When your team is the worst in baseball — yes, the Padres are the worst team right now — what do you do to cope with the disappointment? You start a blog, of course. The man many of you affectionately know as the former Dodgers GM and Moneyball assistant to Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta, has been working in the front office for the Padres the last few years. And as Pat Lackey points out at FanHouse, he has also just started a blog to talk about the team and answer questions from fans. The blog was just started over the weekend while the Padres were still the worst team in baseball, but he seems to be keeping quite a level head. What’s really cool is that Paul has already answered a few questions in the comments of his posts and plans to address more with future posts. It seems to be a great fan-to-front office forum at the moment, hopefully it doesn’t get littered with jackasses and idiot commenters.
And while we’re on the subject, now that it’s been a few years I think we can fairly assess DePodesta’s tenure as Dodgers GM. His biggest move was to trade away the “heart and soul” of the team, Paul LoDuca, better known as the “needle and syringe” of the squad. LoDuca, Mota, and Encarnacion haven’t done much since the trade, but Brad Penny certainly has been a top arm in the Dodgers rotation since. DePo also dealt for Steve Finley at the deadline who helped propel the Dodgers into the playoffs. Sure his deal to get CJ from the Rockies fell apart and Paul Bako was left at catcher, but they still made the playoffs, and Russell Martin came along to do a more than respectable job behind the dish. And for the Hee Seop Choi flameout, at least Beltre wasn’t resigned for millions. Further, the Derek Lowe, Jeff Kent, and JD Drew signings seemed to have paid out for the most part, certainly much better than Schmidt and Pierre.
Perhaps DePodesta’s biggest downfalls seem to be that he wasn’t media friendly and thus unfairly maligned by the press, and that he was working for an image-conscious boss (McCourt). Partly because this was his first time ever dealing with media in a large capacity, and partly because his Moneyball reputation preceded him, he had an uphill battle to begin with. Had DePodesta gone to a smaller market with less press coverage, he’d probably still have a job and be doing fine. Billy Beane advised his assistants to be selective about taking their first GM jobs. Maybe DePo was ready to succeed in terms of building a team, but he wasn’t ready to deal with the press. Anyway, nice to have him aboard in the blogosphere answering questions and participating in the excitement. And he also has a sense of humor — check out that great video he posted:
