LAS VEGAS — After brushing off baseball inquiries during the first five seasons following his surprising decision to leave his longtime sport for the Cleveland Browns, Paul DePodesta couldn’t resist the challenge of turning the Colorado Rockies into a consistent winner.
“It had to be the right situation,” he said Tuesday, four days after he was hired as president of baseball operations. “And that right situation includes a challenge, ownership, geography, other things like people I might be able to work with. So this came about, and we started going through that calculus. This came about, and it’s very interesting.”
After time in front offices of the Oakland Athletics, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres and New York Mets, DePodesta became the Browns’ chief strategy officer in January 2016.
He takes over a team coming off a 119-loss season, that hasn’t had a winning record since 2018 and has never won the World Series. Its only National League pennant in 2007 was followed by a four-game Series loss to Boston.
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DePodesta, who turns 53 next month, has to fill the last remaining manager vacancy. The Rockies are coming off a season in which they drew 2.4 million at home, down from 3 million in 2018.
“I think probably the most important thing for me is being a great relationship manager with the players,” DePodesta said at Major League Baseball’s general managers meetings. “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.”
DePodesta rose in the sport among a new generation of analytics thinkers who would come to dominate the game. DePodesta was the inspiration for Jonah Hill’s character in “Moneyball” about the 2002 A’s that won 102 games and captured the AL West despite a small payroll.
The Dodgers hired DePodesta at age 31 in 2004 to be their GM, and he lasted just 20 months. After time with the Padres and Mets he moved to the NFL. Cleveland’s record was 56-99-1 with DePodesta in the front office.
He signed a five-year contract with the Browns in 2020 and told ownership he didn’t believe he would be there that long, that the pieces were in place for sustained winning. The Browns went 11-5 that season and made the playoffs, but they failed to build on that success and have had just one winning record since.
So DePodesta stayed longer than planned to try to get the organization heading in the right direction.
“Really, the last four years, I started thinking about what might be next,” DePodesta said.
DePodesta continued to follow baseball from afar.
“I have friends across all different front offices,” he said. “There are a handful I’ve kept in very good touch with over the past 10 years, and they would hit me up with things that were happening in the NFL. I always tried to keep abreast of what was happening, certainly not to the extent where I was working full time. But, yes, I was still interested.”
