The Futility Infielder

I was relentlessly critical of new Dodger owner Frank McCourt in his underfinanced but nonetheless successful pursuit to purchase the team. He didn't win too many points immediately afterwards for his treatment of GM Dan Evans, a man who's done a respectable job under the most trying of circumstances, yet is being given an invitation to leave. But if it's the new owner's prerogative to do things his way, then McCourt's first major decision looks like a bold and creative one, at least if the early reports are correct. According to ESPN's Peter Gammons, the Dodgers are going to tap Oakland A's assistant GM Paul DePodesta, Billy Beane's right-hand man for the past five years, as Evans' replacement.

Evans deserves better. Saddled with some ungodly contracts attached to physically unsound players -- thank you, Kevin Malone -- he handled the situation responsibly, resisting the temptation to throw good money after bad, helping to rebuild the farm system, and protecting the team's plum prospects in the face of considerable temptation to trade them for some lumber. All while assembling the league's best pitching staff, mind you.

Meanwhile, DePodesta is considered perhaps the top GM prospect in the game. A 31-year-old Harvard grad, he developed some serious analytical tools, as detailed in the smash hit Moneyball, which have keyed the A's rise to success on a shoestring budget. Whether he has the other skills -- particularly the ability to run an organization and to make deals with other GMs -- remains to be seen. But from the looks of this lengthy (and very corporate-speak) presentation, he certainly brings a thorough and well-crafted organizational philosophy to the table.

Some articles have spun DePodesta's hiring as all but a done deal. But McCourt seems to be backing away to interview other candidates. Since one of those candidates is Phillies assistant GM Ruben Amaro, Jr., this may be simply a CYA move to interview at least one minority candidate and avoid drawing the Wrath of Bud. Not that Amaro isn't legit; he's been highly touted as a GM prospect for a few years. But the opportunitiy to nab DePodesta, whose strategies and experience mesh well with the Dodgers' needs as they begin the McCourt era, should not be passed up.

DePodesta's familiarity with building a winning ballclub on the cheap will be a necessity if he takes over the suddenly cash-conscious Dodgers. There are several areas in which he can applying some lessons from the Oakland model and some sound sabermetric principles to reap some serious benefits for the Dodgers. If any team needs to be hit by the sabermetric 2" x 4", it's the one in Chavez Ravine.

First and perhaps foremost, the Dodgers need to develop a thorough understanding of park effects and the way they distort performance. Dayn Perry of Baseball Prospectus did a thoughtful piece last summer which shed some light on the team's inability to develop hitters:

In fact, for much of their history, they've been less offensive than a Billy Graham knock-knock joke. The Dodgers haven't finished in the top five in the NL in runs scored since 1991, and they've led the senior circuit in runs scored exactly twice since moving to Los Angeles prior to the 1958 season. Additionally, they've been one of the worst organizations in baseball in terms of identifying and developing hitters. The lineage of highly productive, homegrown Dodger hitters runs from Mike Piazza (himself a nepotistic afterthought when tapped in the 62nd round of the 1988 amateur draft) to...Pedro Guerrero? If I'm in a charitable mood I'll throw in the merely decent Raul Mondesi and the so-far-so-good Paul Lo Duca, but you get the idea.

So why is that? Part of it is the "Dodger Way" -- an emphasis on pitching, often to the detriment of the offense -- but part of it may be the developmental environment in which their young hitters toil. I'm talking park effects.

It's not exactly breaking news that the hitting clime at the Dodgers' Triple-A affiliate (now Las Vegas, previously Albuquerque) stands in sharp contrast to that of Dodger Stadium, arguably the toughest park for hitters in the majors.

Dayn goes on to crunch some numbers which show that in terms of park effects, the Dodgers had the second-largest difference between their major league ballpark, which favors pitchers in the extreme, and their full-season minor league affiliates. Regarding this, over the winter I've had several discussions with B-Pro's Ryan Wilkins, who wrote the Dodger chapter in the forthcoming book, about this phenomenon, and he said that farm director Bill Bavasi, now the Mariners' GM, hadn't even considered it. As far as I'm concerned, this is like your sexually active teenage daughter saying she hasn't even considered the idea of contraception -- it's dangerously ignorant on multiple levels. In light of Perry's study and Wilkins' anecdote, the Dodgers' failure to develop hitters becomes more clear. Failing to understand the terrain on which they reside, the expectations they place on their minor league hitters are unreasonable, and when a player like second baseman Joe Thurston doesn't pan out, they're left in a fall-back position.

Hand in hand with understanding the environment in which they're producing hitters, of course, comes identifying good young hitters in the first place. Here's another area the Oakland philosophy can help, both in the application of sabermetric principles -- getting down with OBP and searching for hitters who can control the strike zone, using performance analysis as a tool to aid this -- and in shifting the organization's emphasis from drafting high-school players (particularly pitchers) and infatuation with the tools/scouting side of things. As broached in Moneyball, those two concepts are united by the fact that it's much easier to analyze performance on a college level than it is a high school one, due to the longer seasons, the greater amount of data available, and a more even caliber of competition. From what I recall in Moneyball (which I don't have in front of me, having lent it out), DePodesta was the one in charge of the organization's analysis of college ballplayers in the first place. Check.

The Dodgers have largely emphasized high school rather than college players in drafting; both of Evans' first-round picks were high schoolers. In John Sickels' look at the Dodgers' top prospects on ESPN.com, of the 17 he profiles, only four played college ball, three of them in community college. All seven of the pitchers listed are high schoolers, and while Edwin Jackson and Gregg Miller are thought of as among the top prospects in the game, young pitchers will break your heart more often than not, and the Dodgers will be lucky if a few of the ones listed survive to contribute on a major-league level.

But looking over the team's #1 d(r)aft picks from the past 14 years, high school prospects are only part of the problem:

2003 Chad Billingsley, RHP, HS
2002 James Loney, 1B, HS
2001 (lost due to signing Andy Ashby)
2000 Ben Diggins, RHP, Arizona U.
1999 (lost due to ??)
1998 Bubba Crosby, CF, Rice U.
1997 Glenn Davis, 1B, Vanderbilt U.
1996 Damian Rolls, 3B, HS
1995 David Yocum, LHP, Florida State U.
1994 Paul Konerko, C, HS
1993 Darren Dreifort, RHP, Wichita St. U.
1992 (lost due to ??)
1991 (lost due to ??)
1990 Ronnie Walden, LHP, HS

That's five high schoolers, five collegiates, and four zeroes, one even bigger because it's attached to Andy Ashby. While scanning these top picks constitutes a pretty superficial analysis, the above is a pretty abysmal record unless Loney and Billingsley pan out. Only three of these players -- Dreifort, Konerko, and Rolls -- have had any significant major league career, and that's being generous in Rolls' case. More importantly, only one of these players has had any impact with the Dodgers, and that one, Dreifort, has been the bane of their existence ever since signing a five-year, $55 million contract that's so far seen them spend $31 million for eight wins and 155 innings of below-average pitching. That absurd contract mistake shouldn't fall directly on the shoulders of those who drafted him, but Dreifort has an ERA+ of 95 over the course of his career, and that's nothing to write home about for an overall #2 pick or the organization which picked him.

The bottom line is that even if the Dodgers have done a very good job of drafting lately, they need to get themselves on some fundamentally solid footing as they move forward, and DePodesta's emphasis on drafting college players and understanding what to look for in them would be a big boost.

Another feature from the Oakland model which the Dodgers would do well to emulate is not overpaying for replaceable talent. The Dodgers recently avoided arbitration with third baseman Adrian Beltre, who will turn 25 in April, by signing him to a $5 million contract. Beltre's a combined 7.8 Wins Above Replacement (WARP1) over the past three years, pretty measly, and by most sabermetric measure he's a below-average hitter and fielder. Meanwhile, as Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman pointed out, that money is only $400,000 less than the Yankees are paying Alfonso Soriano (who, to be fair, has less service time). Soriano is 21.7 Wins Above Replacement over the past three years. At this point in their careers, Soriano is a superstar with some flaws in his game, while Beltre's a flawed player with what many once believed was superstar potential -- and their prices are a wash. A cash-conscious team has no business paying $5 mil to a disappointing cipher like Beltre, and that move must be considered a black mark against Evans' name this winter. The DePo Dodgers would likely avoid those kinds of mistakes.

DePodesta would be an ideal GM choice for an organization that's desperately in need of change and facing some unique challenges -- particularly tight purse strings -- in the immediate future. McCourt's hiring of DePo would send a clear message that these aren't the Fox Dodgers, nor are they the latter-day O'Malley ones. There's plenty not to like about the McCourt sale, but if it drags this franchise kicking and screaming into the 21st century, then it won't all be for naught. And if DePodesta can apply what he's learned in Oakland, the Dodgers might actually have a chance to build something special and to instill hopes in the hearts of their fans once more.