Paul DePodesta

Paul DePodesta was hired by the Browns on Tuesday. He had worked for the New York Mets.

(AP)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It was early Tuesday morning, John Hart's cellphone rang.

The general manager of the Atlanta Braves, Hart figured it was a baseball call. After all, the incoming number belonged to Paul DePodesta, the vice president of scouting and player development with the New York Mets.

DePodesta and Hart have known each other since 1996. Hart was the Indians' general manager, DePodesta was hired as an intern with the team. They remained close ever since.

"John, are you sitting down?" asked DePodesta.

"Why?" asked Hart.

"Because I'm going to the Cleveland Browns," said DePodesta. "It will be announced in a few hours."

"WOW!" said Hart.

Then DePodesta explained that he was going to be Browns chief strategy officer.

"We talked about the Browns for a while," said Hart. "Paul knew all about the turnovers and the problems. He had been thinking about this for quite a while. Paul does his homework. He's not going there unless he's convinced he can make it work."

Hart asked some questions about ownership, etc.

"Paul told me that he had a very good feeling about the owner (Jimmy Haslam)," said Hart. "Paul is not just an analytics guy. He also is a good judge of people. As he explained it, I told him that it sounded like an awesome opportunity. Yes, it's out-of-the-box. But Paul is the kind of guy who can make it work."

BASEBALL SUCCESS

DePodesta is a respected baseball executive. Since 2010, he has been vice president of scouting and player development for the New York Mets. The farm system supplied many of the players who helped the Mets reach the World Series this season.

"Paul completely reorganized the Mets scouting and player-development functions and had an extraordinary impact in both areas," Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson said in a statement. "He also was very directly involved in our trade and free-agent acquisitions."

I sincerely doubt DePodesta would walk away from the Mets and baseball, where he's an established executive, to come to the Browns unless he thought they actually had a chance to succeed. This is not a guy who has been fired three times and needed a job. If anything, he risks looking stupid for leaving baseball to work in the NFL.

So DePodesta sees something beyond a healthy paycheck, and you can be sure Haslam dug deep into his wallet to bring the 43-year-old to Cleveland.

"I really like what the Browns did with those two hires," said Mark Shapiro, the former Tribe president who now has that same job with the Toronto Blue Jays. Shapiro worked in the Tribe front office when DePodesta was hired in 1996.

"Paul is astute and a smart, strategic thinker," said Shapiro. "He understands systems and analytics. He would be an asset to any franchise."

Without being asked, Shapiro began to praise Sashi Brown, the new vice president of football operations.

"I spent a fair amount of time talking to Sashi the last two years," he said. "He is extremely smart, a man of high character. The Browns are doing some interesting things."

A Harvard-trained attorney, Brown was in charge of the team's salary cap before being promoted on Sunday.

CLEVELAND ROOTS

Hart talked about the Tribe's front office of the middle 1990s. He was the general manager. His top assistant was Dan O'Dowd. Next came Josh Byrnes, Shapiro and DePodesta. All three became MLB general managers.

"Paul was younger than those guys." said Hart. "(Oakland GM) Billy Beane came up to me and wanted Paul. I let Paul go to the A's (in 1999) because we had so many guys in the front office."

Replacing DePodesta in 1999 was Chris Antonetti, now the team's president.

"Paul is a brilliant and innovative guy," Antonetti told me via a text. "He has helped reshape the operations of each team with which he's worked. He's very well respected within the (baseball) industry as an extraordinarily capable executive and leader."

DePodesta went to work for the Oakland A's, and became a character (renamed Peter Brand and played by Jonah Hill) in the movie Moneyball. He helped Beane transform Oakland into a playoff team.

DePodesta's biggest failure was with the Dodgers. He was hired as general manager at the age of 31 and fired after two years. He was too young and not ready for the Southern California media market. He then revived his career with the Padres and later the Mets.

"Believe me, if Paul had stayed in baseball, he would have been on the short lists for a lot of teams to be a general manager in the next few years," said Hart.

FOOTBALL MEN NEEDED

The Browns still need to hire a coach and a "football talent evaluator." The second spot may be called a general manager or something else.

It's DePodesta's job to not only reorganize the statistical side of franchise, but also to look at what the team calls the "sports science" operation. That's the training and conditioning.

Former Browns CEO Joe Banner pushed analytics when he was with the team in 2013. He sponsored the now-famous $100,000 quarterback study on the 2014 draft that ranked Teddy Bridgewater as the best prospect. The report also rated Derek Carr and Blake Bortles highly.

Johnny Manziel was red-flagged and ranked low.

Banner also hired Sashi Brown to be in charge of the salary cap. Like Banner, Brown was interested in the statistical approach to football.

The Browns drafts have been so bad, they scream for a new approach. They need to find people who appreciate analytics and other data, but have the people skills to bring the numbers alive.

Banner recently gave an analytics example. He said that 76 percent of all NFL games are won by the team in front at halftime. That would indicate a bold, aggressive approach on offense early in the game. Conventional wisdom is to establish the running game first. But throwing the ball could be the better approach to grab a quick lead.

So how do the football people and analytics types resolve that dilemma? That could be Sashi Brown's job. A big part of his job will be having the various football people work together. The Browns also will have to explain to candidates for head coach and general manager exactly how much influence will come from DePodesta and Brown.

So there are still a lot of issues to be worked out.

DePodesta played football at Harvard. He then spent the last 19 years in baseball, many of them trying to prove that he's "a baseball guy."

Now that he's switched to football, he's finally known as "a baseball guy."

The 43-year-old DePodesta gushed to Hart about how he's intrigued by his opportunity with the Browns.

"Paul told me that some of the best years in his life were in Cleveland," said Hart. "He wants the challenge and I think he's ready for it. This guy is razor, you'll see that."