Multiple Authors
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Paul DePodesta wandered through the Colorado Rockies’ spring training complex on the morning of Feb. 12, the official start of his first season back in baseball, and took note of something: For every pitcher throwing, a coach stood beside him.
DePodesta ended a decade-long run with the NFL’s Cleveland Browns to become the Rockies’ president of baseball operations in early November and has spent the past four months obsessing over ways to succeed at mile-high altitude. Building out an army of pitching coaches, the type that can provide as much individualized training as possible, is one of them. Empowering innovation, largely by assembling a more robust analytics department, is another. Just as important, he believes, is a change in mindset.
DePodesta wants the Rockies to view playing baseball at 5,280 feet above sea level as an advantage, not a hindrance. Everything else should flow off that.
“We need to embrace this,” DePodesta said. “This is who we are.”
30 years of Coors Field horror stories
For three decades, baseball at altitude has bruised ERAs and egos. Here’s what it’s really like taking MLB’s scariest mound. Story »
The Rockies are coming off three consecutive 100-loss seasons, the last of which saw them challenge for the lowest winning percentage in baseball history and finish with a minus-424 run differential, the worst since the 19th century. They have reeled off three consecutive winning seasons only once, from 1995 to 1997, during their 33-year existence, all while playing home games in an environment that makes it almost impossible to pitch.
It’s the type of problem that begs for ingenuity, for fresh perspective, and yet the Rockies, in the eyes of many of their peers, remained myopic.
“Fair or not, we needed a change,” said Kyle Freeland, the Rockies’ longest-tenured starting pitcher. “We needed to go in a new direction.”
DePodesta, 53, represents that new direction. He once sparked an analytics revolution throughout baseball, then made a stunning transition to football. Now he’ll attempt to solve one of the most complex problems in all of sports.
Creating a sustained winner in Colorado will take time, if it happens at all. No one man, no matter how bright or creative, can fix the Rockies. DePodesta claims to know this, but he’s also eager to try.
“I’m a sucker for a challenge,” he said.
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, DePodesta was the wunderkind who worked alongside Billy Beane, optimized on-base percentage, turned a floundering Oakland Athletics franchise into an improbable winner and became a key character in Michael Lewis’ monumental book, “Moneyball,” later a movie that saw DePodesta portrayed — via pseudonym — by Jonah Hill. But a subsequent stint as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ general manager lasted just two seasons.
Under DePodesta, the Dodgers won 93 games in 2004 and just 71 in 2005. Along the way, he was panned locally for trading away beloved players such as Dave Roberts and Paul Lo Duca and losing Adrian Beltre in free agency. DePodesta, 31 years old when he got the job, admits he made “a lot of mistakes” then. But in his mind, it wasn’t about roster construction; rather, his scope was too narrow.
“The job is to actually try to build a great organization, not just a great roster,” DePodesta said. “And there’s a pretty big distinction there, even in terms of how you spend your time. And I failed at doing that.”
After his departure from the Dodgers, longtime executive Sandy Alderson brought DePodesta to the San Diego Padres and then to the New York Mets. Over a 10-year stretch from 2006 to 2015, DePodesta began to think bigger. He built out analytics departments, shaped decision-making processes and focused on creating synergy through various departments.
The Browns hired him to do just that, but the on-field success did not follow. In DePodesta’s nine full seasons in Cleveland, the Browns went a combined 54-93-1 and spent a good portion of that time being ridiculed for the trade and subsequent extension of scandal-plagued quarterback Deshaun Watson. They made the playoffs twice, but often people wondered what DePodesta’s job actually constituted. He worked from San Diego, rarely gave interviews, and reports suggested he was at times overruled on key hiring decisions and at odds with his GMs, specifically John Dorsey.
Behind the scenes at Driveline
How the lab that famously gave pitchers an edge is helping hitters, too. Alden Gonzalez »
DePodesta countered that he felt empowered in Cleveland, adding he “wouldn’t give any credence” to reports suggesting otherwise. He said he’s proud of what he helped build structurally but regretful that the Browns could not sustain the momentum of 11-win seasons in 2020 and 2023. The margins of the NFL still alarm him. Every game, DePodesta believes, comes down to six to eight plays.
“And for the other 150 plays, it’s kind of a tie,” he said. “It’s hard to live that way.”
DePodesta struggled with the narrowness of that industry. He missed baseball’s representative sample sizes. More than that, though, he missed player development.
“I’ve always felt that even when the major league team isn’t having the best year, every night during the summer, someone somewhere did something well, where when your head hits the pillow you can be like, ‘OK, our third-round pick in A ball went five innings, gave up two hits, punched out eight, I’m happy about that,'” DePodesta said. “Football, you go out and you get beat 31-10, there’s not a person in the building on Monday who’s saying, ‘Well the linebackers played well.’
“I’m an optimist by nature. So in baseball, to have things you can grab on to as you’re building, successes that you can be happy about, both individual and team when it’s not just about the major league team all the time — I missed all those things.”
DePodesta didn’t have a plan to return, he said, but the Rockies often came up as an ideal destination in talks with his wife, Karen. He loved the city and the ballpark. He knew the fan base was supportive and the ownership group, for better or worse, was loyal. And if someone was going to solve baseball at elevation, DePodesta thought, he wanted it to be him.
A mutual friend suggested him to the Rockies’ ownership group shortly after GM Bill Schmidt stepped down at the start of October, ending a 27-year run with the organization. The timing was ideal. Three months earlier, Walker Monfort, the 39-year-old son of longtime owner Dick Monfort, took on a more prominent role and vowed to pivot away from the insularity that had long plagued the Rockies. A new head of baseball operations was the perfect place to start.
“One of the things we felt was that we needed to really evolve our operation and maybe take in best practices from outside in order to do that most efficiently,” said Walker Monfort, now the Rockies’ president. “It was important to me that we look outside the organization, more to understand more of what we didn’t know in a shorter period of time so that we could essentially pivot our operations and bring on some best practices of other organizations.”
One phone call, two Zooms and an in-person meeting later, DePodesta was hired by the Rockies on Nov. 7. Rival executives were left stunned, both that the Rockies would opt for someone so long removed from baseball and that DePodesta would even take this on.
His reasoning was simple: Every team, he said, faces challenges. Many are structural — an owner that meddles, a market that suffocates, a fan base that wavers.
“This,” DePodesta said, referencing Denver’s elevation, “is one of the more interesting challenges. This feels like it’s at least potentially solvable.”
Can he solve it, though?
“I don’t know,” DePodesta said, “but it’s a lot more interesting. It’s a lot more interesting to think about and spend time on.”
What’s the secret to winning baseball at high altitude? For DePodesta, it involves turning a disadvantage into an advantage. Gavin Liddell
THE ROCKIES HOSTED an organization-wide summit in January, and DePodesta had the baseball side arrive a couple of days earlier to get some time to themselves. There, he instructed the head of each department to present his or her vision to the group. At one point Alon Leichman, the Rockies’ new pitching coach, took his turn. His message was succinct:
Get ahead, stay ahead, and then go kill motherf—-s.
Leichman, known throughout baseball as the man who called pitches from the dugout in Miami last season, was among the headliners of a frenetic offseason that began with DePodesta naming Warren Schaeffer the permanent manager and hiring Josh Byrnes, the longtime Dodgers executive, as GM. DePodesta, Byrnes and Schaeffer then went about assembling a four-person pitching team that would embrace their challenges. Leichman, the head of that group, embodied that.
“There’s two types of pitching coaches I have been around,” he said. “The ones that want this job, and the ones that think this is a suicide.”
Rockies starting pitchers put up a 6.65 ERA last season, the highest for a rotation since ERA became an official stat in 1913. Since the Rockies’ inception 80 years later, their pitchers have finished within the bottom five in ERA in 27 of 33 seasons, including dead last in each of the past four. The thin air that circulates Coors Field makes it a haven for hitters, so much so that a humidor had to be introduced to make baseballs heavier. Still, they fly disproportionately off a hitter’s bat and behave oddly out of a pitcher’s hand. Recruiting pitchers is a chore. Developing them is excruciating.
The first step in overcoming that, the new group believes, is a change in mindset.
“It’s no secret — it’s a hitter’s park,” said Freeland, heading into his 10th season in the Rockies’ rotation. “Things are going to fall in, things are going to fly. But we need to start using that mentality of, ‘Coors Field is our advantage now.’ We know that pitchers coming into Coors Field from other teams, they really don’t want to be pitching at Coors Field. They see it on the schedule and they’re like, ‘Damn, I hope I don’t line up to pitch at Coors Field.’ We need to flip our mentality to that of, ‘They don’t want to be here. We want to be here. Let’s go take advantage of that. Let’s take wins from these guys.'”
Ranking all 30 MLB lineups for 2026
Patience. Power. Durability. Depth. We rate all 30 offenses by these measures and more. Bradford Doolittle »
In his first meeting with the pitchers, Leichman put that mentality in practice by drawing the strike zone on a white board and pointing to it. He then posed a question to the group:
On 0-0 counts, if you throw 100 pitches into this zone, how many end up as hits?
Guesses were all over the place. 16. 21. 11. 30. Then Leichman called on Freeland, who had been supplied with the answer. “Six,” he responded. After accounting for whiffs and foul balls — any ball not put in play, essentially — only six of 100 first-pitch strikes end up as hits, Leichman revealed. He then took his dry-erase marker and pointed to the lowest corner of the strike zone.
“So why the f— would you try to go in here?” he asked.
Leichman and the others in his orbit — assistant pitching coach Gabe Ribas, bullpen coach Matt Buschmann and director of pitching Matt Daniels — don’t want pitchers who are afraid of the elements at Coors Field. They want pitchers who will attack it, and they want them to do so with as deep an arsenal as possible — traits that prompted them to sign Jose Quintana, Michael Lorenzen and Tomoyuki Sugano in free agency.
Sliders don’t break enough at Coors Field. Four-seam fastballs don’t rise. Gyrosliders, a breaking ball with very little spin efficiency, work better. So do cutters and sinkers. After lunch one day, Leichman painted blue dots on about 15 baseballs to represent the spin planes for those pitches. Pitchers placed them in their lockers and used them in bullpen sessions to diversify their offerings.
Quintana picked up the gyroslider in two days.
“I think the old guard in baseball is like, ‘Only in the offseason. Don’t mess them up in spring because he’s trying to make a team,'” Liechman said. “And we’re like, ‘No, f— that. You’ve got to get ready for the season. And we don’t think it’s that hard.'”
But the challenge isn’t just existing at Coors Field; it’s continually coming in and out of altitude. DePodesta made the comparison to football. The Denver Broncos spend roughly 90% of the time training in their environment, he said, traveling two to three days at a time for each of their eight to nine road games. The Rockies spend only half the time in their home ballpark in a given season — and even less so when factoring in a month-and-a-half-long spring training in Arizona.
In hopes of countering that, Leichman wants pitchers to tap into their athleticism. Throughout spring training, they’ve played catch from various arm angles and attempted to hit targets with an assortment of baseballs — lighter, heavier, bigger, smaller. The goal, Leichman said, is to “make them problem solvers.”
“One of the problems we need to solve is going back and forth, altitude to sea level,” Leichman said, “so when we’re going to train, we’re going to train f—ed up.”
They’re also going to try things. What, exactly, remains to be seen. DePodesta does not know whether his coaches will be calling pitches from the dugout this season, but the Rockies are open to the idea. They’re also open to piggybacking starting pitchers, an experiment that failed under former GM Dan O’Dowd in 2012. And being aggressive with openers. And eliminating roles altogether.
“It seems like they’re a lot more open-minded to try different things in order to see if we can find a recipe for success for elevation,” Rockies catcher Hunter Goodman said. “I think it’ll be interesting going forward, seeing the things that we’ll try. The Rockies have been playing at elevation since the team began, but I feel like, as far as since I’ve been here, we haven’t really done much to figure out how we can gain an advantage there. I think going forward, it’ll be awesome to see how we attack that.”
THERE’S A COMMON misconception about what Moneyball was and what it represents. It wasn’t about obsessing over on-base percentage and ignoring defense; it was about finding untapped value, whatever that might be. It was a success built not on a dogmatic approach, but through flexible systems and constant evolution.
“One of the things I learned in Oakland is you can’t just forklift out what worked there and drop it somewhere else and expect to do the same,” DePodesta said. “Every environment is different. There are different opportunities and challenges in each environment, and you have to recognize those. So if you would’ve told me 20 years ago, ‘You’re really going to be emphasizing the importance of baserunning,’ I would’ve laughed at you.”
Indeed, DePodesta is. Because for as much as the thin air at Coors Field boosts home runs, its expansive outfield promotes doubles and triples even more so. The Rockies need outfielders who are elite defenders, baserunners who can capitalize on opportunities and hitters who can consistently put the ball in play. Jake McCarthy, Willi Castro and Edouard Julien, their three main offensive additions this offseason, all embody at least some of those traits.
Last year, the Rockies’ hitters posted the second-highest strikeout rate in the majors while hitting its sixth-fewest home runs and finishing with the lowest on-base percentage in franchise history. The Rockies can be a playoff team if their pitching staff finishes somewhere in the middle of the pack, even slightly lower, in the most important traditional stats. But that’s not the case on offense.
“In the standard-outcome numbers, our offense needs to be elite,” DePodesta said. “And I think we were 30th last year. That can’t happen. It needs to at least appear [through non-park-adjusted stats] as though we’re elite.”
Editor’s Picks
2 Related
Since DePodesta left baseball, the sport has leaned heavily into some of the same analytical principles he was once mocked for. “Now,” he said with a laugh, “I’m the one catching up.”
While DePodesta was in the NFL, Trackman radar technology became fully integrated in MLB. The search for launch angle changed the way hitters trained. High-speed cameras and weighted balls were optimized to turn pitchers into spin and velocity mavens. DePodesta has experienced the growth of analytics through his second of three sons, a promising high school baseball player who has utilized the advanced training equipment that is now available at some of the country’s top amateur programs.
The Rockies have been widely considered among the most repressive organizations in using modern data, not just in what they possess but in how they incorporate it. They insist that’s changing. They recently posted three prominent job openings for their research and development department and brought in a longtime executive, current assistant GM Ian Levin, to oversee it.
Their spring training facility is equipped with a pitching lab, which a lot of teams still don’t possess. They previously owned a Trajekt pitching machine, too, and have since purchased another. They need more, certainly. (Developing their own internal defensive metrics would be a good start.) But they also need to learn how to optimize what they have and make it actionable.
“Bringing on the folks that we have from outside the organization, one of the things that did for us is it helped us understand what other teams have from a technology standpoint,” Walker Monfort said. “And the best part about it is that even though some teams have far more resources or technology or data than the Rockies, we were able to figure out which investments we needed to make based on the best practices of those organizations. So we’re trying to do that as efficiently as possible. We are making investments in technology. In people.”
DePodesta has long been labeled as a cold numbers guy, but he seems to care deeply about people. Over the course of a 90-minute conversation with ESPN, he spoke often about the need to make his own players better — Chase Dollander, Kyle Karros and Jordan Beck the most prominent among them — and the importance of tailoring information to the individual.
DePodesta described his return to baseball as “a big family reunion.” He was surprised to learn how big his network still was. Among those he has consulted with most about this job have been his two predecessors, Schmidt and O’Dowd, two men he has known for three decades.
DePodesta’s first three months were a whirlwind, from shuttling between his old home in La Jolla, California, and his new one in Denver, to making an assortment of new hires — a GM, two assistant GMs, five major league coaches and upwards of 15 new people throughout the franchise — and absorbing as much information as possible. He arrived in spring training a couple of days before the first workout and stayed late.
After the facility emptied, he finally spent a moment taking it all in.
“I was walking through the building, walking through these fields, and yeah, it’s been a while,” DePodesta said. “It’s been 10 years since I’ve done it. And it just sort of hit me like, ‘This is a real privilege.’ In that moment I was like, ‘Yeah, definitely not taking this for granted.’ This is pretty special, to have the opportunity to do this again. It’s pretty neat.”
