Brewers to hire David Stearns as GM

The Brewers will reportedly hire Astros assistant GM David Stearns to take over for Doug Melvin as their next general manager. The 30-year-old will become baseball's youngest GM.

It's hard to tell what kind of GM someone's going to be if he or she hasn't been one before. For example, the Jays hired former GM J.P. Ricciardi out of the Athletics front office, and it looked like he would be a Billy Beane discipline; that didn't really turn out to be the case. And then there's A.J. Preller, who came from a scouting background with the Rangers but promptly traded most of the Padres' young talent soon after taking his first GM job.

Until proven otherwise, though, it's safe to assume Stearns will be strongly oriented towards analytics. Stearns' bio indicates that he helped oversee the analytics department of a very analytically oriented front office in Houston. Then there are the more stereotypical indications that Stearns will be a numbers guy, like his age and his Harvard education. (Stearns' bio also notes that he worked for the Pirates, by the way. I didn't remember him having worked in the Bucs' front office, so I'm guessing he worked in some low-level role soon after college.)

The notes leaked from the Astros' database show that Stearns was heavily involved with player acquisition decisions there. And while Stearns won't be able to take any of his work from Houston to Milwaukee, he'll have the benefit of having sorted through a couple years' worth of experiments in rebuilding in Houston. It will be interesting to see if he goes for a Houston-style teardown with the Brewers -- based on where they are right now, it certainly would be defensible if he did. Stearns also has a good reputation within the game. The Brewers probably aren't going to be very good for the next couple years regardless of who's in charge, but Stearns seems like the right sort of person to lead them out of the mess they're in.