DENVER (KDVR) — On Thursday, it was announced that the San Diego Padres hired the team’s new field manager, leaving the Colorado Rockies as the sole team without a manager.
Hours later, the Rockies made an announcement of their own, that the franchise is one step closer to selecting a field manager, after Paul DePodesta was hired as the team’s new head of baseball operations, according to AP.
DePodesta’s hiring means the Rockies now have someone at the helm of the ship who will oversee critical decisions like bringing in a new manager this season and filling out the front office.
If you’ve heard the name DePodesta before, don’t be too surprised. He has decades of experience in executive sports roles, and even inspired the role of Peter Brand played by Jonah Hill in the movie “Moneyball.”
Brand is a fictional character who takes the Hollywood spotlight, but it was DePodesta’s work in reality that allowed a movie like “Moneyball” to be made.
His accomplishments as assistant to the then-Oakland Athletics General Manager, Billy Beane, are historical in their own right. The two ran the “Moneyball” Athletics, which was the Athletics team from 1999 to 2003.
They garnered the name Moneyball due to their ability to make the playoffs consistently despite having a small fraction of the budgets of big-market teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees.
The reason the team was able to find so much player value with a minimal budget is down to the way that DePodesta helped revolutionize baseball through sabermetrics. In a time when the eye test was all people went off of, DePodesta meticulously combed through advanced analytics to find players that could excel in specific circumstances.
DePodesta modernized sports analytics
Nowadays, when you talk about sports, advanced analytics go hand in hand, something teams in any discipline everywhere have DePodesta to thank for.
Following his integral role with the Athletics, he was eventually scouted by one of those bigger-budget teams, the Dodgers, who wished to make him the head of their entire scheme and brought him on as general manager in 2003.
He lasted only two years before being released by the team, despite posting a 93-win season in his first year, before missing the playoffs the next.
DePodesta was quickly back on the scene and joined the Padres, the team that won the Dodgers’ division the year before, as special assistant for baseball operations from 2006-10. He followed that up with a move to the New York Mets as the vice president of player development and amateur scouting from 2011-15.
In 2016, he made a move that you don’t typically see in sports — swapping the MLB for the NFL, when he joined the Cleveland Browns as the Chief Strategy Officer. Moneyball found its way to the NFL, and he led a data-driven analysis team that would use their findings to minimize loss and gauge player performance and value.
Jump forward to Nov. 6, 2025, and DePodesta is back in the league where he more than earned his keep and is ready to help the Rockies turn things around after a rough couple of years.
He might be a data wiz, but there’s only one number he needs to worry about — 43 — the number of wins the Rockies had in their worst season in franchise history.
If he can help get that number up, while carrying the torch for a team eager to escape their evil ways, he will be loved by the parade of purple-shirted Coloradans cheering in the stands.
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