Most major league baseball organizations think more or less the same way. They differ in tactics and strategies, capabilities, resources, and culture, but for the most part, everyone agrees on what it takes to win baseball games. This resulted in some groupthink and a lot of the same executive hiring.
The Giants bucked the trend and turned back the clock, handing the reins to a former player who had long had cultural cachet but little expertise. In turn, he made a delightfully unorthodox choice of field manager. I look forward to seeing if these iconoclasts can hold their own.
Not to be outdone, the Colorado Rockies have gone one step further in hiring a new head of baseball operations, reportedly closing in on a deal to hire Paul DePodesta for the position. I’ll be as blunt as possible: This is one of the strangest executive hires in decades, and it comes at an organization that was a full step behind its competitors to begin with. Despite the best intentions in the world, failure is almost certain unless DePodesta’s appointment heralds a radical change in organizational structure and philosophy.
The Rockies are 43-119 this year, and it’s not because they’re cursed, or their hometown has been eliminated, or because their owners don’t care. Their payroll this season is higher than three playoff teams. They locked their homegrown success story into a contract extension instead of shipping it out when arbitration occurred. The contract for their record-setting free agent signing, Kris Bryant, is richer than anything the Astros, Blue Jays, Braves or Cardinals have offered on the open market.
Unfortunately, the Rockies’ problem is worse than apathy. I wrote about them in May, right after they fired head coach Bud Black and were on a 28-win pace. Read it if you like; I’ll quote the passage that diagnoses their problem:
It turns out that the Rockies are notoriously isolated. They like and trust their employees and are reluctant to move people around or chase the latest innovation. In almost every other industry, this quality is benign and even laudable at worst. But baseball is a zero-sum game. If you don’t progress, you will fall behind. Since Blake last led the Rockies to the playoffs, the rate of innovation across the industry has exploded.
I have this to say to Rockies owner Dick Monfort: He finally brought in outside help. This is not a given. DePodesta is only the fifth director of baseball operations in franchise history and the first outside hire since Dan O’Dowd in 1999. Looking beyond the family is a good start, but DePodesta is far from the first choice.
The list of candidates is impressive. Those include former Twins general manager Thad Levine, former Astros general manager James Creek, Royals assistant general manager Scott Sharp, Guardians assistant general manager Matt Foreman and Diamondbacks assistant general manager Amir Saudaye.
Levine, Foreman and Sharp have built or helped build winning teams on modest budgets. Creek won a World Series with one of the most dominant teams of the past decade, even though his owner stood like the grim reaper on his shoulder. Sawdaye won three championship rings with the Red Sox while rising through the ranks in the scouting department. From there, he followed Mike Hazen to Arizona, where they won the NFC pennant in 2023.
If I were in the market for someone to build a respectable football club from the ground up and not spend $300 million a year on player salaries, then I would have no problem hiring any of these guys.
Not one of them ended up with this poisoned chalice.
What about DePodesta? He is better known in baseball circles than most MLB general managers as his stand-in character who appeared at Billy Beane’s elbow throughout the events depicted in “Billy Beane.” Moneyball. At age 31, he was handed the keys to the Dodgers and led them through two tumultuous seasons before being fired by then-owner Frank McCourt. (That’s not a knock on him per se; McCourt’s reputation and baseball acumen are just that.)
DePodesta spent the next decade with the Padres and Mets, serving as the latter’s vice president of player development and scouting, helping build a strong pitching staff that helped New York win the 2015 pennant.
I have no doubt that DePodesta would have been given another chance to manage a major league team before this, but in January 2016, he made a shocking move to the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, where he served as chief strategy officer for 10 seasons.
The Browns then were like the Rockies are now. Considered irrelevant, innumerable, isolated and backward. DePodesta has been given a lot of power to reshape the club as he sees fit. He beefed up the analytics department, stocked up on draft picks and looked to target undervalued players, just as he did in baseball.
Before the 2019 season, my then-employer, ringran a themed package called “Trust Browns Process Week,” whose premise was that DePodesta’s team was about to turn things around. This editorial decision is way above my pay grade; I don’t know much about the NFL, but I know it better than the Browns.
As part of this project, I decided to interview DePodesta for a feature story. My premise is that baseball is so far ahead of the other major sports in terms of experience and analytics integration that a smart football (or basketball, hockey, or soccer) team can be five years ahead of the competition by hiring the right baseball nerds with interdisciplinary skills.
“The most important thing is that we try to make the information as accessible and actionable as possible,” DePodesta told me at the time. “There’s a lot of fun stuff. There’s a lot of neat stuff, but if it’s not feasible, it doesn’t make sense, and what we really want to do is support our coaches and personnel staff in the decision-making process.”
In hindsight, DePodesta’s words about team building made sense enough, and while he was tight-lipped about the specific insights he brought to the NFL, I was able to tease out that the inefficiencies in the new market were caused by receivers having crappy college quarterbacks. But the Browns went 6-10 in 2019.
That’s not to say DePodesta’s tenure in Cleveland was a complete failure. He made the playoffs twice in 10 years, which is a lot considering the franchise has only made the playoffs once in 17 seasons since its rebirth in 1999. DePodesta’s Browns delivered their first 11-win season and first playoff appearance since 1994. (You thought the Rockies were terrible.)
Even after reaching these peaks, DePodesta did not bring glory to himself in the 2020s. I’ve said before that I don’t know much about the NFL; my former colleague Roger Sherman, who knows the NFL well, offered the following when news of DePodesta’s hiring broke:
It’s still worth noting that the Deshaun Watson trade/signing backfired in what might be the worst NFL trade ever…
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And before you mention the dozens of sexual assault allegations the Browns knew about but ignored.— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) November 6, 2025 at 4:57 pm
It would be troubling if DePodesta profited by cheaply acquiring a talented player who was revealed to be an (alleged) serial sexual predator. But that doesn’t set him apart from many baseball executives. But DePodesta himself got into deeper trouble when he described the team’s due diligence on Watson during the trade.
“This is the most detailed, tenacious acquisition of a potential player that I’ve ever seen,” DePodesta said. “I mean, I’ve never been involved in anything like this in the last 25 years in two different sports. As we got more and more information through all the steps we took, all the efforts we made, all the people we talked to and all the other information we got, especially the perspectives we got from some different people or people who had more contact with him, we ended up in the same place… We feel very comfortable with this guy.”
Professional sports teams make this kind of moral compromise more than most of us would like, because when there’s an opportunity to acquire a quality player on the cheap, the temptation can be great.
However, DePodesta did not do that. He sent away six draft picks, three of which were first-round picks, including one that the Texans used to select future Rookie of the Year, Will Anderson. Watson Jr. subsequently received a record-breaking five-year, $230 million contract extension and has repaid the Browns by playing 19 games over four seasons and ranking 42nd among 50 quarterbacks to start at least 15 games since 2022. Two quarterback draft picks, and Watson has yet to produce anything.
I would question the judgment of those who sold their souls to the devil. What’s more, he didn’t get anything back.
Meanwhile, Baker Mayfield, the franchise quarterback DePodesta and I talked about, is having a great year with the Buccaneers. The Browns ranked 30th out of 32 teams in the NFLPA’s most recent working conditions survey.
As DePodesta jumped from baseball to football, there was every reason to believe he was an evaluator and decision-maker. Over the next decade he did considerable damage to that reputation.
Especially since baseball has changed a lot since he left. I think DePodesta is in touch with old friends from his previous career and has a general understanding of fastball shape and swing speed. But this is a scout and developer whose last year working in baseball was Statcast’s first year. The learning curve will be steep, perhaps even vertical.
If the Rockies can ease that transition in any meaningful way, then, honestly, they’ll be able to hire a guy like Saudaye.
So what we have here is a team that lost 119 games last season, has the league’s worst scouting, analytics and development program, a meddlesome owner, and the unique challenges of playing in a city where curveballs don’t break. And the guy the organization brought in to bridge the gap with its competitors was himself 10 years behind the times, and his experience in the NFL raises some serious questions about his judgment.
I don’t like making predictions in absolute terms; baseball is so fickle that if you use a word like “never,” you’ll look like a fool. DePodesta has the potential to be a game-changer for the Rockies, allowing them to be competitive long-term for the first time. It’s possible, but it would take a miracle.
