I hate when they say, "It was a good deal at the time." That's not how trades are evaluated. We have to look at the after-effects. It's like saying that the Mets getting Roberto Alomar was an amazing move because AT THE TIME he was great. No. He stunk as a Met, thus, it was a bad move. So far, J.D. Drew has been lousy. Jason Phillips has been lousy. Brad Penny and Derek Lowe have been decent, but not great. Let's look at the big picture. Bottom line, DePo's Dodgers lost 91 games.

Nowhere in that post does it say "it was a good deal at the time."

You want to say Drew was a bad signing - fine. Yes he only played half a season this year but in that half-season he had a .931 OPS. I say it is too early to tell if that is a bad deal. And on the Phillips - Ishii deal - Phillips made $300,000 this year while Ishii made $3 mil. Just as a salary dump alone that was a good deal.

And yes they lost 91 games this year but last year they won the division for the first time in 10-years.

Why doesn't anyone bring up the non-signing of Beltre as a good DePodesta move?

well, from what i can read, the LA media thinks that not signing beltre and finley were just TERRIBLE. or Lima and his 7.0 ERA.

not resigning beltre was good, but not signing a replacement (valentin - puhleeze) was bad.

what theo really did that was bad was to not play politics in an area where politics is more important than just about anything else when you are an outsider

Maybe DePodesta had some faith that building a winner would override political considerations. We can only wish that were the case, I guess.

Meanwhile, "at the time" and "afterward" are both, in my view, valid ways of analyzing a trade. GM's make decisions "at the time," so things have to be evaluated in that respect. Yes, they should be held responsible for the outcomes, but I think in relation to the relative reasonability of them.

Example: JD Drew had a great year hitting the ball, then got smacked in the hand with a pitch. How reasonable to think they'd lose him to such an unpreventable injury? Certainly some. Most people get hurt at some point, and you have to acquire adequate depth to deal with those injuries.

Some in the L.A. media still think that Alex Cora would have been a better choice for second base.

I'm not buying it. A lot of Moneyball fans are desperate to paint DePodesta as some kind of martyr for the cause. Yes, whatever team Lasorda puts together will probably suck, too, although it's worth pointing out that Lasorda does have two more world championships, four more league pennants, and one more Olympic gold medal than Beane and DePodesta.

Question: which team was assembled more by DePodesta? Last year's team that won the division, or this year's team that stank?

Should he have been given another year to better prove himself? Sure. But based on the evidence, i.e., THE RESULTS, the only logical conclusion is that he put together a bad team.

The one thing you can say about DePo is that he saved the team money. Yayyy. When do we get to the part where we get to use that money we saved to pay for players that will help us win?

"it's worth pointing out that Lasorda does have two more world championships, four more league pennants, and one more Olympic gold medal than Beane and DePodesta."

Tommy Lasorda is 78 years old. Paul DePodesta is 32. Billy Beane is 43. What the hell kind of argument is that?

Regarding the money situation, well, DePodesta does not sign the checks. Reports indicate (whether you believe them or not) that DePodesta was held to an extremely tight budget, which is significantly less than McCourt promised upon taking over the team, and has been dropping and will likely continue to decline (despite Shawn Green's and Darren Dreifort's contracts now off the books).

And while you are entitled to your opinion on any GM's work, I think just pointing to a W-L record and using that is "This guy was good" or "This guy was bad" is way too superficial evidence of performance. Sure, W-L record is in large part due to the construction of the team by the GM, but many, MANY other factors come into play in determining a club's record, not limited to injuries, MANAGERIAL DECISIONS, owner's proclivites and financial abilities/limitations. Just pointing at a record as the a "bottom-line" indicator is very short-sighted and unconstructive.

Also take into account that fact someone on a five-year contract can reasonably expect to have some sort of plan that goes beyond selling out in Year 2 for a team unpredictably devastated by injuries to attempt to trade for few worthy players in an obvious sellers' market at the deadline or bring up unprepared prospects to salvage a .500 season and get smoked in the first round of the playoffs.

Some comments:

* A Harvard grad not aware or caring of politics? :^)

* I think any complete analysis of a trade has to take into context the situation the GM faced when making his move. For example, what were his options? Just because the player did not perform well eventually does not necessarily make it a bad move because the alternatives that were available at that time may have been worse. Sometimes life leaves you between a rock and a hard place and you are forced to chose your best option. When you are competitive enough for the division title, going with a young prospect is not always palatable when a "proven" vet is available, but each carry their own type of risk.

* JD Drew's injury may not have been preventable but you need to view that in context of his career where he has been continuously injured for one reason or another; I don't know the details but have to assume he has had a number of "unpreventable" injuries. At some point you have to think that he's just prone to injuries. And now the Dodgers now have their hitter budget drag equivalent to Darren Dreifort. The comment about Bradley's 1 year contract would have been appropriate for Drew IMO, he just had that one good year in his free agency year where he probably took it "easy" and tried to avoid injuries.

I would have ponied up the extra shechels to get Carlos Beltran instead, though that move would have engendered its own post-deal criticisms given his poor performance in NY this past season. But I still think with Beltran you have some hope for performance while with Drew I would expect another injury, preventable or not, causing him to miss a significant number of games for the rest of his career. With him (like with the Giants with our Bonds and Alou situation), you have to expect to need to have capable backups who are potentially a starter to pick up some of the slack when the big boys are out of the lineup.

They were lucky that Jose Cruz Jr. came in, after flopping with Arizona and Boston, and hit a ton for them, essentially replacing Drew's bat. He never hit well at Dodger Stadium before the 2005 season and, given its pitching orientation, his 28 stellar games hitting there in 2005 is probably a fluke. His career .772 OPS on the road is a better indication of what they can expect, not the .923 OPS they got in 2005.

* I agree that the non-signing of Beltre was good, as well as the dumping of Green and actually still getting good prospects for him was greater still, and I even give kudos for signing Kent (hard to say as a Giants fan), but then he shot himself in the foot signing the injury plagued Drew and the recent poorly performing Lowe.

* About Lowe, as an FYI, Baseball Prospectus translated his results to be a -5 Runs Against Average and had a normalized Runs Allowed of 4.69 and a Defense-Adjusted ERA of 4.58, where 4.50 is the normalized ERA; which means that Lowe's stats, when adjusted for LA's normal pitching-orientation, was slightly below average, which I would consider a poor investment of 4 years and $36M.

What happened to their stable of highly touted starting pitchers? They couldn't either flip one for a starter or perhaps tried one of them instead as a starter? There must have been better alternatives out there; Millwood, for example, was available for $7M (Cleveland signed him) for just one season.

* As opposed to the Brad Penny signing, who, according to BP's adjusted stats, has been an average to above average pitcher during most of his career and, as noted by another poster, is only 27, so, especially if compared to the Lowe signing, this is a great deal. And relative to deals that pitchers like Kris Benson got, seemed to be in line with their accomplishments. Some could say that DePodesta was Penny-wise and Drew-Lowe-foolish. (sorry, couldn't resist)

Overall, as a Giants fan, I am happy over the move. The firing can be spun either as an owner finally figuring things out and doing the right thing or as an owner who is a Steinbrenner wannabe with an itchy trigger finger; you can guess which way I prefer, though I believe it is too soon to say which it is.

Either way, when there is turmoil in the upper management ranks, there will always be confusion and fear among the rank and file employees, unsure over how the new GM will be. Management turmoil is usually not a good thing, especially when an outsider is brought in as the replacement. While this is no guarantee that things will turn out horribly, it leaves open that possibility, especially with a novice owner being guided by Lasorda. In addition, as a saber-believer, I am happy that the Dodgers appear to be moving away from the use of sabermetrics with this move.

But, these are all my interim feelings until we see how McCourt runs this GM search and who he choses and why. Early money appears to be on Gillick for GM and Valentine for manager, but there must be a reason that no MLB team has hired Gillick for over two seasons and why Valentine is working in Japan. Plus I'm hoping for an extended circus of prospective GMs coming through the doors and making this a long and drawn out affair. However, given that Lasorda appears to be orchestrating the moves and influencing McCourt greatly, one would have to assume that his "recommendations" of Gillick and Valentine would carry a ton of weight.

My main hope right now is that Gillick will balk at hiring Valentine as manager and cause Lasorda and McCourt to go back to the drawing board in their GM search. My other hope is that given Gillick's bad experience in Baltimore with a meddling owner (he mentioned this in an interview), he will turn down the LA job because McCourt could not convince Gillick that he's not a micro-managing owner - which I would assume would be a hard thing to do when you fired your GM after only two years. Given Gillick's advanced age (late 60's; 69?) and legacy of excellence, my last hope is that he might prefer to go to a place like Philadephia, which, to me, is better poised with good prospects and good players than the Dodgers are. He doesn't have to time (i.e. too old) to turn around a team and I think the Dodgers are in such a situation because of the amount of change it experienced after its first division title in 10 seasons and its recent legacy of poor results.

Using the W-L record as a bottom-line indicator may be crude, but ultimately, that's the stat that matters. Now, it may not be a full indicator of his abilities, just as a pitcher's W-L record or a batter's RBI numbers are more indicative of results than abilities.

To put it another way, the personnel decisions a GM makes are like a pitcher's ability to strike guys out and keep the ball in the park, or a batter's ability to judge when to swing or not to swing. But those are things that go into a black box that is the baseball season, and coming out the other end are the results. I think with ballplayers it's fairly well-established what good components are and what good results are. Smart baseball fans know that the good components are more reliable indicators of good results than previous year's results are. Pitchers show more consistency with their ERA than in their W-L numbers, for example.

With a GM, though, it's much more subjective. You can evaluate things on a trade-by-trade basis, or you can look at who was available and who he got, or what he did with the money he had, or take a look at each position and see whether there was improvement or not at the position, etc. There's a whole lot of second-guessing there. All we really know, though, are the results. How much money he spent and whether it ended up with wins or losses.

And no, the results don't tell the whole story, especially not with the very limited sample size we're seeing with DePodesta.

But the results that we DO have paint a very sorry picture of DePodesta. Maybe he made all the right moves but was the unluckiest man on the face of the earth. Or maybe he made a bunch of bad moves and, consequently, ended up with a bad team. I think it's more likely that if you ended up with a bad team, then you made bad moves.

Again, a result like this would be easier to evaluate if we had more evidence to go off of. So yes, I think McCourt fired DePodesta too early. But if things continued the way they were, then one day he was going to have to go. All we can do is evaluate the job Paul did while he was the GM. In my evaluation, the evidence we have is that he did a poor job. But I'm open to the idea that he might have built a winner for the future, given more time.

Just looking back at the previous off-season, I thought before the 2005 season started that the Dodger team looked pretty awful, with serious offensive liabilities at far too many positions, defensive liabilities at many positions, and an okay but not great pitching staff. Then, a miracle happened and we got off to an excellent start. But soon, things played out exactly the way I saw it from the beginning--- mediocre pitching without the offense or defense to compensate. Plus some key injuries.

But every team gets injuries. You can't say "if only Drew and Gagne and Bradley were healthy, then this would have been a great team." It wouldn't have been. If you're going to make that statement, you have to say the same thing for every team in the league. Some more than others, but there's no way that those injuries were the sole cause --- or even the major cause --- of them finishing 20 games below .500 after leading the division the previous year.

Face it, people are bending over backwards to defend the guy because he's a Moneyball guy. This doesn't have to be a referendum on the validity of Moneyball. It doesn't even have to be a referendum on DePodesta's potential as a GM. It's just a recognition that in his two years with the Dodgers, he didn't fix their problems and ended up with a lousy team.

Well said, Adam.

Adam,

You made some good points. I would strongly disagree with your assessment of his performance, (I would say he did an above-average job), but obviously we each hold our own opinions that are probably unlikely to change. It is especially hard to rate GMs, because like you mentioned, we can't necessarily isolate his "component stats" nor quantify many of his capabilities, so we tend to take a weight his W-L record as a crude indicator of success; just because it's the easiest to quantify and all we have to judge by, doesn't enforce its validity.
I would also disagree that "some key injuries" played a factor in their difficulties. Huge understatement. Don't want to base this whole discussion around J.D. Drew's injury history, but injuries really did play a huge role in crippling the Dodgers this year, more so than any other team.
I do agree that DePodesta is being made out to be somewhat of a martyr by many of his fans, but defending him is a natural reaction to a decision like this by a meddling, incompetent ownership marriage (which goes far, far beyond this firing) supported by a backstabbing senile old man.

In a certain sense, then, I guess it boils down to how much of an impact the injuries made. Maybe somebody skilled in the mysterious art of the Win Share (I know I'm not) could extrapolate Bradley, Drew, and Gagne's contributions to a full year. Of course, with the way the NL West turned out this year, the team wouldn't have had to be that much better in order to win the division.

Winning a weak division by default isn't really the result Dodger fans are looking for, though, of course. I want a team that wins, and I don't want to have to go down to Orange County to find that team.

I should also note that my listing of Lasorda's achievements above wasn't really meant to imply that I think he's the great leader Bill Plaschke thinks he is. He's the poster boy for doing things the old way. What I meant is that he does know *something* about baseball. That even though his methods are outdated, he's skilled enough with them to come up with pretty good outcomes. Particularly, I'm proud of him for beating the Cubans in 2000 --- I think that's one of the most underrated achievements in sport over the last few years.

But basically, I think your assessment is right--- "a meddling, incompetent ownership marriage (which goes far, far beyond this firing) supported by a backstabbing senile old man".

Lasorda does things the old way. Maybe he's even one of the best at doing things the old way. I still believe the new way's better than the old way, but maybe Lasorda's skill with the old way might work out better than the results they've had with the new way.

In response to BGF about JD Drew: I don't believe in injury-prone players, unless we're talking about players with recurring or cascading injuries, where the original injury comes back or it causes other injuries, often in pitchers by changing mechanics (e.g. a bad elbow turns into labrum surgery, or bad knees into TJ).

It seems that injury-proneness comes from people wanting to see patterns, as we so often do. In a game such as baseball, where players constantly get hurt, you'd expect random chance to pile injuries up on some unlucky fellows. That doesn't make their injuries predictable, though, in any way that should be taken seriously be a front office.

Drew's injury this year has nothing to do with the risk that he brought with him. That risk came, as I recall, from his knees. Unless it's clear that his bad knees caused him to not be able to get out of the way of a wayward pitch, I don't think anyone but that pitcher can be blamed for Drew missing time.

Damn or praise Depodesta all you want. McCourt is establishing a terrifying track record for Dodger fans. What is all the more disturbing is to consider that Dan Evans did a spectacular job putting together the 2004 Division Champs, as well as restoring a much depleted farm system. He deserves far more credit for the 2004 team than Depodesta, and did not deserve to be fired. As for the 2005 team, Depodesta can take every last bit of credit. Depodesta seemed to be well on the way to deserving layoff, but, seems to have deserved better from McCourt.

I won't miss Depodesta, but it's alarming to consider McCourt's inability to evaluate baseball situations, especially since he seems like such a reactionary fellow. He seems constantly to be attempting to appease both the fans and the media, while not addressing the bigger issues. Plus, in spite of what he may say, I don't believe he will spend the money. While I'm not about to begin routing for the Angels, I am preparing myself to go back into a LA Rams fan mindset and just revel in the ineptitude.

McCourt is like Stienbrenner, only without any cash... or, perhaps a more suitable comparison, McCourt is going to give Donald Sterling a run for his money as LA's most dispicable sports figure.