The Dodgers Lost Their Nerve by Richard Meade

Picture the scene - you are a wealthy Real Estate entrepreneur who has just taken over an MLB team. You want to bring in fresh faces, give the team a strong reputation, and encourage a winning attitude. So one of the first things you do is hire a GM with a big reputation who believes in a new brand of baseball.

In the GM’s first season the team bring home the divisional title and in an injury plagued second season the team finish fourth.

What do you do?

If you’re Frank McCourt, Chairman of the LA Dodgers, you let your GM sack your team’s Manager then you sack your General Manager and leave your fans and players scratching their heads about how the team is going to be run next season.

Last week McCourt came out in front of a packed press conference and announced that after only two seasons he had shown GM Paul DePodesta the door. The first thing that sprang to my mind was that McCourt had lost his nerve.

When LA hired DePodesta in 2004 I remember thinking that it was a good move. I had just read Moneyball and I was interested to see that another big league club was taking notice of what Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s had managed to achieve. I was eager to see what DePodesta, who had come to fame as part of that organisation, was going to do with this team. Would we see a Dodgers team to be feared or was their new GM going to drop the ball?

Initially things looked good, despite inheriting a manger rather than choosing one, LA took the division by two games but went out in four games to the St Louis Cardinals in the NL divisional series.

DePodesta started making some big trades, most controversially one that took Paul Lo Duca to the Marlins. He brought in Jeff Kent, J.D. Drew and Derek Lowe and began creating a team he thought could compete.

But then the injuries struck and everyone got nervous. The Dodgers suffered an abysmal season and rather than chalking it up to a transition period or looking at the amount of players they had on the DL, LA got scared and sacked everyone.

I don’t understand how they could have come to that decision. Any other GM would have been given the benefit of the doubt or at least a couple more seasons crack at the whip. Would Paul DePodesta’s brand of baseball have worked in LA? We will never know for sure. But I think it is a shame that rather than let the man build his team and see where he could go with it the Dodgers lost their nerve and decided to start again.