The Rockies, coming off a disappointing 71-win season, desperately need quality starting pitching. Their starters’ 5.56 ERA this past season says so.

For most teams, this would be a good winter to add a cog to the rotation. The free-agent class is deep and talented, with Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, Madison Bumgarner and Hyun-Jin Ryu topping the list. Plus, there are a number of solid pitchers making up the second tier.

So, why as this week’s winter meetings commence in San Diego, will the Rockies likely be wallflowers in the free-agent dance?

The easy answer is money. The overriding reasons are Denver’s mile-high altitude and a history of failure signing big-dollar pitchers.

Let’s begin with dollars and sense. In order to land a big-name starter, the Rockies would have to overpay and that’s not going to happen this offseason. Owner Dick Monfort has made that clear.

Colorado’s final payroll for 2019 was a club-record $157,162,629, 12th highest in the majors, according to Spotrac. Contract commitments and projected arbitration salaries already have the Rockies at $148.3 million for 2020, with roster spots to fill.

Even if the Rockies were flush with cash, signing a pitcher such as Cole or Strasburg remains a fantasy. It’s been that way ever since David Nied threw the Rockies’ first pitch in 1993.

“If you were a free-agent pitcher and you have an option and a choice of where to go, Denver is not going to be your first choice,” said Bob Gebhard, Colorado’s first general manager. “Simply because it’s tough to put up good numbers and have a consistent won-loss record and low ERA in the altitude. That matters to a lot of players.”

Gebhard said the Rockies were aware of how tough it would be to pitch in Colorado early on.

“And we noticed it, with other teams, as early as 1995, the first year at Coors Field,” he said. “When certain teams would come in and play us, oftentimes the scheduled starting pitcher wasn’t in the rotation. Sometimes, to our advantage, we didn’t have to face their No. 1 guy because all of a sudden he had a sudden hamstring pull or a tender arm.”

Left-hander Jeff Francis, a first-round draft choice in 2002, pitched for the Rockies for eight seasons. He also pitched for five other teams, where he heard plenty about the perceived horrors of Coors Field.

“I always got the sense that no pitchers wanted to come to Denver,” Francis said. “Once I left Colorado, I talked with other players and a lot of guys dreaded that one weekend they had to pitch at Coors Field. And they sure didn’t want to have a career there.”

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Early in their history, however, the Rockies tried to build a team around big-money starters.

In November 1997, they signed Darryl Kile for three years, $24 million. In two seasons with the Rockies, Kile was 21-30 with a 5.84 ERA. At Coors Field, Kyle went 11-15 with a 6.76 ERA. Kile, however, was reborn after he was traded to St. Louis, where he won 20 games and posted a 3.91 ERA in 2000.

“When we signed Darryl, he said, ‘I can make my curveball work at Coors,’ ” Gebhard recalled. “He battled like heck and did the best he could, but it’s just hard to repeat your delivery as a pitcher here.”

Gebhard also came to realize that pursuing free-agent pitchers was a lousy strategy.

“Every year at this time, we looked at the free-agent listing and we made contacts,” Gebhard said. “We were often told by the agent that they would consider it but that their player was leaning toward someplace else. We went after them but we just couldn’t convince them that this was the place to spend the next three or four years.”

And agents used the Rockies’ offer as leverage for a bigger contract, such as pitcher Kevin Brown during the 1998-99 offseason.

“We brought him in, and we brought in his agent (Scott Boras), too, to sit down and have lunch,” Gebhard recalled. “We really went after him. We thought we made a very lucrative offer to him but they said no. Two days later, they took our offer, used it to upgrade and he signed with the Dodgers.”

The 34-year-old Brown signed a seven-year, $105 million contract.

Dan O’Dowd replaced Gebhard as GM in the fall of 1999 and came to Colorado with an aggressive mentality. In December 2000, O’Dowd, with a push from owner Jerry McMorris, shocked the baseball world with two headline-grabbing moves. He signed free-agent left-hander Denny Neagle to a five-year, $51.5 million contract. Four days later, O’Dowd stunned the baseball world by signing lefty Mike Hampton for eight years, $121 million.

The deals turned out to be two of the biggest busts in major-league history, and the lessons from that experience linger to this day.

Hampton started strong and even made the All-Star Game in his first year. Through his first 10 starts for Colorado he was 7-1 with a 2.65 ERA. In his next 52 starts, however, he went 14-28 with a 6.46 ERA. In Neagle’s three seasons in Colorado he posted a 19-23 record with a 5.57 ERA in 72 appearances.

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O’Dowd, now an analyst for the MLB Network, declined to be interviewed for this story, but two years ago he made some telling remarks on a podcast for radio station WFAN in New York.

“I knew that (the Hampton contract) was a bad contract before the ink was even dry,” O’Dowd recalled. “But one thing that people don’t realize is that so much of what you do is driven by the people you work for. You can have a vision for what you think you want to do, but ultimately at the end of the day, a lot of your vision gets shaped by the people that own the team.”

O’Dowd said that the Hampton and Neagle debacle taught him hard lessons about spending big money for star pitchers in Colorado.

“I knew whoever we signed was not going to be able to live up to that contract,” he said. “I thought I had started to get my arms around the inevitability of pitching at Coors Field, but I had denied it for my first years in my tenure there. Because you deny things when you really don’t know how to deal with them.

“So, you can avoid reality, you just can’t avoid the consequences of reality. The longer you avoid the consequences of reality, the more painful they are.”

The upside to the Hampton and Neagle signings, O’Dowd said, was the realization that if the Rockies were ever going to win, they were going to have to do it through a draft-and-development approach as opposed to big-name signings.

That remains Colorado’s philosophy under current GM Jeff Bridich, who was the farm director during O’Dowd’s tenure.

In February 2015, Bridich, just a few months into his job as GM, dipped his toe into the free-agent pitching pool, signing veteran right-hander Kyle Kendrick to a one-year, $5.5 million deal. But Kendrick was a disaster, going 7-13 with a 6.32 ERA while serving up 33 home runs. At Coors Field his ERA was 7.62.

Bridich rarely tips his hand about moves he might make. Just don’t expect the Rockies to compete for aces this winter.

“We will look at everything under the sun, and whether we are going to come out hot and heavy on a free-agent starter remains to be seen,” he said recently. “I would not put a ton of money on that.”