The DePo DODGERS thread

Dodgers In Market For New Mascot - [aka ALL THINGS DODGERS THREAD]

No NL West team had a winning record in June.

This is by far the worst division in baseball. Embarrassing even compared to last year whose winner (LA) actually won a single playoff game in the first round.

The right-hander's suspension is scheduled to begin Friday, though he will remain eligible to pitch if he appeals the penalty.

Ok, The play in question was a SACRIFICE BUNT with a runner on first, Durham was over to cover first and made a (characteristic) bad catch yet trapped the ball in front of him. Penny seeing the misplay veered a step and a half toward second off of the first baseline. Seeing Penny's move toward second, Durham has the presence of mind to tag Penny out.

Penny, upon getting called out on the tag, goes absolutely apeshit (bear in mind it's the 3rd inning and that nobody's in the bullpen for LA, also bear in mind this was a SACRIFICE BUNT). He throws a total tantrum and gets kicked out of the game.

I dont watch a shitload of baseball, but moving one foot towards second and looking at the second basemen doesnt really constitute a 'move' in my book.. but Im a biased Dodger fan so no sweat.. heh.

Both Alous let that guy have it at the end of the game.

http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/article_perspectives.jsp?ymd=20050827&content_id=1185788&vkey=perspectives&fext=.jsp

This event doesn't reflect well on either player, but it hardly nullifies all of the good work Bradley has done for the team in two years.

"I think for [Bradley] to make it a race issue is ridiculous. J.K. doesn't discriminate against anybody. He ignores Latinos, blacks, and whites equally."

I was trying to make an analogy, "If the Dodgers season happened to another team," like, say, the Red Sox, seems it would be somewhat like this:
*Bill Mueller blows out his knee 2 weeks into the season and doesn't come back until August
*Keith Foulke goes down with an arm injury 1 month into the season
*David Ortiz gets hit by a pitch and is out for the season
*Manny Ramirez goes down for 2 months, come back for 2 weeks, then has a season-ending injury
*Significant numbers of at-bats are given to Kapler, Youkilis and other unworthies
*For significant stretches of the season, Terry Francona decides to replaces Kevin Millar at 1B with Doug Mirabelli
*Epstein gets blamed for all of it

Granted Milton Bradley is no Manny, but you get the drift..

Disappointing: the normally sharp Mets radio guys went on at length during last night's game vs Florida how the Tragic LoDuca Trade was the beginning of the end of the Dodgers, and how the LA owner has recently figured out that "character counts." 15 months later, how much longer will this slop go on? You'd think LoD was Bench, Berra, John Brown and FDR rolled into one instead of maybe the 5th-best catcher in the NL (and a gimpy one at that).

-- gygax! (gygax0...), Today 9:50 AM. (gygax!)

SERIOUSLY!

It'd be even better if Tracy didn't have a problem w/ Asian folk and played the guy that's 3rd or 4th on the team (in just over half-a-season's worth of ABs) in HRs more than once a week.

As far as Duaner is concerned, up until last night he was owning people and developing a sweet changeup. And from what I read the HR he gave up last night was golfed out of the park anyway. Our bullpen has been doing well for themselves this week (even Yhency), in spite of the offenses inability to score more than 1 run without Jeff Kent.

"If there was any disappointment from my end, it's that several of those components from a year ago were not in the clubhouse at spring training in Vero Beach,"

"Familiarity goes hand in hand with success, in my mind. … Some of the elements we had last year that made us successful were [not here]."

Season-ending injuries to closer Eric Gagne, outfielders Milton Bradley and J.D. Drew, shortstop Cesar Izturis, lefty reliever Kelly Wunsch and reserve catcher Paul Bako as well as significant missed time by pitcher Odalis Perez, utility player Jose Valentin and outfielder Jayson Werth helped derail the Dodgers' season.

Still, Tracy was not sure the Dodgers could have replicated last season's 93-69 National League West Division championship team had everyone remained healthy.

"Would it have made us a 90- to 95-win club? No," Tracy said.

Yes thats what we needed. We needed the 2005 stats of Steve Finley, Alex Cora, Adrian Beltre, Shawn Green, Paul Lo Duca, Guillermo Mota and Jose Lima to take us all the way to the top! Not to say that Jayson Werth and Jose Valentin were our saviors, but bitch please. So long Jim Tracy, hope you enjoy Pittsburgh.

That can still happen this year!

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/teams/lineup?team=lad

Combine that w/ Jason "What, Me, Hit?" Phillips playing FIRST BASE, and Cesar Izturis losing whatever little mojo he acquired last year, and WHEEEEEEE Bill Plaschke can go to Unsubstantiated Bullshit Town every day!

Oh, and just for you, I just heard a rumor Bobby V. might be coming back stateside...to the Dodgers.

huzzah

Worst. sports column. ever.

OMG "he tore apart the championship team last year" DUDE WATCH SOME BASEBALL YOU BALD MOUTH-FARTING ASSWIT.

I will miss Tracy, he was good for 2-3 Padres wins every year.

There has been talk about the average-to-bad performances of Beltre and Alex Cora and Shawn Green and Steve Finley (acquired by DePodesta) with their new teams this season, but that's not the point.

All those players were worth more to the Dodgers than to anyone else. It's not about what they did elsewhere, it's about what they would have done here.

When it became obvious that DePodesta's moves would all backfire, either through injury or clubhouse strife or just plain bad baseball, Tracy saw the writing on the monitor.

Then he goes on to take pot shots at McCourt for not spending $100 million on these, the most mediocre of players.

I keep wanting to bring up the mets in this case, but then I realize if the mets were in the NL West they would have won it by 2 games.

I mean, I know Torre will probably retire if he gets fired, but it's out there.

Like Fox was better...

Pandoras box has just been opened in LA.

And the White Sox just showed us that you can't expect to win championships without noted proponents of team chemistry and all-around super popular guys such as Frank Thomas, Carl Everett, and A.J. Pierzynski.

But for all I know this is rumor mongering and bullshit. Ill wait for the official announcement. Either way McCourt still looks like a nutcase and the ignorant assholes at the LATimes will come up with any excuse to tear this team to shreds.

FREE HEE SEOP!

Theres some speculation that Orel might be the new GM and Valentine will be the new Manager. Seems like a Lasorda orchestrated coup if thats the case.

LETS GET MANNY. haw.

The Los Angeles Dodgers don't have much credibility as an organization these days, but they're certainly setting the pace for offseason transactions.

Most teams fresh off a 91-loss season would be content to offer up the manager or general manager as a human sacrifice. Not Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and his wife, club president Jamie McCourt. They christened October by parting ways with Jim Tracy, and brought it to a close by firing Paul DePodesta.

Think about it: Is there a more dysfunctional scenario than ownership cutting loose the manager and general manager three weeks apart? Short of walking around wearing sandwich signs with "We're Clueless" on the front, the McCourts couldn't have provided a greater gift to media critics who view them as an easy target.

Of course, the Tracy and DePodesta departures pale in comparison to the biggest transaction of the month. On Oct. 14, the Dodgers fired three loyal public relations people and hired a new senior vice president of communications, Camille Johnston, to craft a more positive image. At Chavez Ravine, it's all about style over substance, and clinging to the misguided notion that the saps in the press are too thick to discern the difference.

"The McCourts can't deal with the media pressure," said a person close to the Dodgers situation. "So every time they start getting hammered, they try and figure out who they can get rid of that's not helping them alleviate the pressure or is hurting them.

"It's all ego driven with the McCourts. That's the sad part. They think if they sell themselves, the Dodgers will rise up as an organization. But it's really the other way around."

DePodesta is a good person at heart, and it says something about his intellect when A's GM Billy Beane calls him the smartest person he's ever been around. But after DePodesta's one-dimensional, computer-nerd portrayal in "Moneyball," he inadvertently became one of the most polarizing figures in the game.

There will be a mourning period for stat-geek Web sites, where posters worshipfully refer to DePodesta as "Paul" and revel in seeing one of their own entrusted with the responsibility of roster-building. The cynics on these sites love to recycle the same, tired jokes about Paul Lo Duca and "clubhouse chemistry," and were shocked that Milton Bradley and Jeff Kent might have problems co-existing in the same universe.

The anti-DePodesta faction -- made up of purists and scouts -- will reflect upon DePodesta's brief tenure with the Dodgers and write it off as a failure. The scouting community will advocate for some team, any team, to declare a moratorium on Harvard number-crunchers in favor of general managers who can actually evaluate talent.

There's no disputing that DePodesta's personal style was detrimental to his job security. He was harder to find than Sandy Koufax during spring training in Vero Beach. And in crisis time -- for instance, when the Dodgers took a pounding for backing out of the Javier Vazquez trade last winter -- he was slow to return phone calls and articulate his position to the press. Maybe he just felt that he shouldn't have to, that he was smarter than everybody else.

But this much is clear: DePodesta deserved more than 21 months to execute his vision and prove himself, just as his predecessor, Dan Evans, didn't deserve to be canned after two years on the job. There has to be a happy medium between Chuck LaMar's decade-long tenure with Tampa Bay and management-by-turnstile in LA.

DePodesta could have used more friends at the end, when the McCourts panicked and took the easy route yet again. He has three years remaining on his contract, which gives him time to take a breather and find the right spot to rehabilitate his career. As a friend of DePodesta's observed, "How many 32-year-old former general managers do you know out there right now?"

It's telling that just about every former Dodgers employee you talk to expresses relief at being away from this mess. It's common knowledge that Tommy Lasorda, who wants desperately to be heard, felt free to badmouth DePodesta and promote his own agenda with the McCourts.

Two years ago, before Frank and Jamie hired DePodesta, Lasorda pushed for Pat Gillick to get the job. And while DePodesta wanted Terry Collins or Giants coach Ron Wotus to succeed Tracy as manager, Lasorda lobbied passionately for Orel Hershiser or Bobby Valentine.

Lasorda's argument: The best way for the Dodgers to repair the damage is by evoking feel-good images from the past.

If only it were that easy. Dodger Blue once had great meaning to lots of people because of the organization's reputation for loyalty, integrity and class. The version making the rounds these days is nothing more than a pale imitation.

snip:
"The boogeyman of the traditional baseball world -- the bespectacled computer nerd who assembles a roster using only his proprietary statistic MqV3 -- is a caricature. The reality is a guy like Mark Shapiro, who has a toe in each wading pool. The reality is a guy like Billy Beane, who doesn't claim to have baseball figured out, is constantly looking to refine his statistics, and still retains a cadre of respected baseball lifers to bounce his opinions off.

If there was a guy to come close to the stereotype, it was the recently junked general manager of the Dodgers. In Moneyball, Paul DePodesta comes off as a hard-line stat nerd, eager to fire scouts and put his Tandy 3000 in charge of amateur drafting. It isn't a flattering portrait in retrospect. He claimed Brant Colamarino might have been the best hitter in college when the A's drafted him. That didn't work out. Lots of things don't work out in the baseball world, but few have a bestselling author hanging around as they transpire."

BOSTON --Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein resigned Monday, surprising Boston and the baseball world just one year after he helped build the franchise's first World Series championship team since 1918.

The team said in a statement that Epstein will continue working for several days to assist in the transition and prepare for the offseason.

The Dodgers, Phillies and Devil Rays have GM openings, but none has a $120 million payroll to match the one Epstein was given in Boston.

The 31-year-old Epstein was reportedly offered about $4.5 million for a three-year extension -- quadruple his previous salary. But it was still short of the $2.5 million a year the Red Sox offered Oakland's Billy Beane in 2002 before making Epstein the youngest GM in baseball history.

Not that I believe that entirely, but pretty interesting nonetheless.

On the other hand, I could see the Red Sox making a play for DePodesta's services (unless he's content to sit out his three years on the Dodgers' dime).

Oh come on. They'd get their butts kicked by a lot of division ii teams, but it's still a pretty rigorous sport and the one-dimensional portrait of him is not exactly befitting.

Meanwhile, Darin Erstad was a fucking punter and he's "gritty ex-football player Darin Erstad."

Set aside all the specific issues involved here and just consider one thing: the Dodgers have won one division title in 10 seasons, and in the 20 months that he's owned the team, Frank McCourt has fired the three off-field personnel who were most responsible for that success.

...McCourt, who has been a pinata for the vicious, vacuous, vindictive Los Angeles media from the day he arrived, has let that media influence his evaluation of DePodesta, who by any rational standard doesn't deserve dismissal. His moves have been a mixed bag to date, but remember that he had one offseason in which to work, and that his decisions in that offseason, while reviled by people who care more about drawing attention to themselves than baseball

McCourt has no baseball reason to fire DePodesta. He's making this decision--and I readily admit to coming at this as an informed outsider--in what appears to be an attempt to get the cool kids to like him. He isn't putting the Dodgers' 71-91 record in context, taking into account the massive injury problems that contributed to that mark. He isn't evaluating DePodesta's transaction record with care, instead falling into the "chemistry" myth that has been a daily staple of dead-tree media in the city for more than a year.

No, McCourt is throwing DePodesta under the bus to curry favor with a cadre of Dodgers insiders and violently wrong columnists who haven't themselves taken the time to evaluate the GM, the team or the last 20 months.

Examining DePodesta's record is virtually irrelevant in the context of this decision. In his time as GM, DePodesta made a series of controversial decisions that, as a whole, made the Dodgers better. The 2005 season was a disaster, and one he played a part in. He is not the sole or even the primary reason for what happened, and using the year to dismiss him, without giving him a second offseason or a chance to see what a healthy roster might produce, is the kind of management that made the Yankes a laughingstock from 1982-1993.

DePodesta's big decisions almost all worked out well. The controversial trade-deadline deals in 2004 netted two months of Steve Finley and saved a fair amount of money. Any rational look at the players DePodesta let go of or traded after the season (Adrian Beltre, Alex Cora, Finley, Shawn Green and Jose Lima all found their names in the L.A. sports pages a lot this year) and the ones he obtained in their stead (J.D. Drew, Jeff Kent, Derek Lowe, Jose Valentin, Dioner Navarro), has to conclude that the changes were for the better. DePodesta made short-term mistakes at third base and at catcher, and as much as I liked the decisions, may have been a bit thin in the bullpen after Gagne, a weakness that was eventually exploited. He also declined to mortgage the Dodgers' future at the trade deadline, despite a strong farm system and a winnable division. That's the kind of decision-making that should be rewarded, not punished.

The local media, and perhaps now McCourt, think that the Dodgers' poor 2005 season and its attendant controversies happened because all the right guys were gone. In truth, the Dodgers' roster was much better than it would have been had those guys been retained, and the chemistry problems that garnered so much attention were, as they so often are, caused by the losing, rather than a cause of the losing. To be pithy, if Eric Gagne doesn't blow out his elbow, Kent and Milton Bradley get along a lot better.

The Dodgers' disastrous 2005 season was caused by a historic run of injuries, and there's simply no rational way to fire DePodesta based on the team's performance last year.

There's a thread running through this matter that bothers me greatly, because I think it is indicative of the uphil battle that younger GMs, ones with performance-analysis credentials, will continue to face. Among the criticisms of DePodesta is that he was a poor communicator who didn't make an effort to get along with the more wrinkled elements of the Dodgers organization. The premise is the problem. It's one I hear a lot, both in the context of people working in the game and people presenting ideas from outside of it, this notion that the young guys who didn't ride buses carry the burden for the tone of the relationship.

Why isn't it the other way around, or at least mutual? Why do we never hear or read that the old men who have been doing it one way for 25 years have to learn to communicate with the new generation? When there is a conflict, why is the presumption that it’s the young guy, the new guy, the guy with a college degree, the guy who doesn't chew tobacco…that it's his fault? I think that mindset has taken hold, and we see a lot of references to the arrogance of this new generation of executives and analysts, without any reference to the arrogance of an entrenched society of, to be blunt, Luddites who think that experience is not only the best teacher, but the sole one.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-dodgers-ng&prov=ap&type=lgns

HORAY FOR AZN GURLS!!!

* Yes yes I know.

Colletti was the subject of a two part interview in Baseball Prospectus in 2003 in which Colletti reveals himself to be principally an old-school talent evaluator of the sort Tommy Lasorda must be very comfortable with. He's also the kind of guy who, when asked whether the team thinks about park factors when constructing a team, replied "We haven't thought about it much, except with pitching." Hoo boy.

Colletti on Sidney Ponson!

"We saw Ponson in the same vein we saw Jason Schmidt two years ago. Tremendous upside, on the verge of turning the corner from a good pitcher to a potential standout pitcher...."

Colletti on Neifi!

"When we were first in conversations with Neifi, we didn't know what would happen with Kent, or David Bell, and we had players like Reggie Sanders and Kenny Lofton possibly leaving too. So we really wanted a player who was versatile, who could play a bunch of positions for us to help make up for those losses. Talking to Felipe (Alou) about him, he said Neifi could play second, short and third, that he'd be an above-average fielder, a guy who'd occasionally get a big hit and who knew how to play the game. We felt that was a player we could use."

MVP! MVP! MVP! MVP! MVP!

(for Most Valuable Perez, duh)

http://firenedcolletti.blogspot.com/

In more (possibly) uplifting news, all hail the Jacksonville Suns:

http://www.minorleaguebaseball.com/app/news/article.jsp?ymd=20051114&content_id=33974&vkey=news_milb&fext=.jsp

http://www.cantstopthebleeding.com/index.php?p=3760

Oh my god we are the worst franchise in all of baseball.

is there not an 09 dodgers thread? anyway, etheir is back to ripping the ball thankfully

I debated starting one but couldn't come up with a clever title. Pretty bad loss tonight, especially when you make Kevin Correia look good. Also Juan Pierre is slowly but surely coming back down to earth and it shows in the box score. Dodgers have been averaging 2 runs a game for the past 2 weeks.

surely there should be a new thread for THE BEST TEAM

also, DePo long gone

can we please talk about DePo for a minute please? Seeing how Beane has lost his lustre (despite the Hollywood biopic), can we revisit his drafts and transactions?

2004 draft
http://losangeles.dodgers.mlb.com/team/draft.jsp?c_id=la&year=2004

2005 draft
http://losangeles.dodgers.mlb.com/team/draft.jsp?c_id=la&year=2005

2004: draft fail lol? nice try at trying to land David Price in round 19. Anyone else of value in here? Blake DeWitt?

2004 trades/transactions
http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/LAD/2004-transactions.shtml

2005 trades/transactions
http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/LAD/2005-transactions.shtml

Big Ups

December 13, 2003

Traded Kevin Brown to the New York Yankees. Received Brandon Weeden (minors), Yhency Brazoban, Jeff Weaver and cash.

March 29, 2004

Traded Jason Frasor to the Toronto Blue Jays. Received Jayson Werth.

LOLstalgia:

April 3, 2004 (Standings)
Traded a player to be named later and Franklin Gutierrez to the Cleveland Indians. Received Milton Bradley. The Los Angeles Dodgers sent Andrew Brown (May 19, 2004) to the Cleveland Indians to complete the trade.

July 30, 2004 (Standings)

Traded Juan Encarnacion, Paul Lo Duca and Guillermo Mota to the Florida Marlins. Received Hee Seop Choi, Bill Murphy and Brad Penny.

2004 is a pretty decent draft haul when you consider that Elbert and Dewitt both made it to the majors. Meanwhile, some of the guys who were drafted in the first round didn't fare so well. I'd rather have Dewitt than the two next guys who were drafted (Matthew Campbell, Eric Hurley). I'd rather have Elbert than CHRISTOPHER LAMBERT (There can be only one!) or TREVOR PLOUFFE or GREGORY GOLSON, who went in the next four picks. Josh Fields woulda been nice although he didn't exactly pan out either.

Ouch:

October 12, 2004 (Standings)

Released Joakim Soria. (ed: best reliever in baseball?)

December 23, 2004

Signed J.D. Drew as a free agent.

Then the Padres got Soria, and later lost him in the Rule 5.

Notable DePodesta Draftees:

2004
Scott Elbert
Blake DeWitt
Corey Wade - victim of Torre overuse after standout 08 season
David Price - lol didnt sign

2005
Luke Hochevar - turned into Clayton Kershaw after he held out, not bad
Jon Meloan - part of Casey Blake trade to Cleveland
Josh Bell - part of Sherrill trade
Brent Leach - had some time in the show this season
Ivan de Jesus - potential 2b/ss