O’Dowd gets especially low marks from me for all those years he spent not making the playoffs in the NL West. He’s been the GM since 1999 and the team has only made the playoffs once. I think he has a better team than JP right now and he may have a better job performance record over the past few seasons, but he’s still climbing out of a big hole.

I don’t like what JP is doing with the Jays, for the reasons Charlie mentioned above, but I’m going to cut him some slack because his tenure has coincided with a run of Yankee / Red Sox dominance.

Seriously? Dan O’Dowd? You mean the guy who’s had his farm system at or near the top of Baseball America’s list of best in the majors the last few years? The guy who drafted and developed Holliday, Atkins, Tulowitzki and Hawpe and who signed and developed Morales, Jimenez, Corpas, etc. out of Latin America? The guy who took a team with a payroll of less than $60 million to the World Series, despite playing in the pitcher-killing altitude of Denver? That guy?

(Oh, I forgot—he made a bad signing eight years ago, so obviously he sucks.)

Some have argued that the Rockies were lucky to get hot at the right time last year. The fact is they had the best Pythagorean record in the National League in ‘07. They were the best team by the numbers, and a much more legitimate WS representative than the D’Backs (who were outscored by 20 runs on the year), the Cubs (who were lucky to play in the Central) or the Phils (who were lucky to have the Mets fall apart in front of them).

O’Dowd is the kind of GM Bucs fans should be clamoring to get—someone who’s shown the ability to build a winner through scouting and player development, despite huge payroll constraints. Declaring him one of the worst GM’s based on one poor signing in 2000 (which was made in part because the previous managing general partner, Jerry McMorris, was pushing the team to get into the free agent market) is just silly.

Better to include Mike Flanagan, the de facto GM for the O’s (MacPhail is in more of a Stan Kasten-style executive role, I believe) and a holdover from the pre-MacPhail Era. Admittedly, Flanagan’s had a stacked deck against him having to deal with Angelos, but the Orioles have been a joke for years. And MacPhail doesn’t give him cover. Last time I checked, when he was in Chicago, he hired Dusty Baker and let Baker destroy two HOF arms (Wood and Prior) and give legendary out-machines Corey Patterson and Neifi Perez about 1000 AB’s a season.

Teams who have not been to the WS since O’Dowd’s first full season in 2000—Baltimore, Toronto, Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Minnesota, Cleveland, Oakland, Seattle, Texas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Montreal/Wash., Chi. Cubs, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Diego, LA Dodgers….I guess they’re all taking their sweet time, too. Most of those teams have burned through a lot more money than the Rockies, who have been between $50-60M in their annual player budget the last five years or so.

It’s naturally going to take sweet time to build from within, especially when the previous administration had done little to no Latin American scouting and had left a pretty much barren farm system. The guys at the ML level today are the fruit of grassroots investments made many years earlier, when O’Dowd was being pilloried. The Hampton (and Neagle) signings were bad, no doubt, but they were made in large part at the behest of different managing ownership, who were worried about losing fans after the excitement of the new team and new ballpark faded. Most people thought the Rockies could never get out of the dead-money hole those contracts created. Gotta give the guy his due for proving a lot of people (including me) wrong on that score.