Paul DePodesta not afraid to take swings in order to turn around floundering Rockies

DENVER (AP) — Paul DePodesta has made his share of mistakes while working in different front offices. He owned that and even put it in baseball terms.

“I lost my no-hitter a long time ago,” the Colorado Rockies’ new president of baseball operations said Thursday at an introductory news conference. “I’m not perfect. I haven’t been perfect. I won’t be perfect going forward.”

DePodesta won’t shy away from taking chances as he rejoins baseball after a decade in the NFL as the Cleveland Browns’ chief strategy officer. He intends to explore every option in an effort to fix a franchise that’s lost more than 100 games in three straight seasons. His boss, owner Dick Monfort, put it in baseball vernacular, too.

“We’ve taken big swings before. Paul’s taking big swings before,” Monfort said. “You just have to weigh those risks.”

Manager search

DePodesta’s first order of business is to meet and evaluate staff. Then he’ll look to to hire a manager and a general manager, and to develop an organizational pitching philosophy.

It’s all part of changing the culture of a franchise that has twice as many last-place finishes in the NL West (10) as playoff appearances (five). The Rockies have never won a division title.

“I don’t know enough at this point to tell you exactly when that would be,” DePodesta said of a turnaround time frame. “But I’ll tell you this: What we’re actually trying to achieve is this fundamental change of state, within the organization, and that’s both the talent on the field and also the culture in the clubhouse, the culture in the building.

“Even as I’ve gone through these different organizations and experienced that, I still have never been able to say, ‘Oh, yeah, that was perfectly predictable three years ago.’”

When he was with the Athletics, DePodesta was a key figure among a new generation of analytical thinkers who changed the sport. DePodesta inspired the Jonah Hill character in “Moneyball,” a movie about the 2002 A’s who won 102 games and captured the AL West despite a small payroll.

“I’m a big Jonah Hill fan,” Dick Monfort said.

Did he know that character was based on DePodesta?

“Yeah,” Monfort said.

He’s also open to more reliance on analytics.

Turnaround

The Rockies finished 43-119 last season and narrowly avoided becoming the team with the worst record since 162-game schedule started in 1961.

Complicating the turnaround, though, is the status and contract of often-injured slugger Kris Bryant, who’s played in only 170 big league games since signing a $182 million, seven-year contract before the 2022 season.

“(DePodesta) will have an opportunity to allocate what we do have available,” said Walker Monfort, the team’s executive vice president and the son of Dick Monfort. “He’ll have an opportunity to convince us that there needs to be more available. … We feel like we have an opportunity to change things up and to do things a lot different in a variety of areas.”

DePodesta was a GM (Los Angeles Dodgers), executive vice president (San Diego Padres), vice president of player development and amateur scouting (New York Mets), assistant GM (Athletics) and intern/advance scout/special assistant to the GM (Cleveland).

He recalled that inaugural spring training with the Athletics after leaving Cleveland.

“Cleveland, it was a situation where they just expected to win every single day. In Oakland that was lacking for sure,” DePodesta said. “It evolved to, ‘Hey, we think we can compete with these guys.’ And then it evolved to, ‘Hey, we think we can compete with anybody, even the best teams.’ And then it evolved to we know we can win. … That’s a process and it does take time.”

Colorado’s only World Series appearance came following a late-season run in 2007 — dubbed “Rocktober” — which included a Game No. 163 win over San Diego. DePodesta was with the Padres then and kiddingly wondered Thursday whether Matt Holliday actually touched home plate when he slid in with the winning run. The Rockies were swept by Boston in the World Series.

Colorado has missed the playoffs the last seven seasons. It’s led to unrest among the fans.

“I do care,” Dick Monfort said. “I think that’s where it sort of gets foggy. I care about winning. It’s Paul’s job. It’s Walker’s job, and I’m there to support them.”

Monfort said around 20 or 30 candidates showed interested in either the head of baseball position or GM. DePodesta’s name kept surfacing and Monfort reached out to former Rockies GM Dan O’Dowd, who worked with DePodesta in Cleveland.

Deshaun Watson

A topic DePodesta couldn’t avoid was the 2022 trade the Browns made for Deshaun Watson, the quarterback with a complicated past whom Cleveland bet on to turn around its team. The signing hasn’t worked out.

“Those are organizational decisions,” DePodesta said. “Those are done collaboratively, a lot of people on board, and if you’re a senior leader of that organization at that time, then you own that decision.

“It’s the way I feel about almost all the decisions we made there in Cleveland. I absolutely own them all.”

___

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb