On Paul DePodesta, Craig Wright, and rounding out the Dodgers narrative.

In case you missed my piece on Andrew Friedman’s front office in Tampa, and how the Dodgers’ front office might evolve under their new President, Baseball Operations, here it is.

In choosing the narrative I chose — comparing the Dodgers’ front office under Fred Claire to their front office under Ned Colletti to the Rays’ front office under Friedman — I ignored what you might call some “inconvenient truths.” It’s not so much that I ignored them; there just wasn’t space to properly acknowledge them and still write a story that you would want to read.

Truth number one: The brief Paul DePodesta era (2004-05). Here’s an extended summary of what happened and how it was perceived.

Truth number two: Craig Wright.

Who, you ask?

Wright was a Bill James disciple, one of baseball’s early prominent “sabermetricians.” He’s written a book about baseball history and another about baseball theory. Wright also keeps one of Mike Piazza’s catcher’s masks at his home in Montana, but not in a creepy way.

Anyway, Claire hired Wright has a consultant and kept him on until Tommy Lasorda took over as GM. In a 2010 interview, Wright talked about how the Dodgers under Claire — you might want to sit down for this — were one of the first teams to accept sabermetric thinking into its front office.

From seamheads.com:

SH: Was Claire one of the ‘early adopters’ of sabermetrics among GMs?

CRW: In the area of player evaluation, yes, unquestionably. By today’s standards, his reliance on the use of the science of baseball in that area might be considered pedestrian, even conservative. But back then his attitude was quite revolutionary. He listened to my explanations and arguments with a very open mind. He had a wealth of traditional advisors he relied on a great deal and I often was on the minority side of a decision, but I always felt like I got a fair hearing from Fred. I did appreciate that a particularly compelling argument would register with Fred, and I also felt like he had a little scorecard going in the back of his head, and I was steadily gaining as the years went along. As I proved myself, he gave greater weight to my recommendations and sought my opinion in a wider variety of cases.

A huge example of how open-minded Fred was came in the fall of 1994 when he told me I could do the job of a GM and do it well. He encouraged me in seeking an interview for a GM opening in St. Louis and served as a recommendation. So did Tom Grieve and Sandy Johnson, but Fred was the one who first saw that as a possibility for someone with my background. That would not seem odd today, but back then which is even before this Moneyball nonsense it was truly off-the-charts radical.

So yes, Wright doesn’t completely fit the narrative, and not just my own. He’s an outlier worth acknowledging — maybe not in a Malcolm Gladwell book or Brad Pitt movie — but still worth acknowledging.

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About J.P. Hoornstra

J.P. Hoornstra covers the Dodgers, Angels and Major League Baseball for the Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News, Long Beach Press-Telegram, Torrance Daily Breeze, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star-News, San Bernardino Sun, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Whittier Daily News and Redlands Daily Facts. Before taking the beat in 2012, J.P. covered the NHL for four years. UCLA gave him a degree once upon a time; when he graduated on schedule, he missed getting Arnold Schwarzenegger's autograph on his diploma by five months.