When the Colorado Rockies announced Paul DePodesta as their President of Baseball Operations, I was admittedly a bit upset at the news. After all, he had been out of the sport for 10 years, and there is the argument that the Cleveland Browns are no better off now than when he joined them. Sure, blame doesn’t lie solely with him, but there are valid concerns about the decision to bring him in and try and fix the Rockies.
However, after stewing over my thoughts and hearing his first interviews with the media at the GM Meetings in Las Vegas, I have come around a little bit more on his hiring with cautious optimism.
DePodesta is certainly keeping most of his intentions and strategies close to the chest as he is quickly trying to get up to speed with the existing front office personnel. Hiring a general manager and a new manager are at the top of his to-do list, but there is one long-term goal that has piqued my interest and one that I deem important.
In the interviews he has done this week, DePodesta has mentioned several times his intention to develop and implement a single vision for the Rockies as an organization. During an interview on MLB Network’s Hot Stove Tuesday, he extended that to developing the team’s identity and culture.
“So much I think of what we’re gonna try to build right away is just culture, organizational culture,” DePodesta said. “What do we want our identity to be in Colorado?”
(Check out the full appearance on Hot Stove below)
While DePodesta had been asked about qualities of a manager, those buzzwords of culture and identity resonated with me because it’s something that applies to the team in general. One of the main criticisms directed at the Rockies was an obvious lack of vision, direction, and identity. Throughout their existence, the Rockies have tried several approaches, but none have brought sustained success. There were moments of success with the Blake Street Bombers, Generation R, and the start of the Bud Black “Pitch Whisperer” era, but the dysfunction was always lurking in the seams.
Things finally came to a head during the Bill Schmidt era as he regularly and proudly proclaimed the Rockies were a “draft and develop” organization. That’s all fine and dandy, but time and time again, it was clear that the Rockies were not very good in that department, particularly the essential second part of that philosophy.
Ultimately, the Rockies’ overall culture has been one of failure. It’s been about misguided loyalty, complacency, and outright stubbornness to veer off a course that was doomed to fall off a cliff. Whatever culture the Rockies thought they had clearly didn’t foster a winning environment.
So, that’s what DePodesta has to figure out for the team. If the endgame is to be a winning team, than what is he going to do in order to reach that goal? If the desire is to be a model organization that other teams turn to as an example to follow, what does that look like?
DePodesta mentioned his desire to get the perspectives of all the people who currently work with the organization. He was excited to get the thoughts, experiences, and ideas that staff who have been with the organization for a long time and get to the root of what has and hasn’t worked for the team. A collaborative effort is something that has felt missing from the franchise.
“I shared this with them — I don’t have all the answers to the secret to our success moving forward,” DePodesta said to Rockies reporters on Monday. “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.’”
It always seemed that the Rockies were doing one thing in the minors and another in the majors. A player doing certain things in Double-A Hartford would no longer be doing those things with the Rockies. In the past, we saw former Rockies pitchers like Noah Davis rely heavily on his slider in the minors to quality success, only to get lit up in the majors as he relied too heavily on his fastball. Pitchers and even hitters would get pigeon-holed into a cookie-cutter formula that simply did not work.
In this new era of Rockies baseball, DePodesta and the front office have to find a way to get the wheels in motion to actually live up to the idea of everyone pulling the rope in the same direction. From the Arizona Complex League to Coors Field, the process and culture have to be unified in how players are developed and in setting the expectation of success. Why are the Los Angeles Dodgers so fearsome? It’s not just because they can spend a ton of money, but also that, from top to bottom, they have a unified process of how they go about doing things.
“I think probably the most important thing for me is being a great relationship manager with the players,” DePodesta said. “We’re trying to build a culture in the clubhouse. Certainly, there are game strategy and other things that are important, but that manager relationship piece and being sort of a great teammate, too, with the rest of the organization, those things are equally valuable.”
As nice as it would be for DePodesta to establish a culture and identity right away, it’s going to go hand-in-hand with the long-term goals of building a winning ball club. Through a process of trying to win, the Rockies will figure out their identity and set expectations. In the meantime, the Rockies can start experimenting with different ideas and figuring out the process to achieve those goals.
There is a lot of work to do before I fully buy into this hiring, but for now, a collaborative team effort is a step in the right direction to figure out who they are as an organization, because one thing is clear: what they’ve done in the past hasn’t worked and there is truly nowhere to go but up.
It was a solid afternoon for the Salt River Rafters as they scored five runs on nine hits and used just three pitchers. The Rockies weren’t as active in the game as Charlie Condon went 0-for-3 with a strikeout, but Jared Thomas did go 1-for-3 with a double and two RBI.
Here are a few more thoughts from DePodesta about making the jump back to MLB.
Another insightful look into what DePodesta is looking to do in Colorado.
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