When I first wrote about the Colorado Rockies “Mile High Baseball Nerd Club,” truly, it was just a joke.
But lately, I’ve come to wonder if perhaps the title isn’t spot on, especially after bench coach Jeff Pickler answered a few questions about joining a rebuilding team.
A marketing major among humanists
President of baseball operations Paul DePodesta’s economics degree from Harvard is well known. General manager Josh Byrnes has a degree in English from Havorford College (though he preferred the writing over the literature course).
Manager Warren Schaeffer has a degree in history from Virginia Tech.
And bench coach Jeff Pickler is a proud University of Tennessee Volunter (and 1998 SEC Player of the Year) who graduated magna cum laude with a degree in business marketing. (In case you’re interested, Pickler just missed Todd Helton, who graded in 1995 when Pickler started in 1996.)
At first glance, a marketing degree might seem like an odd fit for a staff teeming with humanities majors, but for Pickler, the communication piece is key.
“We talk a lot about our ideas, and we spend so much time coming up with what we think is going to work best for our players or work best for our team,” Pickler said. “And the reality is, how we sell that to the players and the other coaches is more important. So I think that’s where the marketing side comes in.”
After all, coaches and players don’t always just accept a new idea.
“I do think we’ve spent more time thinking about, ‘Okay, this is a great idea. Now, how do we want to roll it out? How do we want to get to get people to buy into that idea? How do we make that idea tangible for them to buy into?’ So maybe there’s some marketing tied into that.”
Closely related is the teaching component that goes with effective communication and persuasion.
“We have to understand that what we’re presenting sometimes isn’t super familiar,” Pickler said. “So the more familiar we can make the deliverable, the easier it is for people to really grasp what we’re trying to say.”
The “deliverable” can take any number of forms.
“Whether that’s more concise documents, whether that’s really good graphics, whether that’s sharpening the spear with our message, whether that’s Paul with the economics, whether that’s Josh with English, me with marketing, I think the idea [is] that we can try to say something that may not be be super familiar to people in a really clear and concise way,” he said.
See what Pickler did there?
He’s describing DePodesta’s model of collaboration and clear communication. It’s a philosophy that permeates this front office and coaching staff and centers meeting players where they are with the information they need in a way they can understand.
You can go home again — and embrace the challenge
This is not Pickler’s first time with the Rockies. He spent 2005 with their Triple-A affiliate Colorado Springs Sky Sox.
Still, what would motivate him to return to a franchise with the Rockies track record? His answer echoed that of many staff and players: He wants the challenge.
“I think people that anything that’s really worthwhile is pretty hard,” Pickler said, “and I think there’s a challenge piece to this.
Plus there was the added bonus of working in a positive environment.
“I’ve heard a lot from a distance, ‘Hey, there’s really good people there.’ Throughout the interview process, and then in the initial months here, I’ve felt that. And then some of the relationships that I had in place of the people that were coming here made it a place that felt like it was going to be really comfortable, and we could circle the wagons and go try to do something really difficult.”
For Pickler, being a bench coach means looking around corners with the key word being “anticipation.”
“I think you’re trying to stay out in front of things that are coming, so that when the decision comes, we had time to be prepared,” Pickler said. “We thought about it before it arrived. We had had time to flesh out that decision, so trying to anticipate what Schaeff is going to need to know, or the questions he’s going to ask, or what we need to think through before it happens so that we can slow the game down in the moment.”
It’s fitting, then, that manager Warren Schaeffer’s one-word description of his bench coach is “prepared.”
“I know for a fact that I am more prepared this year than ever,” Schaeffer said, “in large part due to him.”
So far, things are working.
Process alignment and collaboration
Part of rebuilding a baseball team — or any organization for that matter — involves coming up with a collaborative process that works, and it was a factor that attracted Pickler to the Rockies. At Rockies Fest, DePodesta and Byrnes made clear they were looking for players who were “curious” and “problem solvers” and a coaching staff that wanted to work together and communicate clearly in taking on the rebuilding Rockies.
All of that feeds into Pickler’s calculus as well as DePodesta’s commitment to process.
“To hear Paul say that it means so much because ultimately he’s the one that is going to make decisions,” Pickler said.
“And if he’s making decisions based on process, as an employee or somebody working for him, that’s what you want because you want to be held accountable to your process because we don’t always have control over our outcomes. So if I can control my process and that’s what I’m going to be evaluated on, that’s really encouraging. Sometimes we hear that, but that’s not really what happens.”
For Pickler, though, it’s about more than commitment to a process. It’s also about working productively with others.
“The ‘collaboration’ piece, it’s an in-vogue word,” Pickler said.
“People talk about it a lot, but sometimes it breaks down when people actually start doing it, and everyone’s like, ‘Hey, I got it. Stay out of my lane. You handle your job. I’ll handle my job.’ It feels like Paul is going to really make collaboration at the fabric of what we do, and I think we’re all going to better, and I’ve already seen that with our coaching staff — not just coaching staffs collaborating, but collaborating with our players and having our players take ownership, and it’s not just such a top-down structure.”
Moreover, Pickler sees his relationship to his fellow coaches as highly collaborative. He looks to them to help him see what he’s missing.
“If you trust your teammates and you believe in your teammates, you’d be foolish not to say, ‘Hey, this is what I got right now. But what am I missing here? Help me out. Cover my blind spots.’ And you’re crazy to think you don’t have them. So you might as well ask your teammates to help you cover them.”
That philosophy is also present in his relationship with Schaeffer, a person Pickler describes as having “a real strong sense of what leadership looks like for him.”
But that doesn’t mean Schaeffer is close-minded.
“He’s as open to challenging his preconceived notions as any great leader I’ve seen — like he wants to hear the other side,” Pickler said. “He’ll often ask the question, similar to, ‘What am I missing here?’”
A focus on player improvement
For Pickler, as a coach, his job is to help players improve — and the fact that the Rockies are rebuilding has no effect on his approach.
“It wouldn’t matter to me if we were predicted to win 105 games, or we were predicted to be a rebuilding team,” Pickler said.
“Our job as coaches and as a staff is to get better. So getting 1%, 2%, 5% better in a given day is the mission, regardless of what the expectations are. So I’m far less focused on expectations and limitations. It’s much more ‘What can you do today that you couldn’t do yesterday?’ And wherever that takes us, I’m happy with where that lands.”
In addition to spring training, Pickler also has an eye on the World Baseball Classic and keeping up with the Rockies. But his current focus is clear.
“It’s a great event, but I’m pretty focused on what we’re trying to do in pinstripes.”
This week on the internet
I noticed that EmersonCR dropped this in The Feed, but I wanted to give No More Fielder’s video another shoutout:
And big thanks for reading Purple Row!
The Rockies are finally embracing analytics to solve MLB’s ‘Most Interesting Puzzle’ | si.com
Stephanie Apstein writes about what we’ve known for a while: The Rockies really didn’t know how to use data.
Which Rockies prospects will contribute most in 2026? | Just Baseball
According to Patrick Lyons, watch for Charlie Condon (No. 1 PuRP), Cole Carrigg (No. 4 PuRP), T.J. Rumfield, and Zac Veen (No. 9 PuRP).
A story that’s gotten overlooked amid all the losing is how much former Rockies from better days have wanted to Rockies to make changes and improve. Patrick Saunders spoke with Jeff Francis about what we know so far about the Rockies plans for pitching at elevation.
And one more just because. If you were watching the World Baseball Classic Saturday night, you got to see Puerto Rico walk-off Panamá in what was a pretty terrific game. Add to that, Denver’s own Tyler Maun was on the call. If you haven’t seen this yet, please enjoy.
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