The Rockies recalled Zac Veen to the majors on Tuesday, giving him another shot before their game against the Diamondbacks in Phoenix. To make room, they designated Edouard Julien for assignment.
Veen gets the call after spending all of 2026 in Triple-A Albuquerque, where he hit.325/.400/.637 with a 1.037 OPS and 25 homers in 99 games. His weekend line was even louder: 5-for-5 with three homers, a double and a triple in Albuquerque’s 10-1 win over Sugar Land at Isotopes Park.
Josh Byrnes said Veen had been really good at Triple-A and that it was time to give him some opportunity at the major-league level. That is a change in posture for a club that had said earlier this season it wanted to see more plate discipline before sending him back to MLB. Paul DePodesta had made the same point more bluntly, saying the team wanted to see him rein in his aggression.
The recall matters because the Rockies are revisiting a former 2020 first-round pick who has already been through the churn. Veen, drafted No. 9 overall out of Spruce Creek High School in Florida and signed for a $5 million bonus, made his MLB debut last season but lasted just 12 games before returning to Albuquerque. He hit.118 with 14 strikeouts and a 37.8% strikeout rate in that earlier stint.
His path was slowed long before that. Veen missed large parts of the 2023 and 2024 seasons with injuries, and he also had to wait nearly a year to make his professional debut after the COVID pandemic wiped out the 2020 minor-league season. This past offseason, he got sober after dealing with substance abuse issues, saying he had been smoking marijuana every day and drinking excessively before making that change.
The Rockies are betting that the version of Veen they saw in Albuquerque can carry over, but they have not said how long he will stay or how much he will play. Byrnes said role and playing time are likely to be fluid, and that the club mostly wants quality at-bats with some damage. For Veen, the return is a chance to turn one hot stretch into something more stable at the highest level.
