Now that the 2012 season has finally come to an end, Rockies fans can begin to forget this horrible season ever happened. We all thought we could start forgetting at the end of the regular season, but things actually got worse. First, we had to watch Seth Smith put the A’s on his back and almost carry them to a first round, come-from-behind victory with game-saving/winning hits in games 3 and 4. At the same time, we watched Jason Hammel put up two good outings against the Yankees, proving yet again how horrible the Jeremy Guthrie trade turned out. Then, we had to endure Marco Scutaro turning into a San Francisco folk hero as he tore up the Cardinals in the NLCS and won MVP honors for the series. As if that wasn’t enough, he had the World Series clinching hit for the Giants proving that it is possible to have fun when Dan O’Dowd isn’t your boss. Finally, since MLB frowns on franchises stealing headlines during the playoffs, we’ve had to put up with the most bizarre manager search in the history of sports. The fact that they are seriously entertaining making Jason Giambi the manager is all you need to know about how dysfunctional the franchise is.
Why bring all of that up again? For all of the crazy, idiotic things that have been well documented over the course of the season, there’s one thing that happened that nobody has talked about and I believe it to be one of the worst cases of incompetence in the reign of O’Dowd – the case of Kevin Slowey.
Many of the deals that went down this year have been talked about ad nauseam. Seth Smith for Guillermo Moscoso and Josh Outman, Chris Iannetta for Tyler Chatwood, trading for Scutaro only to ship him right back out, the signings of Ramon Hernandez and Michael Cuddyer, the dumping of Ian Stewart for Tyler Colvin and DJ LeMahieu, and, of course, the Guthrie disaster, represent the major transactions that defined 2012. At the time they were being done, these deals made a sort of sense. O’Dowd was trying to rebuild the pitching staff and bring in some veterans to stabilize the roster. It was actually the first coherent plan the man’s had in his entire tenure with the Rockies. In hindsight, it’s easy to skewer him for almost all of these, but we should have known this plan was doomed by looking at what he did with Slowey.
Right around the time all of these trades were going down, O’Dowd traded a player to be named later (a name which I have not been able to find) for Twins pitcher Kevin Slowey. When this happened, I was intrigued because unlike the rest of the slew of arms they were acquiring, I had actually heard of Slowey. A month later, O’Dowd turned around and traded Slowey to Cleveland for Zach Putnam. My immediate reaction to this was, “what the…?” But, like the rest of the fans, I was distracted from this by more player signings and trades and it wasn’t until recently, when I started researching all of the transactions from the season, that I remembered this trade. So I started digging into it and found some very odd things.
The first was that Slowey was immediately optioned to Cleveland’s AAA team and ended up only pitching in 8 games. Looking at his 2011 stats and digging around some more revealed that he had a back injury and has been battling to get back to full health. The second was that the Rockies agreed to pick up almost half of his 2012 salary at $1.25 million. So, that means that O’Dowd traded some random person for another random person (Putnam ended up pitching 2 innings for the Rockies this season) and paid more than a million dollars for another guy not to play for the Rockies. This was made even more ridiculous given the fact the Rockies pitching staff was atrocious and could have used another arm, even if it was broken.
So the question to all of this was why any of this happened at all. If O’Dowd had no intention of keeping him, why trade for him in the first place? On that note, why not keep him since he’s only 28, but a somewhat established starter? Most of all, why trade a nobody to end up with a different nobody and torch $1.25 million at the same time? It’s situations like these that are the real reason O’Dowd should be fired as there is no logic whatsoever. And just to add insult to injury, the Rockies just lost Putnam to a waiver claim by the Cubs. At this point in time, I’m starting to think that O’Dowd isn’t even a real person, but a hamster that just runs around on a keyboard and the Monforts use whatever comes out on the monitor as their plan.
As much as I’d like to tell you this nonsense is over for the next few months, we still have the outcome of the managerial search ahead of us, as well as pondering what on Earth O’Dowd and Bill Geivett were thinking when they placed Josh Roenicke on waivers, losing him almost immediately to a claim by – wait for it – the Twins. Maybe Roenicke was that player to be named later and the hamster strikes again.
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10 comments
Logan Burdine
November 10, 2012 at 8:41 AM (UTC -6)
Can’t disagree with this, but I will say, around here, there is no hindsight. Travis and I criticized every one of those pitcher acquisitions right from the get go. Outman, Moscoso, Chatwood, and especially Guthrie, all looked like horrible fits as soon as DOD made the moves.
Charlie
November 10, 2012 at 8:48 AM (UTC -6)
“At this point in time, I’m starting to think that O’Dowd isn’t even a real person, but a hamster that just runs around on a keyboard and the Monforts use whatever comes out on the monitor as their plan.” << That is the best summary of the Rockies management I've ever read. Excellent job.
Simone
November 10, 2012 at 12:35 PM (UTC -6)
At what point is a failure deemed a failure?
O’Dowd would have been fired LONG ago had he performed like this in any real world job working for a corporation.
O’Dowd is like Bernie Madoff…and the Monforts are the investors who keep giving him money.
Dan
November 12, 2012 at 8:35 AM (UTC -6)
When Putnam was claimed by the Cubs I thought pretty much the same thing. O’Dowd basically gave Cleveland $1.25 million for one years worth of Triple A middle relief. I can only conclude that after obtaining Slowey they brought him to Denver and realized his arm was gone and did the best they could to get out from as much of the $2.5 million as possible.
Putnam was supposedly a decent prospect when aquired, the Rockies management of their 40-man roster thus far this offseason has been questionable at best.
Kevin Jordan
November 12, 2012 at 1:08 PM (UTC -6)
You make an interesting point – normally, a player must pass a physical before a trade is finalized. Did that happen or did the hamster just accept the trade, then have Slowey checked out after?
Pete
November 13, 2012 at 6:41 PM (UTC -6)
This trade is an excellent example of what most of us have said all year. The team was set up to fail from the many, many stupid trades of last off season. Over and over again, ownership/management made trades in which more value was given than received. Each trade weakened the team in some way, less pitching, less hitting, less depth….I guess less money in this one. Overall, the offseason was like a death from a thousand cuts, slow and painfull. I understand that the target this offseason was to get the new manager in place (Weiss), but now that the wnter meetings are ahead of us, I kinda cringe at what damage is about to occur next. Get someone into the organization that knows how to trade. O’ Doodle isn’t the guy.
Kevin Jordan
November 13, 2012 at 8:59 PM (UTC -6)
Yeah…does anyone else see the hamster trading Fowler for a bucket of baseballs and a rookie league second baseman?
Brett
November 20, 2012 at 12:11 PM (UTC -6)
The player-to-be-named-later was Daniel Turpen, a journeyman 8th-round pick minor league reliever. In essence, the Rockies paid $1.25 million to upgrade a prospect from Turpen to Putnam. Hopefully this sheds a little more light on how absolutely nonsensical this trade-and-sign-and-trade was. I’ve never heard of any organization spending that kind of money to swap two borderline-servicable AAA relief pitchers.
Great article Kevin. Under-the-radar trades like this are what should define a GM’s career, especially among mid-market teams.
Kevin Jordan
November 20, 2012 at 6:16 PM (UTC -6)
Thanks for digging that up. It’s those trades I always wonder about, particularly how it feels to be that player whose name is PTBL.
Anonymous
November 20, 2012 at 10:09 PM (UTC -6)
Introducing himself to the new manager…
“I’m the player to be named later”
–Crash Davis