In other words, two executives with experience building winners out of small-market teams will now have the task of applying those same principles to the Dodgers, the team with the highest payroll in baseball last season.

Image Farhan Zaidi is poised to go from the Oakland A’s front office to the team that had baseball’s highest payroll last season. Credit... Michael Zagaris/Oakland Athletics, via Getty Images

Zaidi’s hiring seemed to be a bold move, and it reinforced a trend in which statistic-minded executives are taking increasingly important positions across baseball. Theo Epstein has been given the job of turning around the Chicago Cubs, and now Friedman and Zaidi are in Los Angeles.

Friedman also has an interesting background. He was working in finance, with no real professional baseball experience, when he first met the Rays’ principal owner, Stuart Sternberg, in the early 2000s. The Rays hired him, and by the time he was 28 he had worked his way up to general manager.

Under Friedman’s guidance, the Rays became the A’s of the American League East. He built teams around young, inexpensive but talented players, and filled out the roster by making savvy free-agent signings. And he was unafraid to trade those young players as they approached free agency to restock the roster with more young talent.

Beane had been doing something similar in Oakland for years.

The culture change around the Rays was nothing short of stunning. In the Rays’ first 10 years of existence, they won no more than 70 games in a season. In six of Friedman’s last seven years there, they had winning seasons, finished with at least 90 wins five times, and won the pennant in 2008.