The Curse Of The Verdugo

Baseball players are characters, for better or worse, in the story of the game, just as much as they are living, breathing people. So are managers and owners, but minus a few exceptions, general managers weren’t expected to act the part until the publication of Moneyball in 2003, and in so doing some of them fell on their heads.

Take Paul DePodesta — Peter Brand of movie meme fame — who parlayed his role with the trailblazing A’s into the Dodgers GM job and made his mark by signing Milton Bradley, an outfielder with a better-than-average batting eye and a notorious mean streak. (Nearly 10 years later, he’d be jailed on domestic violence charges.) As Kevin Arnovitz wrote in Slate in October…