Recapping the new front office hires for the Colorado Rockies

One thing that the Colorado Rockies have been busy doing in recent months is revamping their front office, It started in late April when GM Jeff Bridich resigned.

During the season, two assistant GMs (Jon Weil and Zach Wilson) resigned as well after scouting director Bill Schmidt was promoted to interim GM. Executive VP and COO Greg Feasel was also promoted to President as well. Chris Forbes was promoted to farm director after Wilson’s resignation.

Schmidt was eventually named the permanent GM in early October and, eventually, Danny Montgomery was named as an assistant GM. But before those two promotions, the Rockies hired Scott Van Lenten to head up their research and development team. He was hired from the Nationals in September.

Later, Sterling Monfort was promoted to professional director of scouting, former Rockies manager Clint Hurdle was hired as a special assistant to Schmidt, and Emily Glass was hired to be a scouting operations administrator. She was most recently with the Marlins.

These were well-known hires or promotions but the Rockies have made a few more hires and promotions.

The Colorado Rockies have made a lot of additions to their front office

Patrick Saunders of The Denver Post recapped some of the other additions that the Colorado Rockies have made to their front office in the last few weeks and months.

Ryan Kelley is the new “data architect” for the Rockies. He joined the team after spending six seasons with the Tampa Bay Rays, who are, perhaps, the team that is the preeminent franchise with analytics.

Isaac Gerhart-Hines, who worked with Scott Van Lenten in Washington, is the club’s new web developer. Part of the reason why he was brought in is that, as Saunders explains, the Rockies are revamping their in-house site to create a more user-friendly system for players, coaches, and staffers throughout the organization to more easily access analytics and scouting reports.

Also working under Van Lenten is Taehwa Hong, a data engineer. Hong has a background in baseball with TrackMan (which was the company the MLB used to employ for their ball/strike system with Statcast) and Prep Baseball Report. He also used to work as a campaign management developer for Delta Airlines and he used to do computer engineering and development for the South Korean government through their Air Force.

The Rockies also hired Al Gilbert as its new director of baseball operations. Gilbert replaced Domenic Di Ricco, who left baseball. Gilbert, who graduated from Stanford and went to Harvard Law School, joins the Rockies from the Dodgers, where he was their coordinator of contracts and finance.

Ethan Moore, who spent the past two seasons with the Minnesota Twins, was hired as an analyst in the research and development department under Van Lenten. Brittany Haby is now the Rockies manager of baseball research. Her duties will include advanced scouting. She worked with the Rockies the past four seasons through the Major League Baseball Diversity Fellowship Program.

Julianna Rubin joins the Rockies through the MLB Diversity Fellowship Program. She’ll work on roster, contract, and salary arbitration issues.

The Rockies hope that with an expanded research and development team, they will be able to change some of the things that have gone awry for them in recent years.