The General Manager, Revisited: What's Changed Since Dombrowski's "Man in the Middle"

A modern look at David Dombrowski's 1978 Western Michigan University honors thesis

In October 1978, a 22-year-old college senior at Western Michigan University turned in an honors thesis called The General Manager, "The Man in the Middle." He was working as an Administrative Assistant for the Chicago White Sox at the time, and his name was David Dombrowski. Almost fifty years later, that same David Dombrowski runs baseball operations for the Philadelphia Phillies, and he has built or rebuilt championship-caliber rosters in Montreal, Florida, Detroit, Boston, and Philadelphia along the way. So the thesis isn't just a history paper. It was written by a man who would go on to live every word of it, and watch most of his assumptions get rewritten in the process.

The paper caught the GM's job at a strange moment. Free agency was two years old. The reserve clause had collapsed. A "front office staff" of twenty-five people was still considered big. Reading it now, almost five decades later, you can see exactly which parts survived, which parts evolved, and which parts would be unrecognizable to the kid who wrote them. Dombrowski was right that the title "General Manager" never meant the same thing on every team. On some clubs the GM ran everything. On others, he ran only baseball stuff and someone else handled the business side. He chalked that up to the personalities of individual owners, and that part still tracks. What's totally different is that there's now an entire layer of management above the GM. On about half of MLB's thirty teams, the GM is no longer the top of the food chain. He reports to a President of Baseball Operations. That role barely existed in 1978. It's now the standard for most contending clubs. Dombrowski himself holds the title in Philadelphia, with GM Preston Mattingly working under him. You see the same setup with Andrew Friedman over Brandon Gomes in Los Angeles, Chris Antonetti over Mike Chernoff in Cleveland, Peter Bendix over Gabe Kapler in Miami, and recently Paul DePodesta over Josh Brynes in Colorado.

The reason that extra layer exists is the same one Dombrowski sketched out at the end of his thesis: the job got too big. A modern baseball operations department covers domestic scouting, international scouting in a dozen countries, analytics, player development, sports science, mental skills, performance nutrition, biomechanics, run prevention, pitching coaches at every level, hitting coaches at every level. Nobody can run all of that and still negotiate trades and contracts. So the President of Baseball Operations handles vision, ownership, and the league office. The GM handles the day-to-day baseball calls.

Just as big a shift is who actually gets the job. In 1978, Dombrowski noticed a trend of teams promoting their best scouts into the GM chair, and he listed seven of them: Bob Kennedy with the Cubs, Al Campanis with the Dodgers, Phil Seghi with the Indians, Charlie Fox with the Expos, Paul Owens with the Phillies, Harding Peterson with the Pirates, and Bob Fontaine with the Padres. His logic made sense. The GM's main job was finding and developing players, and scouts had spent their entire careers doing exactly that. That whole pipeline is gone now. Today's top baseball ops executives are more likely to have a degree from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, or Tulane than a stack of scouting reports. ESPN ran the numbers in 2020 and found that the share of Ivy League graduates running baseball operations went from about 3% in 2001 to 43% by 2020. Over the same stretch, the share of former players running front offices dropped from 37% to 20%.

The turning point was 2002 and 2003. The Red Sox hired 28-year-old Yale graduate Theo Epstein as GM, and Michael Lewis published Moneyball, which mythologized Oakland's Billy Beane and his Harvard-trained analyst Paul DePodesta. After that the floodgates opened. Texas hired Jon Daniels out of Cornell at age 28. Tampa Bay hired Andrew Friedman out of Tulane at the same age that same year. Then came Jed Hoyer, Mike Hazen, Mike Chernoff, Chaim Bloom, David Stearns, and on and on. The decision teams were making was clear enough: an executive who could read a regression model, build a forecast, and negotiate a complicated contract was worth more than one who could grade a curveball with his eyes. The "experience" requirement Dombrowski wrote about hasn't gone away, but experience now means time as an analyst or assistant GM, not decades on the road in cars and motels.

The most anxious section of the 1978 paper is the part on labor and money. Dombrowski was writing two years after Messersmith-McNally and the 1976 Basic Agreement created modern free agency. He calls the new salaries "astronomical," points out that fifteen players made over $300,000 in 1977, and worries that ticket prices hitting $10 a seat will price families out of the ballpark. Two of the rules from that era are still on the books today. Players still need six years of service time before they can become free agents, and the so-called 10-and-5 rule still gives a player full no-trade rights once he has ten years of service with five of them on his current team. Those rules have survived fifty years of bargaining unchanged. That's the most durable thing in the entire thesis.

The dollar figures attached to those rules, though, are from a different planet. In 1977, fifteen guys earning $300,000 felt like the end of the world. In 2026, the league minimum is around $780,000. Juan Soto signed a 15-year, $765 million deal with the Mets before the 2025 season, by himself larger than the entire 1977 payroll of every team in MLB combined, several times over. Shohei Ohtani's 10-year, $700 million Dodgers contract rewrote the rules of contract structure, since Ohtani agreed to defer $680 million of it until the 2034 to 2043 window. His endorsement income alone in 2026 is reportedly $125 million, which is more than any team's entire 1977 payroll.

Dombrowski's specific worry, that fans would get priced out, has come true and missed the point at the same time. Tickets really have climbed past what an average family can casually afford. But the revenue model shifted under everyone's feet. Regional sports networks, national TV deals, MLB.tv subscriptions, sponsorship inventory, and premium hospitality now bring in most of a team's money. The Dodgers' local TV deal alone is worth somewhere around $334 million a year. A team that drew 1.5 million fans in 1978, which Dombrowski put down as the new break-even number, would today be in trouble compared to its peers. Not because of weak ticket sales. Because the team had no media leverage.

Building a roster inside this kind of revenue picture isn't just about finding good players anymore. The GM also has to manage payroll inside something called the luxury tax, where teams that spend over set thresholds pay financial penalties to the league. In 2026 those thresholds start at $244 million and step up to $304 million, and clubs that keep blowing past them lose draft picks on top of money. So the modern GM is constantly juggling: long-term contracts versus the cheap years he gets out of young players, all-in moves versus rebuilds, the timing of competitive windows. Dombrowski himself is famous for going all-in when those windows open.

Back in 1978, he wrote that participation in free agency was "essentially a team policy that is dictated by the owner. Many owners are against free agent signings, and refuse to bid in the open market for these players." That's still mostly true, except now it's locked into the league's financial structure rather than just being an owner's mood. Revenue sharing moves money from big-market clubs to small-market clubs, but a lot of those small-market teams use the cash to maintain a payroll baseline rather than chase stars. What hasn't changed at all is Dombrowski's underlying point about leverage. Winning teams have the upper hand in trade talks, because winning teams have what other teams want. When he wrote that "trades are not made by one man, but rather are the result of discussions among the owner, General Manager, field manager, coaching staff, and farm director," he was describing pretty much exactly how trade talks still happen. The only update is that the analytics department is now in the room too, and a computer model usually runs the trade evaluation before any human signs off on it.

The same mix of continuity and reinvention shows up in player development. Dombrowski spends a lot of his thesis on Branch Rickey and the invention of the modern farm system in the 1920s, and he's right that development is the foundation of any good organization. The greatness of an organization, he quoted then-Dodgers VP Al Campanis as saying, is in its "teachability." That's still true. What's different is the geography and the technology. In 1978, the farm system was a chain of affiliated minor league teams from Triple-A down to rookie ball, mostly stocked with American kids signed out of high schools and colleges. The international pipeline existed since Latin American players had been showing up in numbers since the 1950s, but it wasn't formalized.

Now every MLB organization runs an academy in the Dominican Republic, where teenagers can sign at sixteen under a separate set of international signing rules. Most clubs scout heavily in Venezuela, Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Curaçao, Aruba, plus Cuba (with complications, given U.S. policy) and increasingly across Asia. The KBO in Korea, NPB in Japan, and Taiwan's CPBL all feed major league rosters through what's called the posting system, where Japanese and Korean teams collect a fee whenever their players sign with an MLB club. About 28% of MLB rosters in recent years have been foreign-born players.

The minor league system itself is smaller than it used to be. MLB contracted Minor League Baseball in 2020 and cut dozens of affiliates, so most organizations now run six full-season teams plus complex-level squads in Arizona or Florida and a Dominican Summer League team. But the work that happens inside those affiliates is on a different planet from what Dombrowski could have imagined. Ball-tracking radar systems like TrackMan and Hawk-Eye, biomechanics screens, individualized pitching plans built around the spin and shape of each guy's pitches, hitting plans built around how the bat moves through the zone, mental skills work. All of it is now standard. A modern GM doesn't just want a strong farm system. He wants what people in the industry call a "development engine," meaning an organization that can take raw athletes and make them better faster than anyone else can. The Dodgers, Rays, and Brewers have built reputations as exactly that. Dombrowski's Phillies are working on it.

The biggest gap between the 1978 thesis and the modern game is in how players are evaluated. The paper takes for granted that scouting is the dominant method, because statistical analysis as we know it didn't exist inside the sport yet. Bill James was self-publishing his Baseball Abstract out of Lawrence, Kansas, but it would be years before any team officially put him on payroll. Today every front office has a research and development department. Internal databases store every pitch thrown, every ball put in play, every defensive movement on every field. Player evaluation runs scout reports and statistical models side by side, with the weighting between them shifting from team to team. Most clubs have moved past the early-2000s stats-versus-scouts wars into hybrid models, where scouts contribute things like delivery, makeup, work ethic, and ability to adjust mid-game, and the analytics group contributes predictive forecasts. The smart organizations treat both inputs as essential.

The technology has run far ahead of anything imaginable in 1978. Hawk-Eye optical tracking, TrackMan radar, Edgertronic high-speed video, biomechanics suits, training methods popularized by Driveline Baseball, Rapsodo devices for evaluating amateur kids: all of it generates an amount of data that just didn't exist when Dombrowski sat down to write. Pitch design, which means deliberately engineering a pitcher's repertoire based on the spin and movement of each pitch, is now a core front-office skill. The simplest way to put it: a 1978 GM had to know players. A 2026 GM has to know players, models, the limits of those models, and how to lead an organization where multiple departments analyze the same player through different lenses and have to land on one answer.

Media is the other place where the 1978 framework looks young. Dombrowski devoted a full chapter to evolution and progress, walking through the introduction of radio in 1921, night baseball in 1935, television in 1939, and air travel in the late 1940s, and his argument was that each one piled more responsibility onto the GM and made the workday longer. He was right. All of those forces just kept piling on. Radio still exists but is supplemental. National TV deals with FOX, TBS, and ESPN, plus regional sports networks (some of which are now collapsing as the cable bundle dies), generate vastly more money than radio ever did. MLB.tv streams every out-of-market game globally, and the league has experimented with games shown only on Apple TV+ and YouTube. Social media platforms like Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit have collapsed the distance between fans, players, and front offices to almost zero. Players have direct relationships with millions of followers. Most trade rumors break on Twitter before any reporter writes a word.

The casualty in all of this is the "baseball family" Dombrowski talked about, the camaraderie among GMs, writers, broadcasters, and players that he said started fading once teams stopped traveling by train. It has fragmented even more. A modern GM works in a much more adversarial media environment than his 1978 counterpart. Social media outrage can swallow a roster decision in hours. National baseball reporters with hundreds of thousands of followers can shape the perception of a trade overnight. The GM himself has become a public figure, which Dombrowski almost certainly didn't see coming. Theo Epstein's contract extension with the Cubs was reportedly worth around $10 million a year, making him one of the highest-paid front-office executives ever, by a lot. GMs are now mentioned by name on national broadcasts, profiled in long-form magazines, and second-guessed by podcasters every day. The transient nature of the position that Dombrowski warned about is more public than ever.

On labor, the 1978 thesis was written just two years after the 1976 Basic Agreement, and Dombrowski correctly pegged Marvin Miller's 1966 hiring as the inflection point in the player-owner relationship. He traced the player movement through the 1969 spring training boycott, the 1970 Curt Flood lawsuit, the 1972 strike, the 1973 lockout, and the 1975 Messersmith ruling. That sequence basically set the template for every labor fight that followed. Baseball had work stoppages in 1981, 1985, 1990, and most disastrously in 1994 and 1995, when the World Series was canceled. The 2022 lockout pushed back the start of that season. Each negotiation has chewed over the same core issues he identified: free agency rules, salary arbitration, pensions and benefits, revenue sharing, and the luxury tax. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement runs through 2026, and the industry expects the next round of talks to be ugly. Ownership is going to push for a salary cap, which the union has refused for forty years. The players are going to push back on the way the luxury tax has slowed salary growth. A work stoppage looks likely.

One forecast from the 1978 paper has aged really well. Dombrowski predicted that lawyers and agents would become permanent middlemen between the player and the General Manager, and they did. Scott Boras alone represents a big chunk of the highest-paid players in the sport, including eight of the top fifteen earners in 2026 by some counts. The relationship between GMs and agents has become its own discipline. Some agents are even former GMs.

The thesis ends on an optimistic note about baseball going international. Dombrowski mentions Japan's interest in a real "World Series," Cuba opening up to the United States, and Latin American countries asking about franchises, and he speculates that the GM might one day take on "a role of diplomat." That role is real now, just spread across the league differently than he pictured. The World Baseball Classic, which started in 2006, has become a major international tournament. MLB plays regular-season games in London, Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul, and the Dominican Republic. The Toronto Blue Jays, who Dombrowski mentioned in 1978 as a structurally innovative new franchise, have spent decades as the only foreign-based team after the Montreal Expos moved to Washington in 2005. The international pipeline is now central to roster building in a way Dombrowski only hinted at. Shohei Ohtani's 2018 arrival from Japan, his two-way performance as both a pitcher and a hitter, and his record contracts have probably made him the most marketable player in the history of the sport. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, and other Japanese stars have followed him over. Korean veterans like Hyun-Jin Ryu, Merrill Kelly, and Erick Fedde have moved between MLB and Korean baseball with more and more ease. The GM isn't just a roster-builder anymore. He's running a global talent network.

What hits hardest about reading the thesis with a 2026 eye is how much of its core has held up. The GM's job is still about integration, about getting a lot of specialists pointed at one competitive goal. The "buck stops here" pressure is still real. The position is still transient and publicly scrutinized, and Dombrowski himself can vouch for that, since the Boston Red Sox fired him in 2019, less than a year after he had won them the World Series. And the owner still sets the tone. Steve Cohen's willingness to spend in New York looks nothing like John Fisher's posture in Oakland, and the GM works inside whatever lines the owner draws.

What the 1978 paper underestimates is how much the everyday content of the job would change while those bigger truths stayed put. The scouting-to-GM pipeline collapsed and got replaced by an analytics-and-Ivy-League pipeline. A new role, the President of Baseball Operations, settled on top of the GM. A single player contract can now exceed an entire 1978 league payroll. Internal R&D departments quietly redefined what evaluation even means. The talent network went global, with formal posting systems, deep Latin American academies, and international scouting departments larger than entire 1978 front offices. And the GM himself became a public figure, with his own contract value, brand, and media presence.

Dombrowski's title, "The Man in the Middle," has only gotten more accurate. The 1978 GM stood between ownership, the field manager, and the players. The 2026 GM stands between all of those plus the analytics department, the international scouting director, the player development infrastructure, the agent ecosystem, the league office, the union, the media, the sponsorship side of the business, and the fan base on social media. The middle is more crowded. The view from it is more contested. The basic job description from 1978 hasn't moved. That David Dombrowski is still doing that job, almost half a century after he sat down to write about it as a college senior, says something about what his thesis was reaching toward. The General Manager is still the man in the middle. The middle just moved.

SOURCES

Dombrowski, David. “The General Manager, ‘The Man in the Middle.’” ScholarWorks, scholarworks.wmich.edu/honors_theses/684. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“What Is Baseball Operations?” Baseball Connect, baseball-connect.com/learn/what-is-baseball-operations/. Accessed 3 May 2026.

Lee, Joon, and Multiple Authors. “Inside the Rise of MLB’s Ivy League Culture: Stunning Numbers and a Question of What’s Next.” ESPN, ESPN Internet Ventures, www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29369890/inside-rise-mlb-ivy-league-culture-stunning-numbers-question-next. Accessed 3 May 2026.

Calcaterra, Craig. “Report: 43% of Top Baseball Ops Employees Are Ivy Leaguers.” NBC Sports, NBC Sports, 1 July 2020, www.nbcsports.com/mlb/news/43-percent-top-baseball-ops-employees-ivy-leaguers.

Admin. “Baseball’s Analytics Revolution: Evolving from Intuition to Data-Driven Insights.” Baseball’s Analytics Era: From Gut Feel to Data-Driven, 14 Apr. 2025, historicbaseball.com/baseballs-analytics-era-from-gut-feel-to-data-driven/.

Admin. “Moneyball’s Legacy: The Data Revolution Transforming Modern Baseball.” Moneyball’s Legacy: How Data Shapes Modern Baseball, 15 May 2025, historicbaseball.com/moneyballs-legacy-how-data-shapes-modern-baseball/.