LAS VEGAS — Paul DePodesta couldn’t bear to watch the wildest and most glorious night in Rockies history. Working for the Padres in 2007, DePodesta followed the classic 13-inning Game 163 showdown from the visiting clubhouse at Coors Field.
“Man, that atmosphere,” said DePodesta, whose Padres absorbed a 9-8 loss that sent the Rockies to the playoffs and served as the beginning of a run to the World Series. “You’re a part of that, even as the opposition. That leaves a mark.
“It plants a seed in your head. You think, ‘OK, if I ever have the chance to be on the home side of this, it would be pretty neat.’”
Days after leaving the post of chief strategy officer with the NFL’s Cleveland Browns to return to baseball — where he had a lengthy career before switching to football in 2016 — DePodesta answered wide-ranging questions from beat reporters during the first night of the MLB General Managers Meetings.
“I’m a bit of a sucker for challenges,” said DePodesta, 52.
Who is the guy grasping the challenge? The proof will be in the team’s performance, but DePodesta’s answers offer clues and lead to observations.
How will he approach change? He said he told Rockies baseball operations that he would do so carefully.
“I shared this with them — I don’t have all the answers to the secret to our success moving forward,” DePodesta said. “But I’m pretty confident that with all the people on that call, there are some great ideas, a lot of great experiences, a lot of great observations that I want to tap into.
“Ultimately I want to create a shared vision for your organization and an identity for what we want our team to look like, both in terms of pitchers and in terms of hitters. But I’m not going to walk into a room and say, ‘I got it — here it is.’”
Observation: DePodesta will beef up the baseball ops department — likely a general manager for hands-on duties, but employees in place should shorten his learning curve. At the GM Meetings, Danny Montgomery, vice president and assistant general manager of scouting, and Amir Mandami, director of baseball operations, are working with DePodesta. While there was concern that the Rockies’ job search was pushing into November, DePodesta pointed out that in 2004 he was named Dodgers GM the day before Spring Training opened.
What of Warren Schaeffer, who replaced manager Bud Black on an interim basis in May and worked with a roster of mainly inexperienced players? The two texted last week and talked deeper Monday.
“The reviews from people have been really, really strong about him as a person, about him as a leader,” DePodesta said. “I’m excited to get to know him better. But he absolutely will be part of the process.”
Observation: Schaeffer will have a chance to be named full-time manager, and if not, he’ll be offered a role based on what he showed over five months.
What did he learn from his time with the Dodgers, who won the National League West in 2004 but went 71-91 in ’05, with manager Jim Tracy (who later managed the Rockies) and DePodesta being let go after the season?
“I was really young [31] at the time,” DePodesta said. “What I knew how to do at that point, or what I felt I knew how to do, was build a roster that could win. I had been incredibly fortunate — I had been in Cleveland, had been in Oakland, and both of those teams had done nothing but win. So I had an idea of ‘This is what it’s going to take to win, and that’s the job.’ And we did it the first year.
“Then it didn’t take long after that to realize that’s not the whole job. It’s a necessary part of the job — it’s why you do it. But it really isn’t the whole job. The whole job is actually building an organization, not just a team. I look back on that now and realize I made a lot of mistakes in terms of bringing that organization along, being able to bring in people from different departments, tying together baseball and business.”
Observation: “Moneyball,” the book and the movie, managed to romanticize his role as an analytics muse. But since the Dodgers experience, DePodesta’s roles have included melding baseball with business (Padres); making amateur scouting, international scouting and player development work together (Mets); and syncing personnel and coaching (Browns). The challenge here is making sure his process-oriented approach stays on track within the office, and is palatable for a strong fan base that’s tired of the losing.
While the Rockies are reeling from the signing of Kris Bryant, who has been injured for most of the first four years of a seven-year, $182 million contract, DePodesta was part of a major Browns deal gone wrong. Quarterback DeShaun Watson was acquired from the Houston Texans — for multiple draft picks and a $230 million guarantee — at a time that he was facing sexual assault allegations. Watson has alternately performed poorly and dealt with injury.
“There are long-term contracts that don’t work out, like that,” DePodesta said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not still a chance. But they didn’t work out as well as anyone anticipated or the way anyone wanted it to work out on all sides.”
Observation: DePodesta calls such big moves “organizational” and said he “absolutely played a role, and that’s part of it.” DePodesta had nothing to do with the Rockies and Bryant, but it will be an issue going forward with Bryant’s contract guaranteeing $81 million over the next three seasons.
How long is winning with the Rockies going to take?
“One of the things I learned about baseball a long time ago was these turnarounds that I’ve been a part of, they’re rarely linear,” he said. “Which is to say you don’t go from winning 60 to 72 to 84 to 96. What happens is you win 68, then 77, 72, then 90.
“There’s this fundamental change of state that happens at some point among your talent, your culture, etc., and that’s what you’re building toward — to achieve that fundamental change of state.”
Observation: The Rockies made the postseason in 2017 and 2018 but their only win was the ’18 Wild Card Game, and they couldn’t sustain. Should that “change of state” arrive with DePodesta’s Rockies, his challenge will be to capitalize.
