the Rockies win 70 as a franchise again. Some mountains just won’t move.

“My relationship with Billy and Dick, I mean — we don’t talk about (age) 70,” Black said. “But we talk about the now. And maybe not the 70 (part), but the coming years. And yeah, I can see myself (doing this).

“The No. 1 thing is, I love the competition. I love the players. I love the teaching aspect of it. (I love) the interaction from my chair with my coaches, with the front office, with the fans, with the (communications staff), with you guys (in the media), with the players. That is still energizing to me.”

The Rockies remain a sports bar that comes with an MLB franchise attached, instead of the other way ’round. The franchise only becomes relevant as a baseball operation if a) somebody inside the ship can somehow mutiny The Rockie Way and supplant it with something that works, or; b) realignment gets Colorado away from the Dodgers/Giants/Padres table and into a division with the Royals/Twins/White Sox of the world.

Black ain’t the problem here. Or the solution. Which puts him in the same awful baseball limbo as the rest of us.

The blights start in the owner’s box and filter down to the clubhouse. Meanwhile, the returns on the mound, Buddy’s forte, have diminished the way a sand castle ebbs in the tide.  A World Series winner as pitching coach with the Angels in 2002, Black was brought in to help hoist middling arms and keep the good ones from being ruined by elevation. The initial returns proved promising, as Rockies ranked ninth in the National League ERA chase in 2017. They were 12th in ’18. They’ve wound up last in that category over four of the last five seasons. Jon Gray’s gone. Kyle Freeland’s battled shoulder problems. German Marquez is rehabbing from Tommy John surgery.

In any other baseball organization not run by Jerry Reinsdorf, Buddy’s moved on by now. Or been moved on. Yet when I asked the other day about managing here in 2025, the Rockies skipper didn’t rule it out.

“Well, (that’s) probably a better question for all three of us, right — (with) Dick and Bill. But I hope to, OK?” Black replied. “How about that? I hope to.”

Buddy deserves better. The Rockies can’t do better. It’s the perfect dysfunctional baseball marriage. An open smile. On a friendly shore.

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