Taken Down by Cheap Shot

By Bill Plaschke

Oct. 4, 2005 12 AM PT

So this is how life looks from the twisted tower occupied by Frank McCourt.

You give the keys of your prized car to a kid still learning to drive.

The kid steers it through bushes, over mailboxes and to the bottom of a ditch.

You are so angry, you punish ... the mechanic who can’t fix it?

That’s what happened Monday, McCourt protecting his overmatched computer guy at the expense of a veteran baseball guy who was unable to cover the kid’s mistakes.

Jim Tracy has been ejected, Paul DePodesta has been endorsed, and those Dodger fans still willing to support this nonsense should be very afraid.

This was not a decision about winning -- manager Tracy had winning records in four of his five seasons, winning more than 90 games twice.

This was not a decision about championships -- Tracy led the team to its first postseason victory in 16 years.

This was a decision about a vision, one that insists baseball games can be won on a spreadsheet and on the cheap, with little regard for character or chemistry or heart.

It’s a vision held by DePodesta, the general manager who believes he can break into the playoffs the way a hacker breaks into a corporation -- with a few keystrokes, fewer dollars, and no conscience.

It’s a vision despised by Tracy, who watched it tear apart his division championship team last winter.

It’s a vision that has yet to result in a playoff series victory in the three places where it is prominently pushed -- Oakland, Los Angeles and Toronto.

Yet it is a vision shared by McCourt, because it helps him save money, and this latest foolishness shows that nothing matters more to him than money.

McCourt said last month he was all about character, yet he splits with the manager who pushed character and supports the general manager who doesn’t understand it.

McCourt has long preached accountability, yet as of Monday night he had not even spoken to Tracy about the situation. Officials said McCourt was out of town because of a death in the family but, even via cellphone, even for just a moment, how does an owner not involve himself in the essential dismissal of his most prominent employee?

The truth is something we’ve known for certain since the day last winter that Adrian Beltre left town.

The most prominent employee of the Dodgers is not the manager, it’s the banker.

Paul DePodesta was hired to slash payroll and help the team turn a profit, and Jim Tracy was mucking up the works with all this whining about winning.

In a conference call Monday that sounded as if it were conducted with tin cans and string, both men said as much.

“At the end of the day, we both realized we can’t quite get on the same page,” DePodesta said.

It is a page from a spreadsheet, a page with a bold-faced bottom line, a page that will appear in the Wall Street Journal before it ever appears in a World Series program.

“The biggest thing was the personnel factor, the evaluation of players,” Tracy said.

In other words, he didn’t give a whit about the tiny size of Hee-Seop Choi’s contract; the big stiff couldn’t play.

“The differences would have existed whether we had 71 or 95 wins,” DePodesta said.

You see? It’s not about winning the division, but agreeing with DePodesta.

“A lot had to do with how things evolved at the end of last year’s division series, moving forward,” Tracy said.

It started, yes, with Beltre.

Upon winning the division title last fall, Tracy was moved to tears. A couple of months later, when the Dodgers refused to pay cornerstone Beltre and allowed him to go to Seattle, Tracy was moved to anger.

“This is a bad, bad day,” he told me on the phone at the time.

Fast forward to spring training, Tracy walking into a clubhouse that had lost its leaders and kept its oddballs.

“I don’t know what this place is like, I have no idea how this team is going to be,” he said, sitting in the quiet of his office, distressed long before opening day. “It’s hard to understand why everything had to change.”

There has been talk about the average-to-bad performances of Beltre and Alex Cora and Shawn Green and Steve Finley (acquired by DePodesta) with their new teams this season, but that’s not the point.

All those players were worth more to the Dodgers than to anyone else. It’s not about what they did elsewhere, it’s about what they would have done here.

When it became obvious that DePodesta’s moves would all backfire, either through injury or clubhouse strife or just plain bad baseball, Tracy saw the writing on the monitor.

DePodesta’s type of players were not his type of players. DePodesta’s type of players looked good in baseball abstracts, and lousy in dugout realities.

With the payroll headed for another downturn -- just where is that $100 million you promised us, Frank? -- things were going to get worse before they got better.

Tracy, with one year left on his contract, knew he would be a roasted duck next season, so he asked for an extension.

When it was denied, he realized he should leave, and DePodesta agreed, and heaven help his replacement.

Tracy was never Walter Alston. He didn’t always have the respect of his veteran players. He made some panicked bullpen decisions. He sometimes played matchups at the expense of common sense.

All of this was rooted in the fact that, as a journeyman ballplayer and unknown quantity, he was never very secure in his hallowed role as Dodger manager.

He was forever citing his statistics and accomplishments, grabbing the credit but refusing, in the end, to take any part of the blame that already had been publicly shared by McCourt and DePodesta.

Tracy wasn’t great, but, in the end, he was good enough. He was a good manager, a good baseball man, a good human being who made one good team great and brought this town a bit of long-awaited joy.

If allowed to build on his 2004 success, Tracy could have been in this town several more years. But he never got the chance to do it. Dodger fans never got the chance to see it. And that’s wrong.

“The tough part for me is the love I had for managing this club,” Tracy said.

But love of the Dodgers no longer matters here. It’s all about loving DePodesta, who has polarized the Dodger community like few others.

In Los Angeles today there are DePodesta fans, and there are Dodger fans, and they are often not the same person.

DePodesta fans are often statistic lovers who view the game from afar, like their bedroom computer. They are thrilled that somebody like them is in charge. They care less about winning than about living vicariously through his moves.

Dodger fans just want to win, period.

Frank McCourt, it turns out, is less a Dodger fan than a DePodesta fan.

He and his kid protege will now forever be tied at the hip, keeping alive the long tradition of great baseball tandems.

Not like Ruth and Gehrig.

More like Abbott and Costello.

Bill Plaschke can reached at bill.plaschke@latimes. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

‘Trace’ elements

Jim Tracy’s record by season:

YEAR: 2001

W-L: 86-76

FINISH: 3rd