Gov. John Hickenlooper, who loves baseball almost as much as he loves Colorado, has concerns about the Rockies’ pitching staff.

Hey, don’t we all?

Now, this is not to suggest Hickenlooper spends more time contemplating the pitching in LoDo than Colorado’s economic state, but if the governor wonders whether the Rockies have enough pitching to make the playoffs, isn’t it obvious what our National League team needs to do?

Go get a quality starting pitcher.

Jump-start the trade conversation about Chicago Cubs right-hander Jeff Samardzija, stuck with zero wins for a lousy team going nowhere, despite his 94 mph fastball and a sterling 1.45 earned run average.

Get the deal done, even if it means Colorado must surrender a pitching prospect as prized as Jon Gray.

Yes, I know. The Rockies always sit on the sideline, while teams such as the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Dodgers pursue trades to win now. But the Rockies would be foolish to sit on their hands this time. Here are two major reasons why:

1) Shortstop Troy Tulowitzki isn’t going to play like the leading MVP candidate every year. With Tulowitzki ripping up every statistical category from old-school RBI to new-age WAR, the Rockies owe it to their best player to maximize what’s shaping up to be Tulo’s career season.

2) Before a team can win the World Series, it must think like a champion. A champion doesn’t wait until next year, when the prospects in the minors and everybody who buys a ticket will be a year older.

Since spring training, I have been bullish and evangelistic in my belief this is the best Rockies team in at least four years. Yes, I also understand: When a ballclub owns a 23-17 record in May, there are more than 120 games and twice as many ways for the season to unravel.

But I was again spreading my message of hope, declaring that baseball fans in Colorado had legit reasons to be excited in 2014, to the guy standing next to me in a bar Monday night. And that guy happened to be Gov. Hickenlooper. So we casually talked baseball, because that’s what guys do when the local team is knocking the cover off the ball. The governor wants to believe in the fast start of the Rockies, I could tell. But Hickenlooper is a child of the 1960s who played whiffleball back in Pennsylvania and had his heart broken by the Phillies once too often. So he asked smart, reasonable questions about this Colorado team:

Can Charlie Blackmon, a career .291 hitter, continue to hit 50 points above his lifetime batting average? Does Nolan Arenado walk frequently enough? And, most important, Hickenlooper wanted to know: Will the Rockies’ pitching hold up through the dog days of summer?

Samardzija makes sense for the Rockies for a number of factors: His current $5.45 million salary should not be intimidating to a mid-market team. A 1.8 groundball-to-flyball ratio can allow Samardzija to succeed at Coors Field. While salary arbitration figures to give him a significant bump in pay, he would remain under the Rockies’ control through 2015.

Of course, pitching never is obtained cheaply. Purists will scream Colorado should not entertain trading Gray, selected No. 3 overall in the 2013 draft, or any other top pitching prospect, in the name of short-term gratification.

But Tulowitzki, Carlos Gonzalez and fans who have waited patiently for years to see a contending team return to LoDo deserve better than to be told the Rockies must prove their worthiness for at least another month before Gray or fellow pitching prospect Eddie Butler is called up from the minors.

Let’s make this clear: If not suitable as trade bait, then Gray or Butler should be working out of a Colorado bullpen that needs help right now, not later.

For way too long, the Rockies have thought like a franchise that believes it’s lucky merely for the chance to play major-league ball in the beautiful Colorado sunshine.

In fact, the Rockies have been afraid to go all-out for a championship for so many years, paying customers at Coors Field have been conditioned to believe snow in May or a 100-year-flood is a more natural occurrence in Colorado than the local baseball team advancing to the playoffs.

Let’s give general manager Dan O’Dowd props for his offseason moves of trading away inconsistent outfielder Dexter Fowler and rescuing first baseman Justin Morneau from the scrap heap.

Now let’s see if the Rockies are willing to double down and wager a team that routinely waits until next year can actually make a playoff run in 2014.

Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or twitter.com/markkiszla