The Los Angeles Dodgers had a parade Thursday to celebrate their second straight World Series victory. The Colorado Rockies, working the other end of the baseball alley, knew that they had to respond, if not in kind then in volume. And so they did.
Yes, the Rockies acknowledged the Dodgers' place at the cutting edge of the new baseball with a nod to a 14-year-old movie about a 23-year-old season that ended in a first-round playoff loss. It did not take the worst team in baseball a full week to trump the best team in baseball with an equally jaw-dropping and equally on-brand moment, but you avert your eyes from Rockyball at your own peril. You watch them at your own peril, too, which tells you the strength of their weakness.
When the Rockies unveiled their new head of baseball operations in an attempt to defibrillate their future, they were expected only to raise a few nods of acknowledgement, not slacken all the jaws. They had interviewed the sort of promising young executives that teams interview for jobs like this, which was itself a revolutionary shift in approach by the organization, and then announced that they would be hiring none of them. That was just a few days before they announced that that they would be turning things over to Paul DePodesta, the better-looking real-world version of Jonah Hill's Moneyball character and a man who has been out of baseball for a decade. And not just out of baseball, either—as the chief strategy officer for the Cleveland Browns, a job DePodesta has done remotely since 2016, he has also been out of football simultaneously.
In a MLB hiring cycle that has already achieved levels of "What?" not seen since Bill Veeck owned a team, the DePo hire is the most astounding. True, he did run the Dodgers for 20 months in the early '00s, but the fact that DePodesta's time there lasted only those 20 months tells you how it went. He was hired, worked for, and was fired during the disastrous ownership of Frank McCourt, which should further reinforce what a bad time this was. The worst Dodger season in 33 years happened on DePodesta's watch, and so did the decision to blow up the roster in the middle of his first year and then not re-sign Adrian Beltre after it. That DePodesta might have been doing all this at McCourt's insistence does not change the fact that he was the one who got fired; McCourt made a billion dollars selling the team.
After stops in San Diego and the New York Mets, he was lured to Cleveland by fist-faced serial bungler Jimmy Haslam to bring the Browns at long last into the 21st century. As of yesterday they were the fourth worst team in the NFL, ahead of only New York, New York, and Jacksonville. But the Rockies are if anything even more dire than the Browns, as hard as such a concept is to fathom, and while the Dodgers are revolutionizing team-building and revenue generation at the same time, the Rockies have only inspired the White Sox, the sole team worse in the last decade than Colorado, to address their own management shortcomings by getting themselves a Pope.
DePodesta's return to baseball with a seat at the card table of misery that is Rockyball capped a bizarre few weeks of baseball. The baseball stuff, highlighted by the annexations of both Japan and Canada, you know about. and A series of deeply odd managerial decisions were bizarre in less inspiring and more confounding ways. The latest of those, the Padres' hiring of former Padres pitcher Craig Stammen, happened because Stammen, who has been a special assistant for general manager/Inspector Gadget impersonator A.J. Preller and even interviewed some managerial candidates in that role, performed a secondary search in his own bathroom mirror, and came up with, well, "Me! Let's hire me!"
But Stammen, who we swear pitched the fifth inning of a September game against the Diamondbacks last season, was swiftly overpowered by the DePodesta get, which means he was the weirdest hire of a weird offseason for roughly five hours. For one, he is at 41 a relatively old man as a manager after the hirings of managerial neophytes Kurt Suzuki of the Angels (like Stammen, a player as recently as 2022), Tony Vitello of the Giants (whose managerial experience came as head coach at Tennessee), or Blake Butera of the Nationals (at age 33 the youngest manager in more than five decades). Butera, for the record, was hired by Washington's 35-year-old head of baseball ops Paul Toboni. All these hires are so far outside the box as to have been strewn over the rosebushes in front of the house by a UPS driver who just learned he is being laid off.
Taken altogether, it paints a confusing picture of how baseball is choosing to respond to the Dodgers' industry-leading methodologies and results—a clean split between Remembering Some Guys and hiring people still wearing their graduation gowns, and doing both wherever possible. It's an odd countermove after that sweet World Series, but it's easier than investing money and knowhow at both ends of the payroll diaspora. Quick, name the Orioles' new manager. Hint: He at least has been a big league coach for several MLB clubs and an organizational soldier for the forward-thinking skinflints in Tampa. Second hint: Craig Albernaz. Third hint: No, seriously, that's the guy.
But managers are managers, and none of those moves slammed the WTF button the way DePodesta's hiring did. DePodesta probably rose too high too quickly, in fairness, and association with both the Moneyball concept and the Moneyball cinematic universe will tend to warp someone's public image. But his penance in the post-Peter Brand years has been both lengthy and excruciating, as every Browns experience tends to be. That the traditionally disqualifying Cleveland Browns line on a C.V. did not eliminate DePodesta from consideration in Denver speaks mostly to the Rockies' own impenetrable and distinctive Rockydom. And maybe he's just what the Rockies need. Then again, how would the Rockies know what the Rockies need, when they have never shown an inkling to that effect at any time before this? Being hired by the Rockies is its own reputational hand grenade, every bit as destructive as the Browns version, but with a different logo on the bottom. Such a move might best be filed under the Rockies' general philosophy of "We Got It Figured Out; What Is It?"
But at least this team stole a chunk of the Colorado news cycle on an evening that the Broncos shamed themselves in victory over an archrival that hasn't been one in a quarter-century. If you can't win 50 games in the summer, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to win a cold afternoon in November.
