When he was working under Billy Beane with the Athletics, Paul DePodesta was on the cutting edge of baseball analytics. He and Beane’s front office were ahead of the curve, using statistical analysis and other modern tools to evaluate players and ultimately revolutionize the game.
While the A’s changed the sport with their “Moneyball” philosophies, the Colorado Rockies were notoriously late to the party. They were much slower to embrace and adopt Beane’s methods, sticking with traditional, old-school methods longer than most teams.
The Rockies are dinosaurs in this regard, and their failure to adapt off the field is a big reason why they’ve floundered so much on the field. They fell behind other teams and are now struggling to catch up.
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After seven straight losing seasons and one of the worst campaigns in MLB history, Colorado still has a long way to go. Finally hiring someone like DePodesta to run its baseball operations department is long overdue, but better late than never.
While the Rockies have developed a poor reputation around the league for their antiquated front office methods and general incompetence, DePodesta was pleasantly surprised to find that things weren’t as bad as he’d heard or feared when he arrived in Denver.
New baseball operations president Paul DePodesta says the #Rockies have more analytical tools than people think. The goal is setting procedures to use it successfuly.https://t.co/SpVFXgvEnl
— Thomas Harding (@harding_at_mlb) November 13, 2025
“I had heard all these things … ‘We may be behind … we think we’re behind,’ and then they gave me a list of all the third-party vendors and all the things that they’re already doing,” DePodesta told MLB.com’s Thomas Harding. “It’s pretty impressive.”
DePodesta may just being publicly nice to his new employers, but the Rockies don’t appear to be light years behind. They recently built a performance lab, use biometrics and have other tools and data to help their players.
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While having the necessary systems, technology and infrastructure is a critical foundation of any Major League front office, DePodesta also acknowledged that the people using the data are just as important as the numbers themselves.
“Sometimes it’s not about what you have, but it’s actually how you utilize all that, how you incorporate that into your decision-making, how you incorporate that into your development system,” DePodesta told Harding.
One of DePodesta’s top priorities will be building on and improving what’s already in place to help bring the organization up to speed.
“I’m interested in seeing what we can do from a technology standpoint, but also how we use it,” DePodesta said. “That might be just as important as saying, ‘We have this system at every level.’ It’s really about how you’re using it and is it really helpful.”