According to reports, the GM tandem of Dan O’Dowd and Bill Geivett are finished with the Colorado Rockies. In so doing, they bring to an end one of the longest-tenured but most dysfunctional front offices in baseball. Or at least they have nominally because Colorado has already named a new GM in Jeff Bridich, who had been serving as the senior director of player development.
Even if the Rockies are promoting from within, any change has to be seen as a step forward. After three seasons of a little on-field success and a bizarre split of duties between Geivett, who handle major league operations, and O’Dowd, who handled the farm system and had final say in personnel decisions, Colorado needed to do something to shake things up. The question is if this will be enough.
The hallmark of the O’Dowd-Geivett regime has been a philosophical mandate to ignore the the true state of the team. The Rockies are riding a streak of 88 or more losses, yet O’Dowd and Geivett have gone about building the roster in virtually the same way each year: acquire “high-character” veterans, cross your fingers that Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez can stay healthy and productive and then don’t trade anybody at the trade deadline to acquire young assets no matter how poor the team’s record is.
Shockingly, that hasn’t worked and doesn’t even begin to touch on some of the more head-scratching decisions the regime has made including putting the GMs office in the clubhouse and imposing a piggyback rotation in the middle of the season with absolutely no preparation for it and hiring a rookie manager but signing him to a one-year contract.
But now they have an opportunity to start undoing all that and begin overhauling the roster. The first step for Bridich is going to be admitting that this is not a team on the verge of contention as his predecessors always seemed to assume. What the Rockies do have is a few young pieces and a burgeoning farm system. The onus needs to be on developing those prospects and putting them in a position to succeed, something that O’Dowd specifically has utterly failed to do for the last several years, and acquiring more young assets to build a foundation for the future. That means trading Troy Tulowitzki and/or Carlos Gonzalez.
For the outgoing GMs, the idea of dealing Tulo or CarGo has been a non-starter. Having those two as centerpieces was central to their misguided belief that the Rockies were a high-priced left-handed reliever (hi, Boone Logan) away from challenging for the NL West. After four years of watching the Rockies flounder while those two underachieve and/or spend an inordinate amount of time on the disabled list, hopefully Bridich will not fall into the same trap.
In fact, it might already be too late for Colorado to trade Gonzalez who is coming off a trainwreck of a season and two years of seemingly constant injury. Tulowitzki, however, has always been the bigger trade piece. Before he got hurt, an annual right of passage, Tulo was the runaway NL MVP favorite. He’s an elite player at an elite defensive position and he’s signed to a contract that has seven years and $134 million left on it. That’s a lot of money, but is actually quite reasonable for a player of Tulowitzki’s talent.
He’s the piece that the Rockies can move to bring back a treasure trove of top young talent that can reinvigorate a roster that has become increasingly reliant on former Twins in their mid-thirties. It would also be the one move that truly signifies that Colorado finally understands what they need to hit the reset button and spend a few years building a new, sustainable core.
None of that may happen though. Because Bridich is an internal promotion, there is going to be a natural skepticism that he’ll do anything that diverges from what O’Dowd had been doing for the last 15 years. O’Dowd had long had the support of Rockies ownership to the point that O’Dowd’s offer to resign a few years ago was rejected, with O’Dowd getting a promotion instead. If the Monforts have seen the light and empowered Bridich to blaze a new path, then there is hope. But if they tabbed Bridich specifically because he’s willing to carry O’Dowd’s torch into the future, then this amounts to nothing more than a PR move to appease the growing unrest in the fan base.
Given the history of the Rockies, everyone is going to assume it is the latter until they prove otherwise.
