Now permanent Colorado Rockies’ GM Bill Schmidt said he obviously can’t spend like the Dodgers, but his “philosophy” rings hollow as anything other than a self-own.
After Jeff Bridich stepped down in April, Bill Schmidt became the Colorado Rockies interim general manager. On Saturday, after a search that seemed to hardly be exhaustive, Schmidt had the interim tag removed.
“After five months as our interim general manager, it became increasingly clear that Bill was the right person to lead this franchise forward,” Rockies president and CEO Greg Feasel said in a statement. “We already knew Bill as a trusted and respected baseball professional within the game. He came into a challenging situation and quickly Impacted the play on and off the field.”
Schmidt has been in the Rockies’ organization since 1999, serving in various scouting capacities and running the team’s drafts since 2000. So he’s not a fresh voice to help turn things around. Failing to trade impending free agent shortstop Trevor Story is a black mark on his run as interim GM, but the team did play better in the second half of the season.
Rockies GM Bill Schmidt invokes the Dodgers in a certified self-own
Few teams can spend like the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Rockies certainly can’t, and Schmidt said as much on Saturday.
“We’re not the Dodgers. We’re the Colorado Rockies. We scout, draft and develop.”
The Dodgers not only spend, but they also develop. Many of their key players are homegrown, and the continual pipeline of prospects provides assets to make big trades. MLB.com’s midseason (late-August) farm system rankings had them in the middle of the pack (No. 16), but that’s the exception not the rule.
By comparison, MLB.com ranked the Rockies No. 26 in their midseason farm system rankings-fifth-worst in baseball. They have one top-100 prospect (No. 55, outfielder Zac Veen).
So the Rockies not only don’t (or can’t) spend to add outside stars, or in many cases keep their own when they do have them (the big contract they gave Arenado apparently came with some idea conveyed to him that they’d spend, and we know how that ended), they don’t draft or develop well. Developing pitching that can survive Coors Field will always be a struggle, but finding every day players and building any sort of pipeline there has been a struggle too. One-time top prospect Brendan Rogers is the youngest lineup regular, while players like Garrett Hampson haven’t quite found their footing.
Schmidt wants Rockies fans to think the Dodgers spend their way around and out of failures to develop players. But anyone who truly pays attention knows that isn’t the case. By invoking the Dodgers in any way like that, Schmidt levied a solid self-own based on his long run as a point man for the Rockies’ drafting, scouting etc.