He is the one truly Goodman on a wretchedly unlikable baseball team.

During the rockiest year in Rockies history, the one ray of Colorado sunshine has been catcher Hunter Goodman.

“It’s hard not to see or hear people talking about me making the All-Star Game,” Goodman recently told me.

“It would be awesome. Really cool to get there for the first time. And the game’s in Atlanta, not all that far from where I grew up.”

Way back in grade school, as a youngster in Tennessee, he took photos to class for career day and declared his ambition to earn a paycheck by playing catcher in the major leagues.

When the All-Star rosters are announced shortly after the Fourth of July, it seems obvious to me that Goodman’s team-leading 14 home runs, 48 RBI and .844 OPS has to make him the Rockies’ lone representative in the Midsummer Classic, despite the hamstring tightness that has kept him in the cold tub instead of behind the dish for three straight games.

That Colorado is winless, with only a lone hit Saturday during a 5-0 loss in Milwaukee, with Goodman on the shelf, is much more than a coincidence. Without him in the lineup, the Rockies don’t have anything resembling a legitimate big-league batting order, with way too many hitters that fail to put up a good fight at the plate.

“Bulldog,” is how new manager Warren Schaeffer regularly describes Goodman.

“He plays a tough position. But he never wants to be out of the lineup. That’s his personality. You can be catching in 100-degree heat and also have to hit. But if you have nine tough guys on the field, your team is going to be a lot better off.”

Four months and 65 losses ago, the Rockies had no clue where this team or their catcher would be now.

During spring training, then manager Bud Black lauded shortstop Ezequiel Tovar and center fielder Brenton Doyle as the primary reasons to believe his ballclub could surprise rivals in the National League West.

But Tovar’s season has been wrapped in a Band-Aid, with injuries causing him to miss more than 50 percent of the team’s games. Doyle hasn’t been able to hit his weight, much less carry it in Colorado’s batting order.

The unanticipated woes of Tovar and Doyle are major reasons why Black was fired May 11.

While the Rockies are playing baseball as badly as anyone has witnessed at the major-league level in over a century, Goodman is enjoying the best season of his young life.

To tell the truth, those conflicting emotions can sometimes be a little weird for a player trying to make a name for himself.

“You obviously want to win ball games. I mean, that’s why we take the field as a team, is to try and win games,” Goodman said. “There are days, when you have individual success and the team loses, that you’re still mad.”

Bad evaluation and worse development of talent have been chronic problems as the Rockies have spiraled into a major-league laughingstock.

And that’s why it makes me smile that Goodman has enjoyed a breakout season at age 25.

This franchise, which doubted if he possessed the defensive skills to be an everyday catcher, didn’t develop him so much as Goodman proved the organization wrong.

“The hitting side of my game,” Goodman said, “has always been better than the defensive side of the ball.”

During spot duty with the Rockies during 2023 and ‘24, when Goodman batted a meager .192 in only 281 at-bats, he was a man without a position, shuttling between first base and the outfield, looking for anywhere he could sneak into the lineup for a club that lost more than 100 games two seasons in a row.

Goodman, however, instinctively knew where he belonged better than the Rockies did.

“I guess you might say I was born to be a catcher. My parents were both catchers,” he said.

“I come from a family that loves catching. Growing up around the game, watching them play it, I think that made me the competitor I am today. From the time I was a kid, I just wanted to be like my parents.”

The home-run thump in Goodman’s bat? He was born with it.

And those genes were bestowed on him by his mother, who blasted nearly 50 bombs during her career as a catcher for her fast-pitch varsity softball team in college.

His mom was a proud catcher, speaking softly and carrying a big stick.

And now Stephanie Goodman is the proud mother of the most unlikely all-star candidate in the major leagues.