By Mitchell Forde, IvyLeague.com Contributor
Fourteen years ago, when Mike Chernoff was asked for his input on a potential trade for the first time, he was terrified.
The future general manager of the Cleveland Indians was an intern with the team at the time. He had graduated from Princeton a few months earlier, in the spring of 2003. His typical intern duties involved tasks like charting pitches thrown in minor league games.
So when former general manager Mark Shapiro stopped by Chernoff’s desk one day and asked Chernoff his opinion on a trade Shapiro was considering, Chernoff took the question seriously.
“I stayed up all night thinking about it and gathering as much information as I could, reading every scouting report we had, calling our scouts, and I put together a summary for him of what I thought we should do,” Chernoff explained.
Seeing the analytical approach behind front office decisions served as a career tipping point for Chernoff, an ex-player who grew up dreaming about making it in the bigs, not watching from a front office window. That approach is emblematic of a shift in how Major League Baseball decisions are being made, a shift that makes guys like Chernoff—a former ballplayer with an Ivy League education—very appealing.
Nearly half of the 30 MLB clubs (14, to be exact) have an Ivy League graduate as either general manager or president of baseball operations. That doesn’t include Shapiro, now the President and CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays, or Peter Woodfork, the MLB’s Senior Vice President for Baseball Operations. Nor does that account for the litany of Ivy League alumni working in lower-ranking front office roles.
When the World Series begins tonight, there will be Ivy Leaguers on both sides. Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow is a Penn alum, and Megan Schroeder, the manager of the Dodgers’ research and development department, graduated from Yale.
That’s not a coincidence.
A Perfect Fit for a Changing Game
Chernoff, like Woodfork and Oakland A’s GM David Forst, came to his front office gig reluctantly. The three, all infielders in college, planned on playing baseball, not managing it. But upon realizing their chances of making it to the major leagues as players were slim, the three turned to front office work as an alternative.
“There was nothing else I really wanted to do other than be in baseball in one way or another,” Forst said. “The idea of winning or losing every night, it was going to be hard to replicate in any other industry…This was the next best thing to still being on the field.”
The reason there was such a demand for Ivy League graduates within major league front offices lies in the changes that were sweeping baseball around the turn of the century.
Clubs were beginning to rely more on statistics and analytics and less on scouting reports as predictors of player success. As a result, playing in the major leagues became less of a requirement for someone looking to break into baseball operations. The ability to crunch numbers and analyze data became just as important as the ability to assess a pitcher’s stuff.
As Forst put it, a former player with an Ivy League education represented the best of both qualities.
“When I sent out resumes in the summers of ‘98 and ‘99, it was a little bit unique that I had the education I did and I had played the game at a somewhat high level,” Forst said.
Then, in 2003, Michael Lewis published
Moneyball. The bestseller detailed former Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s use of advanced statistics, called “sabermetrics,” to field competitive teams despite having the league’s second-lowest payroll.
Chernoff and Forst noted that the release of
Moneyball coincided with the Boston Red Sox hiring Theo Epstein (a 1995 Yale graduate) and the Los Angeles Dodgers hiring Paul DePodesta (a 1995 Harvard graduate) as their general managers. Those events combined to inspire a wave of people with a passion for the game that hadn’t played professionally to pursue jobs in baseball operations.
As more Ivy League graduates found their way into front offices, networks began to develop that helped younger alums find jobs. Chernoff worked under Princeton graduate Shapiro in Cleveland. He followed the path of fellow Princeton alum Mike Hazen—now the general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks—who interned with the Indians two years prior to Chernoff.
Forst credits DePodesta for helping him get an interview with the A’s. Woodfork got his start as an intern for the MLB Commissioner’s Office, a position he learned about from fellow Harvard student and current Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich.
Getting a foot in the door was important, but to rise to their current positions, Chernoff, Forst and Woodfork had to separate themselves from other front office personnel. That is where their Ivy League educations came in handy.
There was no college major for baseball operations, and fields of study among the Ivy League graduates currently in front offices varied widely. Chernoff majored in economics. Forst and Woodfork studied sociology.
The important thing, Chernoff said, was that his college experience equipped him with a strong work ethic and sharp problem-solving skills. In Chernoff’s words, he “learned how to learn” at Princeton.
“In my experience it was this combination of learning how to dig in on the biggest problems and try to solve them,” Chernoff said.
Woodfork pointed out that his experience competing against his teammates and classmates at Harvard prepared him for the hard work of a front office.
“I think it’s the people at Harvard that help the most,” Woodfork said. “It’s a group that’s competitive, a group that wants to be successful. I think that surrounding yourself with those types of people…that’s all you can ask for.”
The Ivy League Impact
Chernoff, Forst and Woodfork were all quick to point out that graduates of non-Ivy League schools have also risen through the ranks and impacted the way baseball teams are operated.
“I don’t think the line is Ivy League graduates,” Forst said. “I think there are generally very smart people running teams these days.”
Still, there’s no denying that a large percentage of successful front office personnel in recent years has been comprised of Ivy League graduates, and that the group has changed the sport.
Forst pointed to Dartmouth alum and current New York Mets general manager Sandy Alderson as one of the pioneers of using analytics in his front office work. Epstein, now the Chicago Cubs’ President of Baseball Operations, has led three World Series champions in the past 13 seasons. And six of the 10 teams in this season’s playoffs featured Ivy League graduates in prominent front office positions: Minnesota Twins Director of Baseball Operations Daniel Adler (a Harvard grad), Bridich, Chernoff, Epstein, Hazen and Luhnow.
Chernoff, Forst and Woodfork all said that it’s difficult to pinpoint how Ivy Leaguers specifically have impacted baseball, but one change brought about by front office personnel in general—and Epstein more than any other individual—is heightened publicity for front offices.
No longer are general managers regarded as faceless names that show up in the news when trades are made.
Epstein was the subject of a 7,000-plus-word
ESPN the Magazine story during the 2016 season. As the Cubs were gearing up for their World Series run, Epstein signed a contract extension worth roughly $10 million a year to become the highest-paid front office executive ever—by far.
As a result of the heightened publicity, the pool of candidates pursuing front office positions today is larger than ever. When competition increases, the margin for error for acting executives shrinks.
“Now, it’s a lot bigger (than 1999), the stakes and the money have gotten a lot higher, and it’s a lot more competitive in a front office sense,” Woodfork said.
Leaving a Legacy
In 2003, the Indians wound up making the trade that Chernoff researched, though they didn’t use the exact players he included in his summary.
To this day, Chernoff has no idea if Shapiro actually read his report. But the sense of accountability—having a hand in the future of a Major League Baseball team—made for, as Chernoff described it, “a moment of truth.”
“It was sort of that moment of, okay, this is real,” Chernoff said. “(Shapiro)’s not just asking for me to gather the data on this and then second-guess it afterwards, he’s asking for my opinion up front.”
Chernoff, Forst and Woodfork all described themselves as “lucky” for entering baseball operations at a time when the field was less crowded and front offices were flatter in structure. Nowadays, Chernoff said, “there’s usually like nine layers between the GM and our interns.”
Despite the bigger staffs and heightened stakes, however, Chernoff hasn’t forgotten the feeling of being asked for his trade opinion by Shapiro. Chernoff said he still tries to make today’s interns feel similarly involved.
“We try to provide that opportunity to every intern here,” Chernoff said.
Inevitably, as executives search for an edge, the trends and strategies employed in front offices will continue to shift. Ivy League grads—having “learned how to learn”—figure to continue to play a role.
Even if the number of Ivy Leaguers in front offices decreases, however, the leadership of executives like Chernoff ensures that the Ivy League will have its finger prints on Major League Baseball for years to come.
Ivy League Executives in Major League Baseball
Jon Daniels (Cornell, General Manager, Texas Rangers)
A.J. Preller (Cornell, General Manager, San Diego Padres)
Sandy Alderson (Dartmouth, General Manager, New York Mets)
Matt Klentak (Dartmouth, General Manager, Philadelphia Phillies)
Jeff Bridich (Harvard, General Manager, Colorado Rockies)
David Forst (Harvard, General Manager, Oakland Athletics)
Rick Hahn (Harvard Law School, General Manager, Chicago White Sox)
Michael Hill (Harvard, President of Baseball Operations, Miami Marlins)
Matthew Silverman (Harvard, President of Baseball Operations, Tampa Bay Rays)
David Stearns (Harvard, General Manager, Milwaukee Brewers)
Peter Woodfork (Harvard, Senior Vice President of Baseball Operations, MLB)
Jeff Luhnow (Penn, General Manager, Houston Astros)
Mike Chernoff (Princeton, General Manager, Cleveland Indians)
Mike Hazen (Princeton, General Manager, Arizona Diamondbacks)
Mark Shapiro (Princeton, President and CEO, Toronto Blue Jays)
Theo Epstein (Yale, President of Baseball Operations, Chicago Cubs)