You never want to make too much out of what happens in a week. But, when you’re a baseball team expected to compete for a division title and have aspirations for a deep postseason run, patience can come at a premium.

For the Colorado Rockies, the main issue during a 3-5 start to the 2019 campaign is offense. Prior to a six-run outburst (albeit in a 10-6 loss) in their home opener on Friday, the Rockies went through a stretch during which they scored a grand total of two runs in 38 innings. Many explanations are in play; it’s early, they faced great pitching (in Tampa, anyway), the presence of prized free-agent acquisition Daniel Murphy is sorely missed—you get the point.

But the club is also shooting itself in the foot with bad at-bats. Only one National League team—the Miami Marlins, whom the Rockies faced in the opening series of the season—has swung at a higher percentage of pitches outside of the zone than Colorado’s 35.9 percent. The Rockies did a much worse job at making contact with those pitches than the Marlins did, though. In fact, the Rox have done a worse job than all but two NL teams at making contact in general—and they swing and miss more than any other club in the senior circuit.

The poster boy for those struggles, though he’s had only 11 plate appearances thus far, is Raimel Tapia. The out-of-options outfielder is playing like he’s under pressure, looking completely overmatched in the majority of his at-bats—a statement backed by the fact that he’s swung at two-thirds of the out-of-zone pitches he’s seen. And, truth be told, Tapia is under pressure, considering he could be out of a roster spot entirely if he doesn’t start performing soon.

That may sound crazy to say when it comes to Tapia, and that’s probably because he has an impressive prospect pedigree linked to, well, tearing the minors a new one. Since 2012, when he hit in 29 straight games at rookie-level Grand Junction as a second-year pro, Tapia has hit better than .300 in every single minor league season. It’s an impressive feat on the surface, but there have always been red flags with Tapia.

One is that he’s always been known as a hacker who thrived on an excellent rate of contact, even if a lot of it was soft. Tapia has excellent speed and defense in the minor leagues isn’t always exactly a thing of beauty, and the combination of those two things can result in a lot of base hits.

Another thing going against Tapia is his fortune of playing most of his games in extremely hitter-friendly environments. That certainly wasn’t the case for part of 2016, when Tapia posted a .323/.360/.450 line in the notoriously pitcher-friendly Eastern League, but literally every other one of his minor league stops have been a hitter’s paradise.

Nobody gets more sick of hearing about offensive ballparks and their effects on players’ numbers than those who follow the Rockies. But those things—as well as judging minor league performance against major league equivalency—have to be considered when evaluating prospects.

Tapia, per Stat Corner, has always been solidly above average in terms of park-adjusted wOBA+, which is a stat that uses linear weights on plate appearances that result in a player reaching base (the single most important thing an offensive baseball player can do) and wraps them up in a nice number that is relative to league average. But not as far above average as you might think given his batting averages alone. Most recently, in 2018, Tapia was basically a league-average offensive player in the Pacific Coast League, posting a 101 wOBA+. That came after figures of 110, 94, 110, 106, and 110 in his previous five minor league stops.

Tapia put up all of those numbers against pitchers who, to simplify things, are largely working on fastball command. That’s what the minor leagues are; if young hurlers can’t harness their fastball command while making their way up the organizational ladder, they won’t get very far. So, as a result, you see more fastballs—and, overall, pitchers just “working on stuff”—in the minors (particularly until about Double-A) than in the majors.

And that’s the book on Tapia right there, at least so far. A look at Fangraphs’ pitch values reveals what we’ve all seen with our eyes: the free-swinging, 25-year-old outfielder hasn’t been able to adjust to the repertoire of the average major league pitcher—and it’s because they’re not throwing him fastballs. Only 44 percent of the pitches Tapia has seen in his 200-plus big league plate appearances have been fastballs, and for the most part, he’s been able to handle those. But his value is in the negative when he sees sliders and curves—basically, any pitch that is offspeed and moves.

This season—again, in only a handful of plate appearances—pitchers are really trying to expose Tapia’s weakness against breaking balls. He’s seen a fastball just 18 percent of the time! Pitchers are loading him up with junk and, unfortunately, he’s taking the bait. That’s going to have to change quickly, or else the Rockies are going to have to face a tough decision: either lose Tapia for essentially nothing by designating him for assignment (removing him from their roster gives them little leverage in a potential trade scenario), or let him continue to take his lumps at the major league level, which could negatively affect a team with World Series aspirations.

Ultimately, the Rockies largely have themselves to blame. There were ample opportunities in, say, 2016—a season that should have played a huge part in deciding which players were going to be part of the team’s upcoming contention window (something almost everyone saw coming, by the way) and in what roles. Instead of giving near major league-ready guys like Tapia, Tom Murphy, Ryan McMahon (admittedly a little early), David Dahl, and even Jordan Patterson playing time, only Dahl saw a considerable amount, and two years later the Rockies backed themselves into a real corner with most of those players while still seemingly jerking them around.

And now, we’ve come to this. Tapia, a long-time prospect darling, is at a crossroads with the team that developed him. And the only real solution is more playing time, which the Rockies—ironically, considering the events of 2016—might not be able to afford to provide.