Last year I picked the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the National League pennant. The team was coming off a division title and an off-season in which it added stars like Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew. With a fine manager in Jim Tracy, a rising star in general manager Paul DePodesta, one of the best farm systems in the game, and young talents like center fielder Milton Bradley and first baseman Hee Seop Choi, the prospects for the 2005 season looked bright.

Things, of course, didn’t work out so well. Superstar closer Eric Gagne got hurt; less surprisingly, so did Drew. Choi, whose patience at the plate can seem an awful lot like passivity, became the object of Tracy’s ire and a pawn in a power struggle between manager and general manager. Bradley and Kent, two of the game’s most difficult personalities, proved unable to coexist. When it was revealed that Bradley had had the police called on him for choking his pregnant wife, the situation became completely untenable.

DePodesta proved puzzlingly unable to fill holes in the infield, rotation, and bullpen with players as good as those found on a typical Triple-A team, and alienated the organization and fans with his lack of attention to team chemistry. Say what you will about chemistry’s effects on a team, but when you bring in such enormous headaches as Bradley and pitcher Derek Lowe, you’re surely at the outer reaches of the acceptable.

Compounding all this was an inability or unwillingness to communicate and manage. DePodesta seemed baffled, for instance, when a spring training coach who had been with the team for decades and was on something of a sinecure bolted for the Giants after DePodesta, who hadn’t told him whether his contract would be renewed, didn’t return any of his calls last winter. Players complained of being treated as if they had no feelings. Surely all of this wasn’t DePodesta’s fault, but there’s more to being a GM than making personnel decisions – and the man didn’t even do a very good job of that.

So after the season, after DePodesta let Tracy go, owner Frank McCourt – supposedly at the behest of old school baseball men like Tommy LaSorda – let DePodesta go. This was a good call. One day DePodesta may be a fine general manager, but he has a great deal still to learn.

DePodesta was replaced in November by Ned Colletti, the universally respected former capo of successful Giants GM Brian Sabean, whose knack for spotting which ancient veterans still have it is one of the more baffling attributes of any baseball executive.

Colletti immediately began showing why he was Sabean’s man, collecting the wizened likes of Bill Mueller, Kenny Lofton, and Sandy Alomar, Jr. (I didn’t know he was still playing either, and I’m paid a fair amount of money to keep tabs on such things.) He dumped Bradley and troublemaking infielder Antonio Perez on the Oakland A’s for a bag of baseballs, threw big money at shortstop Rafael Furcal and Nomar Garciaparra (who will likely play first base), and hired Grady Little to manage, completing the reconstruction of the 2003 Red Sox.

This is all good stuff, more or less. The Dodgers may have lost 91 games last year, but a lot of that, maybe most of it, was because of injuries. This team’s core talent was that of an 85-win team last season, and Colletti has adeptly filled a variety of holes with low-risk solutions that will make it a bit better than that, which is all he needs to do in a weak division.

Lofton may not have Bradley’s upside, but he’s a fair bet to get on base 36% of the time and not choke any pregnant women. Signing Alomar, who isn’t a major league ballplayer anymore but will ably mentor talented young catcher Dionner Navarro, is just the sort of move you wouldn’t expect DePodesta to make, but one that will probably pay dividends now and in the future. Signing Garciaparra, who may or may not still have the bat to be a star, to a one-year, $6 million deal is just the sort of move that would have been applauded as a masterstroke had DePodesta made it.

The takeaway here isn’t that DePodesta is an unfeeling robot fit for nothing but generating spreadsheets, or that Colletti’s brand of wise baseball is what all teams need at all times. It’s more that running a baseball team isn’t like practicing neurosurgery. Do a bit of gladhanding; don’t leave obvious, glaring holes on your team because they can theoretically be filled by anyone who happens along; keep in mind that while most of what’s important shows up one way or another in the stat lines, not all of it does.

DePodesta will probably learn from his mistakes and do a fine job for some other team. In the meantime, I’m thinking about picking the Dodgers two years running.

tmarchman@nysun.com