GM Candidate Bios: Chris Antonetti

Moving right along...

Name: Chris Antonetti

Age: 32

Current position: Vice President - Baseball Operations, Cleveland Indians

Playing experience: None. The closest he's come was being student manager for Georgetown University's basketball team.

Education: MA in sports management from UMass, BA in business administration from Georgetown (magna cum laude).

Business experience: Five years as a top assistant to Mark Shapiro at Cleveland. Before that, one year in minor league operations with the Expos, followed by three years as a functionary in Cleveland's baseball operations division. (Jobs link).

Summary: Cleveland has successfully transformed itself into a perennial contender in the tough AL Central, and Antonetti deserves a large share of that success. He's a strong supporter of statistical analysis, who developed Cleveland's system for storing and analyzing data, finding a way to successfully integrate number crunching and scouting reports into a coherent resource (see this 2003 article for some context). He's also been Cleveland's chief negotiator on contracts for several years.

He's universally regarded as a very smart guy, and Baseball America honored him as having the best statistical analysis "tools" of any GM prospect in baseball a little less than a year ago ( link - behind the pay wall, sorry). They also tagged him as a guy to watch in this 2003 article on the game's top GM prospects. Even though he's a stat guy by nature, he's supposedly also good at dealing with scouts.

Dispositionally, he's fairly humble, which could be a problem if he's put forward as the media face of the franchise. He's not a shrinking violet, but he is somewhat reserved, so he might do best if he's paired with a CEO who could share some of those duties. Subjectively, that also might be less of a concern here in Pittsburgh than it would be in a market with real barracudas in the media.

It's been reported that he intends to be fairly choosy about his next job, as he has the luxury of being in high demand (for example, he declined an opportunity to interview as Theo Epstein's replacement in Boston two years ago). Our job may or may not pass muster, depending on circumstances that we as outsiders really have no way to analyze right now.