Dudes Rock

Though admittedly, not these particular dudes

The good news for the Rockies is that they’ve finally joined the 21st century. After years of being a moribund franchise characterized by nonstop on-field failure, the organization has finally shaken up their leadership structure, hiring Paul DePodesta as President of Baseball Operations and Josh Byrnes as General Manager. Gone are the days of Jeff Bridich and Bill Schmidt; here are the days of guys who have turned teams from also-rans into playoff teams.

The bad news for the Rockies is that they’ve joined the beginning of the 21st century and they are still 10-20 years behind the rest of the league. DePodesta hasn’t been involved in baseball since he was the VP of player development and scouting for the Mets from 2010 through 2015 (and hasn’t run a baseball team since the 2005 Dodgers), and Byrnes hasn’t run anything on his own since getting fired by the Padres in 2014. Byrnes has been a senior vice president with the Dodgers since then, so he’s plenty familiar with the modern game, but it’s been a long time since anyone handed him the keys to a team.

The great news for the Rockies is that if they are 10 years behind, then next year is 2016 again, so Kris Bryant is going to win the MVP! They really nailed the planning on that.

So, in Denver the crappy old guard is out and the maybe not-crappy new guard, led by DePodesta and Byrnes, is in. Way back when, 20-25 years ago, both were part of the wave of sabermetric-friendly executives who became trendy in baseball in the wake of Moneyball becoming a best-selling book.

DePodesta broke into baseball with the Cleveland Indians in 1996 before moving to Oakland in 1999. As an A’s executive in 2002, DePodesta was of course in Moneyball, playing the character of Jonah Hill, who would go on to be portrayed by the actor Peter Brand in the movie. DePodesta then went to the Dodgers for two years, then had a stint with the Padres before moving to the Mets, after which he took a position running the Cleveland Browns from 2016 until 2025.

Byrnes, like DePodesta, started his career in Cleveland, but then he took an assistant GM position in Colorado for a few years, headed to Boston in 2003 and was there for their first championship, then served as the Diamondbacks GM from 2006 until 2010, when he was fired midseason in a move that Fangraphs at the time called “unjustified at best.” He joined the Padres later that year, got promoted to Padres GM in 2011, and lasted there until being fired in 2014, after which he took the Dodgers job, which he held until going back to Denver.

So DePodesta has had recent experience running a professional sports team, but not a baseball team; Byrnes has had recent experience in a baseball front office, but this is a big promotion from what he was doing recently, though he has experience in GM jobs. Of the two, Byrnes seems to have been more highly thought of around baseball in his GMing days, but on the other hand, despite some good drafts (his Wikipedia page is glowing with praise for his draft classes and omits any mention of why he was fired), his teams were not perennial contenders, often because the pitching staffs he put together just were not very good.

So are these good hires for the Rockies? It’s a good sign for them that they’re going outside the organization to get new ideas and a fresh look at the team’s processes. When something doesn’t work for a long time, it’s not super useful to promote one of the guys who’s been making it not work and see what he can do. A team like the Rockies with an insular, established culture — for years, they’ve been keeping players on the roster because of their strong character instead of their ability to contribute on the field — needs that kind of shake-up.

But neither DePodesta nor Byrnes has ever built a consistent winner. DePodesta didn’t really get the chance — he won the division in his first year with the Dodgers and was fired after his second. Byrnes, in the seven full and two partial seasons he ran two different teams, had a winning record twice and made the playoffs once. He was able to find talented players, but he was not able to turn them into a winning team.

For a team like the Rockies, the playbook is simple: get as many prospects as you can by any means necessary. Minor league signings, trades, taking on payroll. You really don’t have to worry about the short term, because the short term is going to be awful no matter what you do. The important thing is to get creative with how you find talent.

Which is why it’s kind of funny that the perfect guy to run the Rockies would have been Farhan Zaidi.

When he was with the Giants, it was both a blessing and a curse that Zaidi was constantly tinkering with the roster. The team got some good players out of it — Mike Yastrzemski, Alex Dickerson, Darin Ruf — but also notoriously missed in a lot of cases — Michael Reed, Connor Joe, Brett Wisely, just to name a few. But in an environment where the misses don’t matter because all the organization does is miss and the standards are therefore low, this is the perfect strategy.

The Rockies can afford to spend all season trying to find a few average starters for the near future, because the Rockies do not have anything to lose. The Rockies fanbase is well aware of the state of their team, and so they will be more forgiving of a front office trying to find its way. Rockies ownership seems to have sold the fans on Coors Field being more of a cool vibe than a place to see your team play objectively good baseball, which would give Farhan the latitude to take the long-term view necessary to make the team good. And that “pick up a guy for the last spot on the 40-man then drop him and hope he gets through waivers” strategy, while it sucks and is annoying, makes sense if you do not need the last spot on the 40-man to be someone who can actually make the major league roster.

We know that Farhan would do this, because when he was with the Giants, he literally would not stop doing this. In 2021-2023 or so, when the 40-man was passable but not great, he let a few guys slip away who would end up being productive major leaguers for other teams; with the Rockies, their existing 40-man situation is bad enough that that issue would be mitigated for a couple years until they got back to respectability. Most importantly, we could really test his old “With proper sabermetric principles, no team should win fewer than 75 games” quote. Does he still believe or stand by that quote, which he said more than a decade ago? Doesn’t matter! We’re holding him to it anyway!

Now, neither DePodesta nor Byrnes is dumb, and they could very well adopt the Farhan model on their own without him. Byrnes has spent plenty of time working with Zaidi with the Dodgers, and so he’s likely well aware of this strategy. And I don’t want to suggest that Farhan wanted the job or was a candidate for it — he’s currently an advisor to Dodgers owner Mark Walter, and is also doing some work with the Los Angeles Sparks and Chelsea FC, so it’s entirely possible he didn’t want to go anywhere.

But when you look at the model the Rockies should follow, that’s the one. The best thing for that franchise is to do everything possible as fast as possible to get better players into the organization. For all the problems with Farhan Zaidi’s tenure in charge of the Giants, he was undeniably effective at getting new blood in the door. For a team whose blood has been stale for years, that’s job number one.