Dodgers History: DePodesta Hire Reminds Fans of a Low Point in Team History

LOS ANGELES — Paul DePodesta is back in the division, and that sentence alone probably sent a few longtime Dodger fans flashing straight to 2004–05. And not in a great way. The Rockies, coming off a 119-loss faceplant and looking for someone with actual ideas, just hired him to run their baseball operations. On paper it makes sense for Colorado. Their roster is a crater, their system needs structure, and DePodesta has always been good at building systems.

But if you lived through the Frank McCourt years here (an era when the Dodgers were definitely NOT ruining baseball), you remember this guy in a very specific way. DePodesta in Los Angeles was the promise of “Moneyball” smarts dropped right into a noisy, proud clubhouse that had finally made the playoffs again… and then watched its popular catcher get traded in the middle of the party.

Let’s rewind.

McCourt bought the club in January 2004 and went straight to the Ivy League well. He could not convince the main architect of the A’s, Billy Beane, to leave Oakland, so got what he thought was the next best thing. He hired Beane’s 31-year-old Harvard-trained lieutenant instead. DePodesta arrived with a reputation for being the numbers brain behind a small-market powerhouse. He was young, he spoke the language of “process,” and he walked into a situation where outgoing GM Dan Evans had already put together a pretty good core.

Year One actually worked. The Dodgers won the NL West, reached the postseason for the first time since 1996, and even won a playoff game, which had not happened here since 1988. That was the high-water mark. Things fell apart after that.

The first big blow came on July 30, 2004.

In what still ranks among the most jarring in-season trades this team has made, DePodesta sent Paul Lo Duca, Guillermo Mota, and Juan Encarnación to Florida and brought back Brad Penny, Hee-Seop Choi, and prospect Bill Murphy. The logic was clear in his head: frontline pitching is hard to find, Lo Duca was getting older and expensive, and offensive production can be replaced (“in the aggregate” as they say in Moneyball). The problem was that the Dodgers’ clubhouse and fan base did not see “replaceable.” They saw the heart of the lineup walking out the door at the exact moment the club was trying to prove it belonged back among the contenders.

That was the tell. DePodesta was far less interested in what players meant to each other and far more interested in what he thought a roster should look like over 162 games.

The winter that followed was even louder. Shawn Green was traded. Adrian Beltre, coming off his monster 2004, was allowed to leave for Seattle after turning down the Dodgers’ offer. At the same time, DePodesta was not shy about spending. He poured money into Jeff Kent (which worked), into J.D. Drew on a five-year deal despite Drew’s medical file, and into Derek Lowe. He even re-upped Odalis Pérez, which a lot of people inside and outside the building questioned. It was the second-highest free-agent outlay in the sport that offseason. It felt aggressive. It also felt a little scattershot, like someone trying to prove that you could do “Moneyball” and still spend like a big-market team.

Then 2005 happened.

The club jumped out to 12-2 and looked vindicated for about two weeks. Then the injuries started. Eric Gagné, Milton Bradley, Cesar Izturis, and yes, Drew, all missed significant time. The depth pieces did not pop. The Dodgers wound up 71-91, their worst record since 1992. That was on DePodesta because it was his roster and because he had just fired Jim Tracy after a season of philosophical tug-of-war.

It also did not help that DePodesta was not a natural front-of-the-room communicator. People who talked to him liked him. He was smart, polite, very prepared. But the 2005 Dodgers were drifting and the owner, not the GM, was the one who went into the clubhouse late in the year to calm things down after the Milton Bradley–Jeff Kent mess. That tells you how thin DePodesta’s authority felt inside the building at the time.

So McCourt pulled the plug that October. The whole experiment lasted less than two years. The headline version was simple: the Dodgers tried to go young, analytical, and contrarian, and the GM could not connect those ideas to the people who actually wore the uniform.

Which brings us back to 2025 and the Rockies.

Colorado is getting the polished, older, NFL-tested version of DePodesta now, the one who has spent nearly a decade building processes for the Browns and who clearly likes big organizational puzzles. That is exactly what the Rockies are offering. They were 43-119. They have never won the NL West. They need to overhaul scouting, development, and probably the way they talk to their own players about playing half their games at altitude. So in that sense, this is a good hire for them. They needed an adult with ideas.

For Dodger fans, though, his name is a time capsule. It reminds us how chaotic the McCourt era was, how quickly a division winner can become a 90-loss club when ownership is learning on the job and the GM is trying to win theoretical arguments instead of ballgames. It reminds us that spending a lot of money is not the same as spending it in the right places. On that score, Paul DePodesta could take some lessons from his analytical acolytes like Andrew Friedman. And it reminds us that even very smart people can misread a clubhouse, misread a city, and misread the moment.

The punch line is that the Rockies are so bad right now that DePodesta almost can’t help but improve them. That is their good fortune. For the Dodgers, it is only a mild annoyance that he is back in the NL West. The Rockies aren’t going to contend in this division for a good long time. And, thankfully, the current L.A. operation under the Guggenheim ownership is steadier, deeper, and better resourced than anything Frank McCourt was running in 2005. If anything, his return is useful. It gives us a chance to remember just how bumpy that era was here, and how far the club has come from the days when the Dodgers played to half empty stadiums at Chavez Ravine.

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