The Dodgers Have a GM, Until They Don’t

So, a funny thing is happening. The Dodgers have a general manager, one Ned Colletti. And yet we keep hearing names about potential replacements, like Tampa Bay’s Andrew Friedman, Cleveland’s Mark Shapiro, Chicago’s Kenny Williams, Billy Eppler of the Yankees, the Dodgers’ own Logan White, former assistant GM Kim Ng, and so on. These are all really fun names to think about, even if in some of those cases I absolutely don’t trust the reporter naming them and hate that it’s even becoming a thing.

It’s fascinating, really. We haven’t had a Dodger GM search since the fall of 2005, a full nine years ago. Think about nine years ago. Twitter didn’t exist. Julio Urias wasn’t born yet. (I mean, probably.) Clayton Kershaw was in high school. Matt Kemp had just completed his first full season at Hi-A Vero Beach, hitting .306/.349/.569. Put another way: Hi-A was in Vero Beach! Low-A was in Columbus, GA! Double-A was in Jacksonville! Triple-A was in Las Vegas! Bless you, Ogden. Bless you.

The point is, that was a really long time ago, and the world has changed a lot since then, so the process of….

…wait a minute. I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It feels like there’s one important thing that hasn’t happened before we talk about new GMs. Oh! That’s right. The Dodgers have a general manager.

We haven’t heard anything publicly from Colletti or Stan Kasten since the season ended. We know that they met on Thursday, and we know they’re expected to meet “through the weekend.” (Don Mattingly says he expects the GM to be back, but if no decision has been made, then he wouldn’t know otherwise.) That meeting could be anything, really. Maybe Kasten wants Colletti to lay out his road map to get this team to the World Series, and he’ll decide if likes what he hears. Maybe he’s explaining to Colletti his vision for some front office restructuring, something that keeps Colletti as GM but changes responsibilities, and Colletti decides if that’s a situation he wants to be in. Maybe Kasten really is talking to other people quietly, and he’s stringing things along so that if he fires Colletti, he can have someone new in place immediately.

Maybe it’s none of those things, because we don’t know. But for the moment, as we hear other names pop up, it’s far from a given that this is even a position that is open. I would have to think that if we haven’t heard anything on Colletti’s departure by Monday, we probably won’t, because this is not a situation you want to drag out longer than you need to. But it’s very, very weird. The Dodgers have a GM. That’s just on a minute-by-minute basis, I think.

About Mike Petriello

Mike writes about lots of baseball in lots of places, and right now that place is MLB.com.