Rockies owner Dick Monfort: Bringing in outside personnel would 'negatively impact' organizational culture

Christine Voss, a Denver-based Rockies fan who, like most diehards of the team, is tired of the persistent losing and all the other mind-numbingly awful things going on at 20th and Blake as of late, recently wrote a detailed letter to owner/chairman/CEO Dick Monfort about her feelings on the matter.

Monfort, being the nice guy that he is (and again, I don't think anybody disputes that notion), treated Voss to breakfast this morning to chat about his business, baseball and what the future might hold. After the completion of the meeting, Voss joined our friends on The Press Box on Mile High Sports radio and DenverPost.com to talk about what came out of the discussion. While I'm sure Monfort had some good things to say, this will probably be everyone's -- including Christine's, obviously -- lasting memory:

Christine Voss interview (courtesy of Peter Burns and The Press Box)

In case you didn't bother to click or had a hard time hearing, Monfort told Voss that he doesn't believe bringing in outside personnel, such as a new team president, would be all that helpful. In fact, he reportedly insisted that such a situation would negatively impact the culture of the organization -- a culture that, at this point, includes a beautiful ballpark and a whole lot of losing.

It sounds like, as Christine later clarified on Twitter, Monfort would rather fill the vacant team president role internally. What does that mean? Well, among other things, it means a lot more years of likely inaccurate assessments of the organization.

Bill Geivett is a wonderful, smart individual, and a great man. Dan O'Dowd has made a lot of shrewd moves during his tenure, and for several years at the end of the last decade, built a winner. But with that duo at the helm, things haven't gotten any better since the Rockies inexplicably fell apart at the end of the 2010 season and lost out on a postseason bid. A change should have been made after 2012, when the Rockies had just finished their worst season in franchise history and the entire roster was in disarray. That didn't happen, obviously, and the latest opportunity for change -- another terrible stretch of baseball after a very respectable start -- seems to be passing as well.

The Rockies have a good-but-not-great farm system that should produce some players, but it seems the entire organizational philosophy -- particularly, on the pitching side of things -- is not working. Top prospects are being tinkered with, pitchers at the major league level are largely pitching to opposing hitters' strengths, and depth is constantly being challenged due to an overabundance of injuries, which at this point, is hard to simply pin on bad luck.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that changes need to be made in the Rockies' front office, but if what Monfort is telling people has any merit, that won't be happening any time soon.