In 2012, O'Dowd's 13th season, he hasn't put a championship-contending club on the field.

Yeah, that 2007 World Series team had zero shot at a championship...

The 2007 and 2009 playoff teams were both built around homegrown players, or young players acquired on the cheap. Not a single regular on either team had ever been a regular for another team.

This year, O'Dowd shipped out young veterans like Seth Smith, Ian Stewart and Chris Iannetta in favor of a bunch of guys in their mid-30s who weren't even all that good in their mid-20s. This was an entirely predictable disaster.

They're so worthless that O'Dowd can't even unload these guys for middling prospects. Who's going to want to pay Michael Cuddyer $11 million in 2013 and 2014 when his upside is being a league-average right fielder?

The only “culture” O’Dowd changed was bacterial.

I see what he did th... no, actually I don't.

Here's Woody Paige from spring training:

The Rockies don't want Bolshevik Ballet, but businesslike baseball.

These are professional players, not that Cotton Candy Corps the Rockies put on the field last year.

Let's be straight here. Chris Iannetta had become a pain in the box because his batting average stunk; Ian Stewart was a waste of time; Seth Smith was a nice guy who should be playing cricket as a left-handed batsman hitting sweepshots...

If there's any evidence that he thought this year's team would be horrible, he forgot to mention that.

It doesn't help when Jim Tracy is your manager.

Yeah, that 2007 World Series team had zero shot at a championship...

Reelin' Dan O'Dowd hasn't provided Denver with a championship-contending team in 11 — yes, 11 — of his 13 seasons while serving as general manager, chief baseball officer and executive vice president of the Rockies.

Paige did answer that.

If there's any evidence that he thought this year's team would be horrible, he forgot to mention that.

Woody aspires to be Dan Shaughnessy.

Woody's not a good writer, is he?

I still don't get the one sentence paragraph thing that sports columnist do now.

If 11 of 13 is too low, what is a reasonable amount?

I think playing in the NL West, in Denver you should be around 50% contending for the division.

As far as a title? Maybe once a decade unless you end up with a Pujols or an A-Rod type player.

Reelin' Dan O'Dowd hasn't provided Denver with a championship-contending team in 11 — yes, 11 — of his 13 seasons while serving as general manager, chief baseball officer and executive vice president of the Rockies.

That's not really true, as Paige ought to know. The 2010 team was in contention all year, and with two weeks left in the season, they were one game back in the NL West at 82-66. They proceeded to lose 13 of their last 14 games and ended up 9 back, so if you just look at the final standings, you might think they were never in it. But they were contenders.

Once a decade for a title is really optimistic. Really the best you can hope for is contending and after that, see what happens.

I do think being out of the race for 11 out of 13 years, especially with the Dodgers fighting with one hand tied behind their back due to shitty ownership, is not good enough to keep your job. The book on O'Dowd before 2007 was that he was a habitual plan-switcher who couldn't settle on how to make the Rockies competitive in Coors Field. He then sorta-stumbled on a plan of using young players and guys he drafted after years of picking near the top of the draft, then switched again to expensive veterans with predictable results.

Signing Cuddyer was really dumb, but giving Todd Helton a contract extension when he was already in decline due to age and a bad back was equally dumb.

Well, there is the troubling "strategy a year" thing. It looked for a while O'Dowd had broken from that until the last offseason.

But if you count 2005 as a change in organizational philosophy (the first year in their youth movement), they've contended 3 times in 8 years, counting this year as a non-contending year. (They were a game back on Sept 18 in 2010 before shitting the bed, that's contending, right?)

The 8 years have been a lot better than the previous 12. (O'Dowd obviously has a hand in some of the failures of those earlier years.) I don't know if that's enough to save his job. I also find it interesting that O'Dowd has acted more Tracy-like (throwing people under the bus) than Tracy.

I still don't get the one sentence paragraph thing that sports columnist do now.

I see what you did there.

Signing Cuddyer was really dumb, but giving Todd Helton a contract extension when he was already in decline due to age and a bad back was equally dumb.

The Helton extension doesn't really bother me in isolation, as long as they realized it was time to start his transition into platoon first baseman/pinch hitter/elder statesman. Sure Helton would be overpaid, but I don't have any problem with keeping one of the best players in franchise history around a little longer than is strictly necessary.

But they already have Jason Giambi in that role, which means it's impossible to bring in a RH first baseman to spell Helton. And it doesn't seem to have occurred to the Rockies that Helton was going to get old someday; they have exactly zero young first basemen on the horizon. In that Woody Paige spring training piece I linked to earlier, he says: "Cuddyer (on a three-year deal) will be in right until 2014 and, presumably, move to first when Helton retires." That's not a plan; that's just pathetic.

wher my tacoes

But if you count 2005 as a change in organizational philosophy (the first year in their youth movement), they've contended 3 times in 8 years, counting this year as a non-contending year. (They were a game back on Sept 18 in 2010 before shitting the bed, that's contending, right?)

The 8 years have been a lot better than the previous 12.

Only contending three times in eight years, especially in a weak division, shouldn't be nearly enough to save a job that has encompassed 12 seasons of mostly failures.

#'s 12 and 15:
The other angle there was re-working Helton's existing contract, which called for a $19.1M salary in 2011 with a $4.6M buyout on the option for 2012.

The Rockies have supposedly been around ownership's payroll ceiling the past few seasons, so looking at the moves they made between that re-working and the 2011 opener, I guess the biggest thing it enabled them to do was re-sign De la Rosa, who then blew out his elbow:

*Re-signed De la Rosa
*Tulo re-extension (2011 salary didn't change)
*CarGo extension (I think he was already pre-arb for 2011)
*Betancourt extension (already signed for 2011, 2011 salary didn't change)
*Belisle extension (already signed for 2011, 2011 salary didn't change)
*Hammel deal (2-yr deal, bought out some arb years)
*Lindstrom deal (2-yr deal, avoiding arb)

And retaining Hammel and Lindstrom of course enabled the masterstroke of acquiring innings-eater Jeremy Guthrie and stabilizing the rotation.

At least we now know that O'Dowd posts here under the "Davo" handle:

35. Davo Malvolio Posted: February 06, 2012 at 06:15 PM (#4054967)
Why oh why was I so certain that Guthrie was an extreme sinkerball, ground-ball pitcher? Was that his reputation in the minors or something? Or did I just completely make it up? [Guthrie trade thread]

The concept of the "Dan O'Dowd era" is unclear to my ears. It seems like the Dan O'Dowd period comprised four or five eras each with its own philosophy of team formation. He's like Jean-Baptiste Colbert, taking an interest in everything and changing with the times.

I still don't get the one sentence paragraph thing that sports columnist do now.

It's not so much "now" as a traditional thing, from when sports columns appeared as actual columns on a newspaper page, a couple inches wide. One sentence paragraphs look best that way. I remember looking at Rick Telander's section of the Sun-Times website fifteen years ago and saying "Man, these articles look kind of weird with all this white space."

Jamie Moyer got smacked around again today, giving up seven earned runs in five innings. What was the point of that again?

So Moyer could teach the younglings how to pitch like a veteran.

The Rockies, by the way, have five hits today - all solo homers. That has to be some sort of record.

Jamie Moyer is just pitching to the score! Unforgivably, he pitched to the score too much and gave up too many runs.

Jamie Moyer is just pitching to the score!

Speaking of which...Tommy Hutton was going on today about how Matt Cain seems to have the same pitching to the score ability that Jack Morris had.

I quickly clicked over to the Twins where Blyleven was yakking about the protection Prince Fielder provides for Cabrera.

(threw clicker into mudshitter)

Speaking of which...Tommy Hutton was going on today about how Matt Cain seems to have the same pitching to the score ability that Jack Morris had.

Actually, I think Cain has the same pitching to the score thing that Bert Blyleven is alleged to have had.

The Rockies, by the way, have five hits today - all solo homers. That has to be some sort of record.

Not only that, but they had no walks. Mat Latos had a perfect BABIP and K/BB rate, and suffered from no errors. And he still allowed five runs. First time since 1971 (McClain) that a starter allowed 5 HRs, no other hits, and no walks.

the protection Prince Fielder provides for Cabrera

It's a good thing he has that or he might be having one of the worst years of his career offensively so far!

It does seem like the Rox franchise is getting kind of stagnant and while I don't think O'Dowd is a bad GM, it probably is time for a change. Last winter's moves did seem like a "save my job" kinda winter, and I think everyone here saw a terrible season coming a mile away, so it wouldn't surprise me to see them make a change soon.

I will give him a lot of credit for selling high on Ubaldo, although it makes me a bit curious about what they knew and when they knew it.

Don't folks like Woody remember the pre-O'Dowd era? You know, when the Rockies couldn't put even one decent starting pitcher on the field? When people would ponder, in all seriousness, the question of whether it was even possible to field a winning team at altitude? O'Dowd was one of the best things ever to happen to the Rockies. I'm not saying his time isn't up; it probably is. But his time at the helm has to be judged a success, on balance. He was the guy who proved the MLB in Denver could actually work.

God has spoken, I see. Given the Rockies' reputation for piety, I presume that's that.