Don’t lose 100!

How’s that for an inspirational battle cry?

Or how about the Colorado Rockies make it the first big goal for the most laughable team in Major League Baseball?

The odds, however, don’t care about our pain. The wise guys in Las Vegas have drawn the over/under betting line on Colorado losses during the upcoming season at an ugly 106.5.

But don’t tell new Rockies general manager Josh Byrnes the odds.

“I’d rather not think of the odds and focus on the sense of purpose. A championship is ultimately what we’re all shooting for,” Byrnes told me in mid-March, during a sit-down interview at the team’s spring training headquarters.

And here I thought the major reset in the thinking of Colorado’s front office was based in analytics.

Silly me.

“Hey, 24 months ago, who thought Indiana football was going to win a national championship?” Byrnes said. “If we turn off the light on what we’re ultimately chasing, then we don’t have the right mindset, whether you’re wearing a collared shirt or a uniform. Of course, we’re chasing that goal.”  

New president of baseball operations Paul DePodesta promises the Rockies will dig deep into the metrics of everything from spin on a slider to physical recovery at altitude.

But it takes more than numbers for a baseball team that calls 5,280 feet above sea level home to not only survive but thrive during the grind of a 162-game regular season.

For starters, can wrapping the Rockies in Band-Aids stop the bleeding of three straight 100-loss seasons?

While there was joy in LoDo-ville when franchise owner Dick Monfort looked outside the organization to cure the Rockies’ chronic ineptitude, what DePodesta and Byrnes have done during their first four months on the job more closely resembles a series of TED Talks rather than a major roster overhaul.

Looking for a semblance of competency in their starting pitching, DePodesta and Byrnes brought in grizzled and graying veterans Michael Lorenzen (age 34), Jose Quintana (37) and Tomoyuki Sugano (36) to fill the Nos. 2-4 slots in the rotation behind Opening Day starter and Colorado native Kyle Freeland.

“Colorado doesn’t historically sign free agent pitchers. So a lot of people have asked, ‘How did you convince these guys to come to Colorado?’” DePodesta said. “We didn’t convince anybody. It was self-selecting. We had a small group of targets, based on a pitcher’s makeup, that made us believe they might be up for this challenge. And they ran toward the challenge.”

A year ago, Lorenzen, Quintana and Sugano combined for 28 victories in the bigs. Can the Rockies get 30 victories and 450 innings from these three veteran arms?

I’m no analytics guru, but the smart way to bet is: Heck, no.

Want a sign of reasonable progress for Colorado?

Now entering his fourth full season in the big leagues, it doesn’t seem too much to ask shortstop Ezequiel Tovar to keep the momentum of winning the World Baseball Classic with Venezuela into fulfilling his All-Star potential.

While the Rockies’ new brain trust rummaged through the bargain bin of free agency to add a true pro in Willi Castro at a salary of $5.5 million and likes to believe it found a leadoff hitter in an under-the-radar trade for Jake McCarthy, neither of those guys is anything more than stopgap measures that reveal the lack of major-league-ready talent in the organization.

What can make a much bigger difference for Colorado is if we see no significant regression to the mean in catcher Hunter Goodman after his feel-good appearance in the All-Star Game and third baseman Kyle Karros proves there’s 24-karat gold in his glove and 20 homers in his bat.

During my visit to spring training, what became quickly apparent is DePodesta and Byrnes have spent considerable energy talking with coaches and players to establish standards of excellence and well-defined expectations for everybody in the organization.

The standard for everything from pounding the strike zone to being smartly aggressive on the basepaths has been emphasized on a daily basis in very specific terms at all levels of the Rockies organization.

“It establishes how we go about our business every day. We want everyone to understand what winning looks like in February, hopefully this is what winning looks like in August and even what winning looks like in December, if you want to be a championship-caliber team,” DePodesta said.

“We get down to the granular level of: ‘How do we go scout an amateur game?’ There are standards there, each and every day, if we want to reach a championship level. It’s off the field. It’s on the field. And that’s why I do think it was important to bring in some veteran players that all the other guys on the team could look at and say, ‘OK, I get it. That’s above and beyond what we’ve been doing previously with this team.’”

For all the TED Talk enthusiasm about changing the culture, these new Rockies’ standards of excellence won’t truly be tested until Colorado suffers through its next lousy month of baseball.

“It sometimes requires having hard conversations with teammates. It’s holding each other accountable, including other guys holding me accountable to the standards we’re trying to uphold,” Freeland said.

“The second you start letting standards collapse, that’s when everything goes to (bleep).”

The Rockies lost 119 times a year ago.

Their cumulative run deficit of 424 was the worst in the modern history of the sport.

My math skills are so weak that it’s hard for me to count as high as the earned run average of Colorado’s starting pitchers. But the way I figure it, the “Moneyball” magic of DePodesta must find a way to improve the Rockies by 20 games merely to avoid 100 defeats for the fourth straight season.

If we see the minor baseball miracle of a 63-99 record by our LoDo lads, no executive in baseball will have done a better job than DePodesta.