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DePodesta now helping to build Padres structure


By Tom Krasovic
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

March 30, 2008

When the Los Angeles Dodgers fired him, Paul DePodesta grabbed a hammer.
And a shovel, bags of cement and sheets of drywall.

The unemployed baseball executive joined Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit group that builds affordable housing in partnership with people in need. DePodesta, who was fired as general manager after L.A.'s fourth-place finish in 2005, reported to construction sites in Long Beach and Torrance.

“It was something I had always wanted to do but could never see myself having the time to really commit to it,” he said. “After the Dodgers laid me off, I volunteered. I said, 'All right, I want to do this.' ”

The grunt work, he conceded, may have softened the sting of being dismissed with three years left on a five-year contract.

“It was tremendous,” DePodesta said. “It was a fantastic experience. I did it all, man. I hung drywall. I built fences. I demo-ed a house. I ripped off roofs. I bent rebar. I dug ditches, poured cement.

“It was great. Hard to sort of match how you feel at the end of the day after you put in eight hours there.”

It was the first step in the rejuvenation of a baseball man whose career had zoomed upward like a NASA rocket, until his second Dodgers team, battered by injuries, crashed to Earth.

The next restorative step came when Padres CEO Sandy Alderson called and asked him to work as his special assistant. DePodesta had admired Alderson and Padres GM Kevin Towers. Further, San Diego held extra allure for his wife Karen, a La Jolla High alum.

“It was a no-brainer,” said DePodesta, who joined the Padres in July 2006.

DePodesta's Padres duties are as varied as his home-building tasks were. He does statistical research, scouts amateur players when called upon, assists in draft-day research and often consults with personnel in several departments, including minor-league managers and coaches and Padres manager Bud Black.

“I do a little bit of everything,” said the 35-year-old. “I'm the front-office rover, so to speak.”

Versatility had served him well in a colorful variety of other pursuits.

As a freshman at Harvard, he walked onto the football team and earned a spot as a 150-pound wide receiver. He also pitched for the Crimson, which had recruited him to play shortstop. Shortly after he graduated cum laude with an economics degree, he took classes at the national Shakespeare Theater in Washington D.C. The 22-year-old even appeared in a few episodes of the TV show “Homicide, Life on the Street,” after the mug-shot photographs he had sent caught the eye of Executive Producer Barry Levinson, who called him.

“I had no speaking lines,” DePodesta said. “I was the rookie cop. There were some pretty exciting scenes.”

At night, he worked in promotions for the Baltimore Bandits, a hockey team. “I threw T-shirts into the crowd, did my best Hulk Hogan to get the crowd riled up,” he said, laughing at the memory.

DePodesta considered Officer Training School with the Marine Corps but his career goal was to become a college football coach – until the Cleveland Indians hired him as an intern in their player development department. His first job was to shuttle minor leaguers in a van.

From there, he quickly blossomed, showing a talent for assimilating a broad spectrum of information, whether as a statistical analyst or an advance scout for three Indians teams that reached the postseason.

A's GM Billy Beane hired him as his top assistant in 1998. The A's, under tight payroll restrictions, led a pioneering change in player evaluation that valued statistics over gut instincts. Author Michael Lewis wrote the 2003 bestseller “Moneyball” about Beane's approach to the game, and DePodesta's statistical insights, notably about the relationships between an amateur hitter's walk rates and the increased likelihood of professional success, were prominently featured.

DePodesta said his appreciation for scouting wasn't conveyed by the book. He often praises the scout-driven Braves, who won 14 consecutive playoff berths starting in 1991.

“They deserve a best-selling book,” he said. Part of his success in Oakland, he said, owed to heeding scouting reports such as those by A's scouts who recommended Kevin Youkilis, memorably dubbed by DePodesta as the “Greek God of Walks.” Youkilis became a poster player for “Moneyball.” The A's were unable to trade for him, and he went on to become a Red Sox star who helped Boston win the 2007 World Series.

“Our scouts liked him a lot,” said DePodesta, who prefers to scout amateur players without knowing their statistics.

In his 12 years in professional baseball, DePodesta has worked for four franchises that have reached the playoffs a total of nine times, including his first Dodgers team, which in 2004 captured the franchise's first division title since 1995. He sees the trend as continuing, but after vicariously experiencing eight October trips that ended in defeat, would welcome a victorious finish.

“We expect to be one of those contending championship organizations certainly for the foreseeable future,” he said. “When that results in a World Series victory, we'll see. Hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Tom Krasovic: (619) 293-2207; tom.krasovic@uniontrib.com

See? If McCourt was as savvy of a real estate developer/businessman as he fancies himself to be, he would have reassigned DePo while he was still on the payroll to help build one of his dead-tech, post-modernistic bullshit 10,000 square foot mansions.