Rockies poach longtime Guardians exec for massive brand reinvention

While the Guardians brand of baseball isn’t for everyone, they’ve morphed into one of the sport’s most consistent franchises despite consistently ranking near the bottom of the sport in payroll. 

In fact, those tight purse strings mean that almost everyone in the organization has to think outside the box to succeed in their role compared to some other teams that are just able to throw money at their problems.

It’s one of the biggest reasons why guys like Ross Atkins, Mark Shapiro were poached to be executives elsewhere while Craig Albernaz and Kai Correa were nabbed for other coaching opportunities. 

They lost another key piece on Monday, as the Rockies announced they’d hired Nicky Schmidt to be their senior vice president & chief revenue and strategy officer in what's a newly created position. Schmidt has spent the past 14 years as the Guardians, and finished last season working as the team’s senior vice president of organizational strategy and business analytics.

Rockies latest hire shows how highly regarded Guardians are in MLB

As a part of the position, Schmidt will oversee the club's ticketing, merchandise and corporate partnerships departments. She’ll directly report directly to executive vice president Walker Monfort.

“Nicky is an exceptional and innovative leader with a deep understanding of the modern sports business as shown through her time with the Guardians,” Monfort said, per MLB.com’s Manny Randhawa. “By creating this position and bringing her on board, we are continuing to strengthen the foundation of our organization and are positioning ourselves to grow, evolve, and deliver the type of product our fans deserve.”

Per Randhawa, Schmidt led the Guardians “in a variety of roles across strategy, data science, business intelligence, brand marketing and consumer insights.” 

She also helped lead the ballpark transformation and worked to restructure the team’s internal organization.  

Evidence of her and her team’s hard work is there every time the Guardians take the field on both the jerseys (the 2022 season marked the first year of the Guardians era) and at the park, as the shipping containers in right field have been replaced with a standing bar and the previously tarped-off area in left field has been turned into a new lounge. 

She’ll have her work cut out for her with the Rockies, who are coming off a season where they lost a franchise-record 119 games. 

But a new day appears to be dawning in Colorado, as the largely insular team swung big with an outside hire of Paul DePodesta as president of baseball operations after interviewing other candidates like Guardians assistant GM Matt Forman.

DePodesta had previously been working with the Cleveland Browns, and is best known for leading the “Moneyball” A’s teams that revolutionized analytics. 

While Schmidt and DePodesta won’t be able to change the Rockies by themselves, they both have proven track records of winning. We’ll see if that carries over to the future of baseball in Colorado.