Eli Whitney | May 5, 2026
Kyle Karros grew up in a house where October baseball wasn’t the goal. It was the assumption. His father wore Dodger blue for twelve seasons, and the family calendar stretched to match – summers ran long, the season ran longer, and Karros learned early that the sport simply kept going after most things stopped.
Then the Rockies drafted him in the fifth round of the 2023 MLB Draft. The expectations he’d grown up with came with him.
Ask Karros where his goal came from – getting Colorado back to playing October baseball, what he’d called his “North Star” back in spring training – and he points back to the team he watched as a kid.
“Honestly, I think a big part of it was growing up a Dodgers fan and just being accustomed, like, you play baseball in October every season,” Karros said recently, sitting in the Rockies clubhouse. “I think that’s just what the expectation was, and that was obviously what the dream was. That’s what I grew up watching. And then I get drafted by the Rockies, and then kind of start following along with where they’re at as an organization, and what kind of baseball they’re playing in the big leagues. And it’s just not what I was used to watching growing up. So I was like, this isn’t the baseball that I want to play. I want to be part of something that’s playing in October. I want to be part of something that’s respected amongst the league.”
Karros – polite, unbothered, direct in a way that sneaks up on you – has carried that goal the whole way up. The Rockies haven’t made the postseason since 2018. There is a generation of young players in the clubhouse who would like to change that, and Karros has decided that he wants to be one of them.
The City
Colorado started feeling like home, of all places, at Fan Fest.
He flew into Denver for the first time. Saw the city, saw the stadium, saw the people who had paid money in the dead of winter to fill Coors Field for a team coming off a last-place finish in the NL West. That was the part that landed.
“The first time Colorado felt like home was when I came out to a Fan Fest, my first Fan Fest,” Karros said. “That was my first time in Denver, first time seeing the stadium. But the biggest thing was the fan base – seeing the amount of people that still show up when we’re not at our best.”
So he started looking around. At the Avalanche, the Nuggets, the Broncos. At a city that knew how to bury itself in a team. He arrived at a thesis.
“There’s not a better sports town in America,” he said. “You always see online, it’s like, yeah, but just forget about the baseball in Denver, and it’s the best sports town in the country. The fans are just waiting. They’re ready. They’re out there, and they’re ready for us to give them something to rally behind.”
He says it like someone who’s already done the math. The fans are doing their part. The rest comes down to wins.
“We play in front of a couple sold-out crowds, and it’s just a different feeling,” he said. “It’s a different energy, and it just makes you want that every night you take the field. And the only way we’re going to get that is if we start winning games.”
A sold-out crowd watched the Rockies split a series with the Dodgers at Coors Field in April – a lot of blue in the stands, the team his father wore for twelve years milling around the visitors’ dugout, the kind of week a writer would build a feature around. Karros, when asked whether facing Los Angeles in particular added any extra fire, didn’t bite.
“I don’t think the Dodgers in specific add any fuel to the fire,” he said. “I think it’s a cool, funny story. But as far as what gets you juiced up to play, I think it’s just fans in the stands. It doesn’t matter what team we’re playing. Obviously, the Dodgers bring fans with them everywhere they go, and as we saw, there are a couple of sellouts. But playing in front of a packed crowd means everything. That’s why we do what we do.”
The Family Name
Eric Karros was the 1992 National League Rookie of the Year, a name that still rings in a particular octave around Chavez Ravine. He played fourteen seasons. He hit 284 home runs. He stood at first base in Dodger blue for the large majority of those years, long enough to become a face in a city that hands those out reluctantly. His son, three decades later, plays third base for one of the Dodgers’ division rivals.
Ask Kyle Karros what it was like growing up in that household, though, and the first person he names isn’t the one with the Topps cards.
“Honestly, I didn’t feel a ton of pressure,” he said. “I credit my mom a lot for that. She really kept it under control and just made sure that I was doing what I loved, and made sure I didn’t feel like it had to be baseball or anything like that. It happened to be baseball, as it turns out, but I really didn’t feel a ton of pressure, expectations.”
The comparisons themselves don’t worry him much either.
“We’re just very different people, my dad and I. Very different players,” he said. “I’m just being my own player. I don’t think I have any hype to live up to. I wouldn’t mind hitting as many homers as he did, but I’m more worried about just showing up every day and doing what I can to help the team.”
The separation is mostly peaceful. Mostly. “My first spring training at-bat they announced me as Eric Karros,” he said with a chuckle. “That stuff pisses me off.”
He has one more grievance, smaller but more specific.
“The only thing I get tired of, really, is when he sometimes tries to speak on today’s game like it’s the same game that he played,” Karros said. “And I just don’t think it is.”
It is a familiar generational moment, translated into baseball – the son who has to occasionally remind the father that the game has moved. Karros says it without bitterness. He just plays in a different version of the sport than his dad did.
“I think it’s always going to be a topic of conversation,” he said of the comparisons. “So I don’t really mind it.”
The Glove
If you really want to get Kyle Karros talking – not about his father, the Dodgers, or the comparisons – ask him about his love for third base.
“Honesty, I’ve been thinking about this recently,” he said. “I think it’s the creativity that’s needed to play defense. Any ball that’s hit to you, every single ground ball, you’re going to attack differently. Whether you’re going to field it on the run, whether you’re going to set your feet and throw, whether you’re going to take a drop step, whether you’re going to come get it. There’s so much room for creativity in each defensive play.”
For Karros, ground balls aren’t homework. They’re a hobby. He takes them for fun. Every grounder is a slightly different problem, and that’s the appeal.
“I never get bored with that, because there are endless possibilities.”
He belongs to, by temperament and by training, the generation of ballplayers who grew up reading data the way his father’s generation grew up reading reports. He talks fluently about contact points and chase rates and the new ABS system, and he has very little patience for the statistics on the back of a baseball card.
“The more I play, the more I buy into the underlying stuff, just because the old stats are so lucky, honestly,” he said. “There’s so much that goes into an at-bat that doesn’t show up on a baseball card. There’s so much that goes into defense that doesn’t show up on a baseball card. So I think the more I play and the more I realize what it really takes to put together a good at-bat or be a good defender, none of that is reflected in the old statistics. It’s more modern-day analytics.”
This is, not by accident, how he would prefer to be measured. He has watched his early-season slashline. He doesn’t think it tells the truth.
I would say my numbers are pretty misconstrued right now, for sure,” he said in an interview on April 22nd. “I’ve bought in a ton this year of the Baseball Savant stuff. It just tells a way truer story than your batting average, slugging percentage, and all that.”
Still, he’s clear-eyed about where he stands as a player, too.
“I have a lot of work to do defensively and offensively, and I’m not shying away from it. I’m nowhere near the player that I’m going to end up being in this league, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make that happen sooner rather than later.”
The Lineage
The Rockies have a tradition at third base. Vinny Castilla, three Silver Sluggers and an RBI title, walks the halls now as a special assistant to the front office; he is, at any given moment, ten feet from the locker where Kyle Karros dresses. Nolan Arenado made the position a Coors Field synonym for eight years. Ryan McMahon held it down until last summer’s deadline, when the Rockies traded him to the Yankees and gave an opportunity to Karros.
“Those guys did it right,” Karros said. “A lot of them were around for really competitive Colorado teams. And that’s the goal for me – not only to be a part of a competitive October baseball team, but to be a pillar on that team, like those guys were.”
The early returns have been the kind of mixed they’re supposed to be. The walks have piled up – sometimes elegantly, sometimes by attrition. The deep counts have multiplied. He has come up looking, in the season’s early months, like a hitter with a near religious devotion to the strike zone, drawing free passes and fouling off competitive pitches, and refusing, on principle, to chase. He doesn’t want to be that hitter forever.
The walks, he says, are scaffolding. The building is what comes next.
“The power is really inevitable,” he said. “Honestly, what’s going to allow me to get to my power is getting good pitches to hit. I think it’s all connected. And the most important part about hitting is controlling the zone. I genuinely believe that. Any superstar in this league probably controls the zone really well, and that’s just – it allows you to be a way more consistent baseball player. Rather than if you’re just swinging at everything, and then you’re relying on a ton of luck and hoping the pitcher throws it over the plate on this given pitch. But if you’re actually seeing the ball, recognizing pitches, you can show up on any given night. “
The defensive work, he adds, is its own kind of project – the same patient inventory of small things, the same willingness to find more.
“I think a big part of it for me defensively is just having your body feel good every day,” he said. “Defense is all about getting low, playing underneath the ball, and if you’re banged up, that’s not going to be easy. There’s a lot of room to be done in the weight room, just refining my body. And then back to the creativity stuff – learning new stuff, new throws, new plays, and getting comfortable with those so they can show up in the game.”
The Dream
So here is the dream, in the form Kyle Karros has chosen to carry it. Manhattan Beach to Denver. October baseball at Coors Field. His name eventually finding its way onto the short, jealously kept list of men who have played third base for this franchise and meant it. The fans, already loyal, already filling the seats when given a reason, finally getting back to the quality of baseball that they have been patient enough to deserve.
He grew up on the other team. He knows what it’s supposed to look like in the latter months. He has, in his quiet and stubborn and surprisingly specific way, decided he is going to help build it here.
“That’s the dream,” he said, “That’s the goal for me.”
It is, by his own telling, what he came here to do.
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