CLEVELAND: Like many who navigate their way though college, Mike Chernoff didn’t know the career path he’d take until just before his senior year.
Chernoff was a middle infielder at Princeton, and his prospects of playing professional baseball weren’t especially great. He was an economics major. He knew numbers, he knew finances and he knew baseball, which he had played in the backyard since before he can remember.
But he wasn’t sure what the future held. The idea he could eventually rise to become the general manager of a major league team — or that he really wanted to — hadn’t really crossed his mind.
He took an internship with the New York Mets between his junior and senior years. And just like that, everything clicked.
Chernoff joined the Indians as an intern in June of 2003, 48 hours after graduating. His impact was almost as immediate. He spent his early days taking in and breaking down scouting reports to be used in talent evaluation. It wasn’t long before he started to play a direct role in the team’s financial decision-making process, assisting with negotiations for arbitration-eligible players.
Chernoff was promoted to assistant director of baseball operations and worked his way to be director of baseball operations in 2007, then assistant general manager, and twelve years after walking in as an intern, he’s entering his first full season as the club’s general manager under president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti.
Not bad for a Princeton middle infielder who hadn’t deeply considered this a real career option until about the time he’d need to be ordering his robe for graduation.
“I didn’t ever think there were jobs in baseball that I might be able to fit into outside of playing until I did that internship with the Mets,” Chernoff recently told the Beacon Journal. “It was at that point I realized I wasn’t just passionate about the game, I was passionate about working in the game. I think part of that was seeing that I had a skill set in the academic background I had in economics and finance, and that it could potentially apply to baseball.”
Chernoff’s initial role with the Indians — when he dealt directly with scouts — had a profound, lasting impact on how he operates in the front office. It shaped his perspective and view of the game. What he remembers in those early days aren’t just the reports he fielded from scouts. It was their passion. It was the their tone of voice, not just the words they chose.
Some of those scouts are still with the club today. And Chernoff is still bouncing ideas off of them as much as anyone.
“People might have had an idea of what my mindset might have been and I’m put into this situation where I’m interacting with our pro scouts — not just running analytics, interacting with them,” Chernoff said. “It was this incredible perspective I learned. They have such deep knowledge and I now have such a deep bond with those people because I’ve been talking to them for 12 years.”
Chernoff came in as a Princeton graduate with a degree in economics. That background tends to heavily lend itself toward a numbers-based, analytical approach. But that approach was colder than what Chernoff encountered in helping to make decisions. He wanted the scouts’ intake to be heard in the room. He wanted their emotion. The data was good, and he could sift through it, interpret it and apply it. It just wasn’t enough. He didn’t want the data and the scouts’ opinions to compete. He wanted them to layer on top of one another to create a better picture of a player’s abilities.
It is in this goal that Chernoff finds his place in the Indians’ front office as the de factor second-in-command to Antonetti. He is an organizer, a representer and an evaluator.
“[Antonetti] and I have been working side-by-side for 12 years. We’ve gotten really close and know each other’s styles really well,” Chernoff said. “Chris is leading decisions and he gets this intense focus on that process. I’ve often found my role to be to go out, gather a lot of input and ideas, generate new ideas and look at it from different angles. I tend to have some emotion and passion for what I’m advocating for. Chris is a really good balance for that. Those styles complement each other. Hopefully, sometimes I bring some of that to the table in our discussions.”
The information revolution in baseball over the past decade has created a need for streamlined systems of organization. Synthesizing data is as crucial as it has ever been. More data, viewpoints and ways to break down the game means a higher chance of disorganization and crucial information getting lost in the fray. Chernoff is a facilitator of data to take to Antonetti as a means to better make a more informed decision rather than relying on incomplete information, which recently has become an increasingly present issue for teams when any player could have half a dozen indicators of future performance all pointing in different directions.
“I’m not an expert scout. I’m not an expert coach. I’m not a sports psychologist,” Chernoff said. “What I view my job as being is to facilitate getting that information, driving those people to have systems in place to have gotten that information and put it together. It’s not competing interests [when debating a decision], it’s more like, ‘How do we get these pieces into the puzzle and solve that complex puzzle?’ ”
As Chernoff has climbed the ladder, he has of course been molded by many Indians executives who have gone on to find high-level positions with other franchises. That list includes Mark Shapiro (Toronto Blue Jays), Ross Atkins (Toronto Blue Jays), Neal Huntington (Pittsburgh Pirates), David Stearns (Milwaukee Brewers) and Mike Hazen (Boston Red Sox).
Along with those scouts in the early days, Shapiro and Antonetti have been the main architects in Chernoff’s development and the ones who allowed him to have such an impact at an early age. And it was from Shapiro that Chernoff says he learned his greatest lesson.
“Some of the best advice I ever got was in how Mark is a huge believer in really getting to know and understand people and where they are coming from,” Chernoff said. “In baseball, you can have a 16-year-old player from the Dominican who had a completely different upbringing than I had. Or you have a 65-year-old coach who’s at a completely different place in his life. So Mark made sure to instill in all of us that empathy. That has stuck with me more than anything.”
It’s one of the many lessons Chernoff has picked up along his 12-year journey from intern to general manager of the Indians. It’s also one of the many results of his college realization that he had a quality skill set in his knowledge of numbers, finances and his childhood game. And with it, a long-lasting place in the baseball world.
Ryan Lewis can be reached at rlewis@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Indians blog at www.ohio.com/indians. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/RyanLewisABJ and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/RyanLewisABJ