Guys who never played have a place in the game, too.(Closer)

As we enjoy this renaissance period of baseball, let's look at an interesting shift taking place off the field.

In the past few years, there has been a growing movement to hire front-office types out of Ivy League colleges instead from the old School of Hard Knocks. It used to be almost unheard of to have a general manager who never played at the pro level, but that has changed.

I'm pretty sure this movement started on the West Coast. Billy Beane's former assistants with Oakland, J.P. Ricciardi and Paul DePodesta, took over G.M. jobs with the Blue Jays and Dodgers. Add others such as Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein in Boston and you have a mix of computer-age number crunchers doing the same kind of work as grizzled scouts. These are the two sides of your supposed baseball brains, and they're having trouble meeting in the middle.

The old-school scouts say, "Look, this kid's a five-tool player. He's 6-5 and can fly and hit for power. He's a can't-miss." Then the baseball savants, as we'll call them here, will show the old-school scout a list of five-tool prospects who did miss and wonder out loud what happened.

The savants base their evaluations on statistics such as on-base percentage and pitches seen per ...