The email represented the Rockies in one news release.
They brought in a fresh set of eyes from the outside, a person who has been with the Browns for the last decade. Not St. Louis. Cleveland.
Wait, what?
They tried to do the right thing. And they still got it wrong.
Their search for a president of baseball operations was unusual. Unorthodox. Unfortunate.
A bottom-feeding major league franchise in need of strong leadership and modern vision hired Paul DePodesta, who last worked in baseball in 2016, a year before Trackman radar technology became fully integrated in MLB.
A team that has lost 100 games in three consecutive seasons hired someone who was last a general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2005.
An organization that needs a cultural reset hired someone who helped facilitate the Browns’ trade for troubled quarterback Deshaun Watson.
What is the level of confidence that this will work? Low. Very low.
This is not an indictment of DePodesta as much as the timing. It is hard not to imagine Dick Monfort flipping through Netflix one night, settling on “Moneyball” and deciding the Rockies had to have that Peter Brand guy (the character loosely based on DePodesta’s successful role in Oakland).
The book was published 23 years ago. It has been 14 years since the movie came out.
Being light-years behind an industry trend is on brand for the Rockies. In that way, DePodesta can walk into his Blake Street baseball office with an iPhone 6 in hand and an Ed Harvey T-shirt on and feel like he never left.
DePodesta is a bright guy, Harvard-educated. He was not ready for the GM job in Los Angeles. Or more accurately, the Dodgers were not ready for him. Scouts were jealous of a 31-year-old, mockingly calling him “boy genius.” He did not come from the Branch Rickey tree, but the Google bandwidth.
Without internal support, DePodesta became isolated, and a natural fall guy for an awful owner, Frank McCourt.
The same traits DePodesta was once criticized for are now complimented, praised, coveted. (Not by Browns fans. They have universally cheered his departure.)
Analytics are embraced. And no one needs to strengthen its infrastructure and use of data more than the Rockies.
But DePo? Now?
DePodesta never severed his relationship with baseball. He last worked for the Padres in 2016, and his family has lived in La Jolla, Calif., since. That surely makes the president of baseball ops job appealing. But going from the Browns to the Rockies? The jokes write themselves. If Colorado had a sister city in the NFL, it would be Cleveland.
If any other team made this move, it would have been panned as the worst in franchise history. The Rockies make this move, and many consider it good news. At least it was someone, anyone from outside the league’s most insular organization.
It speaks to how low the bar was set by previous general manager Bill Schmidt, who failed upward for 25 years, and should have been fired in May when manager Buddy Black was canned.
In my past interactions with DePodesta, he was impressive. It was just a long, long time ago. To think that DePodesta has been keeping up to speed with baseball’s technological evolution over the last decade is naive, negligent. Or both.
And yet, for those who want to believe it will work, DePodesta has brainpower. The question becomes: Will he have real power?
Without autonomy, he has no chance. Zero. Zilch.
The hope was that Walker Monfort would usher in a new era for the Rockies. However, his father’s fingerprints were all over the hiring process, which got weird when Arizona Diamondbacks assistant general manager Amiel Sawdaye and Cleveland Guardians assistant GM Matt Forman fell out of the running either by choice or by finishing behind DePodesta, depending on whom you believe.
DePodesta will be free to hire a GM. Bringing in childhood friend Thad Levine would go a long way in making this move make sense.
The reality is that this job requires a complete house cleaning of roughly 20 people. There is little reason to believe Dick Monfort would sign off on such seismic change, given his loyalty to longtime employees and the looming work stoppage after the 2026 season.
In the absence of a complete front-office makeover, guardrails must be established. Follow a flow chart that helped produce the franchise’s greatest success in 2007. Let DePodesta oversee baseball decisions and report to Walker Monfort. And have Walker report to his dad, acting as a buffer just as the late Keli McGregor did between ownership and Dan O’Dowd.
And, oh yeah, bring on a handful of Rockies from the World Series team as special assistants.
The notion that DePodesta can pull this off — turning the Rockies into a consistent winner would rank right below Theo Epstein winning titles with the Red Sox and Cubs — is wishful thinking. The Rockies have so few major league players, and their minor league system is flawed from a developmental approach.
The challenge is enormous, and DePodesta is most known for being portrayed by Jonah Hill in a movie. That, and his 10-year gap in baseball employment. Doing research led me to the bio page for DePodesta on the Browns’ website. It read: “The page you are trying to reach cannot be found.”
Oh. That can’t be good.
The idea was for the Rockies to make a move outside of the batter’s box. Not outside of their league.
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