The Bill Schmidt era finally gets relatable

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Yesterday, the Rockies introduced new President of Baseball Operations Paul DePodesta in a press conference with at least two Monforts and every beat writer the Rockies would allow in the doors. At this presser, DePodesta answered questions, talked about direction, and tried his best to establish that this was a new era of Rockies baseball. It was all very exciting! As Baseball Prospectus writer and fellow Rockies sufferer Mario Delgado Genzor put it, the Rockies are trying to be normal, but in their own way. Much has been said and will be said about the new hire. DePodesta is from Moneyball fame, he is also from infamy as the guy that brought DeShaun Watson to Cleveland and let Adrian Beltre leave the Dodgers. Whether or not this works is up in the air, but at least it’s something different.

Prior to PDP’s press conference, Thomas Harding posted an article after speaking to Paul at the MLB GM Meetings that revealed a few of Paul’s initial thoughts but also later on, a very funny and revealing look at the Rockies under Bill Schmidt. A snippet:

You just gotta relate to an office that refused to consider brain drain and has now spent two years battling a cloud transition. That is the most relatable thing I’ve ever heard from the Rockies in my now three decade long fandom of the club. Anyone who has watched the one person who knew how the formulas in an excel worked quit and then the entire process of a company come to a half because of it can relate to this.

Each bullet is funnier when it’s paired with the results of the Schmidt era. The organization’s use of data being so preposterous and discombobulated that anyone could start a project without any goals or change management behind it. It leads to one only imagining the desktop of the data analyst. Littered with SQL and Excel sheets titled “ALTITUDE VS CURVEBALLS” that went nowhere. How God-like one Project Manager could’ve felt in this club by just saying “let’s take this information and use it” more often. Now I can see why Major League pitching development stalled! Nobody has any idea what coaching should be or what projects should be used!

I think everyone who is like me and worried that the Rockies had their bottom fall out due to the comic ineptitude of the people they put in charge is feeling awfully justified here. This is, in fact, the very nature of infrastructural rot. Schmidt’s leadership had no direction, no means of achieving anything, and certainly no possibility of crawling out of the whole they were getting into.

At the end of it all, here on the precipice of a new era, the Schmidt Regime will be remembered for 119 losses, Kris Bryant, and an unshakable resolve to sign slap hitting veteran infielders that fell on their face in Denver. But also, it appears to be leaving a legacy of a front office that didn’t know how to convert a word doc to a PDF. Maybe the signings of Thairo Estrada and Kyle Farmer were due to an early analysis that showed veteran infielders led to 0.5 more wins per week or something but nobody knew that analysis got scrapped before it actually ran and this was the hypothesis of some guy that quit three weeks ago to go manage a district of Jamba Juices. And these are the embarrassing failures the Rockies are willing to tell us!

It’s encouraging that DePodesta is being given license to change structures like this. As funny as it is that the Rockies are working through processes that inefficient, it’s nice that they’re recognizing that these types of things are what kept them permanently behind their rivals. As Mario says in his piece, the Rockies have not currently been rebuilding, they’ve been spinning in place. The practice of removing stuff like this, however obvious to us, is a sign that at the least they’ve finally caught up to the times.

Is being too late a sin in itself? Are the Rockies catching up right at a time where they’ll still be left behind? I guess we’ll find out. But at least there appears to be a recognition that they are behind at all.