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Tuesday, February 17, 2004
duty-free information!
we have here an article from the venerable wall street journal. they make you pay for their words (bastards!), so it is my duty to free the information.
the ancient greeks thought it important for the rhetorician to first establish his credentials:
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Carl Bialik and Jason Fry write The Daily Fix every weekday morning for the Online Journal. The Daily Fix offers links to the best of the day's sports columns from around the country -- whether it's the latest trade talk in major-league baseball or the newest furor about an athlete's life off the field.
Carl is a technology reporter with the Online Journal. He has contributed to CNNSI.com, Media Life Magazine and The Monitor (Uganda) and interned at the Online Journal and the Village Voice. Jason was technology editor of the Online Journal from 1996 through late 2000, and is now an assistant managing editor. Carl and Jason are both graduates of Yale University.
Dodgers Opt to Play Beaneball
With First Hire of McCourt Era
You may have heard the news over the weekend about a big-market baseball team acquiring top talent from a poorer club. The Fix is talking, of course, about the Los Angeles Dodgers' hiring of Oakland A's assistant general manager Paul DePodesta – let's call him D-Pod -- as their new GM.
Mr. DePodesta is a disciple of Billy Beane, the A's GM whose knack for acquiring top talent at low prices has propelled low-budget Oakland into the playoffs for four straight years. Mr. Beane's methods, as chronicled in last year's best-seller "Moneyball," are relatively heavy on sophisticated analysis of players' actual performance numbers, and light on baseball chestnuts like "intangibles" and "five-tool players." Mr. DePodesta was portrayed in the book as a computer nerd from Harvard, leaving some L.A. columnists suspicious despite Oakland's remarkable success. He is also, ahem, rather young.
paul is not a disciple of billy beane. he is an associate (was). many of the successful techniques developed by the recent a's were his.
"The Dodgers have a new face, and it is dabbed in Clearasil," Bill Plaschke writes in the L.A. Times. "The Dodgers have a new voice, and it speaks in megabytes. Meet General Manager.Com, otherwise known as Paul DePodesta, a 31-year-old computer nerd who was hired Monday to rid the Dodgers of their, um, virus."
But, as Orange County Register columnist Mark Whicker notes in his profile of Mr. DePodesta, the new GM isn't just an adept programmer. In "Moneyball," Mr. Whicker writes, there's "not a word about DePodesta's work as an advance scout for Cleveland. Not an anecdote from A's spring training mornings, as he rode around with wise man Bill Rigney."
Hiring Mr. DePodesta is Frank McCourt's first major move as Dodgers owner, and has won over some skeptics of the new regime. L.A. Daily News columnist Steve Dilbeck writes that "to lead the Dodgers back to their first playoff appearance since 1996, McCourt went with unproven youth, yet youth full of obvious potential." Mr. Dilbeck points out that other young GMs -- including Boston's Theo Epstein, who also plays Beaneball -- have done well. So has Toronto's J.P. Ricciardi, a disciple of Mr. Beane.
the dodgers will soon be the class of the nl west.
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