Colletti Joins Blue Regime

By Bill Plaschke

Nov. 17, 2005 12 AM PT

Into a room whose walls still echoed talk of sample sets and sabermetrics, the new Dodger general manager showed up Wednesday and changed the subject.

Ned Colletti, talking hardball.

“Can we win as the team is constituted right now?” he said. “No. We’ve got our hands full.”

Ned Colletti, talking clubhouses.

“I believe in character, work ethic, coachability, how badly someone wants to win,” he said. “Statistics don’t tell the whole story.”

Ned Colletti, talking swagger.

“Up until the late ‘80s, this was a team that could beat you a number of ways, they played until the end, the players bought into it,” he said of the Dodgers. “Lately, I don’t see that all the time. The last few years, I rarely feared coming in here. We’ve lost some of that allure here.”

Ned Colletti, talking rings.

“It took me 22 years to get it,” he said, when asked how he had the audacity to wear his San Francisco Giants 2002 World Series ring to his first Dodger news conference. “Any time I see somebody wearing this, I know they’ve been part of something special.”

He sighed.

“But this is the loser ring,” he said. “The guys down the road, they have a little bigger one.”

We have no idea how he will perform, but the new Dodger boss talks a wonderful game, filled with stories and philosophies and memories of a sport that nurtured him in Chicago and matured him in Candlestick.

Colletti is 50, but he makes references as if he were 70, and laughs as if he were 30.

He began his first Dodger interview session by thanking his mentors, listing more than a dozen old baseball guys from Dallas Green to Don Zimmer, his sense of history firm.

“The great thing about this game is, you never stop learning,” he said.

Colletti ended his interview session by wincing his mustache and citing exact innings and pitches of games that the Dodgers stole from his Giants last season, his sense of detail strong.

“We lost some games here, it was like, you gotta be kidding me,” he said.

In between, he was asked about conducting a managerial search while finding time to attend this week’s wedding of his former Giant boss, Brian Sabean.

“I’ll search up until the wedding, not during the wedding,” he said, pausing, shrugging. “But then, you never know who might be there.”

For more than two hours Wednesday, it was all baseball, all the time, and if Frank McCourt wanted someone to charm the room until April, he picked the right guy.

What happens after that, who knows, not even Colletti, who skipped the usual Dodger platitudes and slid head-first into reality.

“I make no promises,” he said of fixing the Dodger problems. “When is it going to happen? I don’t know. One year, one-and-a-half years, two years, I’ll know more as time goes on.”

When asked what they needed, he didn’t pause.

“A corner of the infield, I don’t consider our outfield as strong as it could be, a starting pitcher,” he said.

About Milton Bradley, who McCourt has implied would not return?

“I’ve got to look into that,” Colletti said.

About J.D. Drew, whose injury history clashes with Colletti’s philosophies?

“I’ll let you know about J.D. Drew,” he said. “I’ll share it with J.D. Drew before I’ll share it with you.”

And the new manager?

Look for a winning veteran who talks the same sort of hard-bitten ballgame. Lou Piniella and Jim Fregosi clearly fill most of his requirements.

“I’m looking for a great leader, someone who has won, someone who knows how to win the last game of the season,” Colletti said.

It is that last game of the season that haunts Colletti; twice his teams have been upset in the postseason after blowing big leads, the 1984 Chicago Cubs and the 2002 Giants, and it drives him.

“Every year, watching the last game of the World Series, I get choked up, because I know what those teams have done and what they’ve been through,” he said. “It literally brings tears to my eyes.”

He could be crying again, of course, if McCourt doesn’t give him enough money to hire a top manager or sign a couple of top free agents.

When asked whether he was made any promises here, Colletti said he was next in line to replace Sabean as the Giants’ general manager, and said he turned down past overtures from the Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates.

He said he would not have flown south if he didn’t have the financial freedom to win.

“When I asked about the payroll, [McCourt] said, ‘Tell me what you need. You find the players, and if you think it’s the right thing to do, we’ll do it,’ ” Colletti said, answering the most important question of the day. “I’ve been told the payroll is flexible.”

That’s what the last guy said. But nearly everything Paul DePodesta did reeked of cheap. So we’ll see.

In the end, Colletti will only be as effective as McCourt will allow. For now, it will be fun to watch the new guy work, marked by a life of trial.

He grew up a poor kid in Chicago, living first in a remodeled garage, then a four-room house next to a railroad depot and directly in the flight path of incoming planes.

He remembers his father awakening three times a night in the winter to start the car, so it wouldn’t freeze and keep him from driving to work in a factory.

A former semi-pro baseball player, Colletti attended Northern Illinois and dabbled in journalism before joining the Cubs in 1982 as a public relations guy.

Yeah, the new Dodger general manager used to be a hockey beat writer, which will serve him well in his new rough-and-tumble environment of cynicism and underachievement.

“I take nothing for granted,” he said. “I’ve had to be street smart since I was a little kid.”

Time for a confession.

Back in 2001 in these pages, I wrote a column about the many things I hated about the Giants.

One of my entries read, “I hate that the Giants have such front-office depth, one of baseball’s smartest guys -- Ned Colletti -- is only their assistant general manager.”

I have long thought he’s the right man for this job. On Wednesday, he certainly sounded as if he’s the right man for this job.

Only time, and support from Dodger ownership, will tell.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.