Phillies exec Bryan Minniti has Matt Klentak’s ear, and an unusual backstory | Mike Sielski

Bryan Minniti is 39 years old and an assistant general manager with the Phillies, a confidant to GM Matt Klentak, and when you are a 39-year-old baseball executive, there are certain presumptions and preconceptions intrinsic to the job.

The first such preconceived notion is obvious, so obvious that, just from reading that brief biography, you might have jumped to it already: Minniti is 39, which makes him young and which, in turn, must make him an Ivy-educated, algorithm-embracing intellectual who views ballplayers primarily not as living, breathing human beings but as collections of digits and decimal points on a spreadsheet.

But he’s not that, not really. And to understand how the Phillies have evolved and changed under president Andy MacPhail and Klentak, and how they might continue evolving and changing, it’s important to understand who Minniti is, because he is an important figure for them.

He and Klentak have been friends for 15 years. He has influence within the organization. He was on the four-person committee — Minniti, Klentak, assistant GM Ned Rice, and then-director of player development Joe Jordan — that selected Gabe Kapler to be the Phillies manager.

And in late 2017, when Klentak promoted Minniti to assistant GM, selecting him to oversee the franchise’s player development and amateur and pro scouting departments, the decision reportedly led to the departure of Jordan, the more stereotypical “baseball guy,” who had been a driving force behind the replenishing of the Phillies’ minor-league talent pool.

It was difficult to juxtapose those two moves — Minniti rising, Jordan leaving — and not believe there had been tension within the front office over the Phillies’ direction and future.

“I don’t sense tension,” Minniti said in a recent interview. “Maybe the analogy is just trying to modernize an old home. You want to keep the character. You want to keep the charm. You want to keep all the things that make it great, and you want to update it a little bit. That’s what we’ve been doing on the inside.

“Any time you’re doing anything different — doesn’t matter what it is — there’s going to be a little bit of a growth period. I think that’s probably where we’ve had, if there’s any kind of tension. Every time you try to do something different, you’re going to face a little bit of ‘Hey, why are we doing this? Are you sure you want to do this? How far do you want to go with this?’ That’s probably where we’ve been.”

Based on his background, Minniti would be as likely to ask those questions as he would rely on data to answer them. Though he was a math/statistics major in college, he broke into baseball not by impressing anyone with his numeric wizardry but by attending a job fair in the fall of 2000 while he was an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh. He chatted with a university career-services officer about an internship opening with the Penguins, and not long after, she left a message on his answering machine: Hey, the Pirates are looking for someone who sounds like you.

That night, Minniti wrote his first resume and cover letter. The next morning, he faxed the documents to the Pirates. He scored an interview the following week. “That was 19 years ago,” he said.

That was pre-“Moneyball,” too, when baseball’s analytics revolution was confined to the brains of Bill James, Sandy Alderson, and Billy Beane, and the notebook of Michael Lewis. Minniti worked directly for Jon Mercurio — then the Pirates’ director of baseball operations, now an advance scout for the Phillies — traveling to Latin America and to high schools and colleges around the U.S., learning scouting techniques and MLB’s rules and arbitration practices.

He got the kind of classical education that helps any up-and-comer in any trade or profession, the kind of diversified training that Eagles vice president Howie Roseman received from Joe Banner and Andy Reid.

“I couldn’t get into baseball today,” said Minniti, who spent nine seasons with the Pirates, five with the Nationals, and two with the Diamondbacks before joining the Phillies in 2016. “The standards are so much higher. The resumes are so much better. I got in when I did and was very lucky. I don’t know exactly why they chose me, but once they did, I didn’t give them a reason to kick me out.

“Early, it was always made a priority to me: Go to games. Go see other teams’ affiliates. Go see high school and college games. Go see games whenever you can. So I did that. That gave me the ability to at least have an opinion and have an idea. I’ll never pretend I’m a top evaluator.

"Even now, with [Phillies director of amateur scouting] Johnny Almaraz, for example, and with my role, I don’t find it important that I for sure see our first-round pick. In my opinion, that’s what this man does for a living. He’s had a lot of success. If he tells me and the room says, ‘That’s the guy,’ I don’t have to go see him. I know what I am, but my career’s given me an opportunity to at least ask the right questions.”

Minniti met Klentak in 2004 while the two were working on a player arbitration case — Minniti with the Pirates, Klentak in the commissioner’s office, two guys in their early 20s trading phone calls while they worked until 9 or 10 on their Friday nights, those shared experiences forming the basis of their friendship and the power Minniti wields within the organization now.

He isn’t the man on top, but he has the ears of those who are, and for a franchise that was once too old-school for its own good, from beginnings that aren’t as new-school as you might think, Bryan Minniti has no small say in the Phillies’ future, for better or worse.