The Cleveland Browns are losing Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta, who is leaving to become the head of baseball operations for the Colorado Rockies, per a report by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, Zac Jackson and Brittany Ghiroli. DePodesta had been with Cleveland since 2016.
Per the report, DePodesta “orked with ownership and football operations on various projects and was regarded as a large part of the team’s planning for free agency each March and the NFL draft each April,” but did not make personnel decisions.
The career change marks a return to baseball by DePodesta, the executive highlighted by author Michael Lewis in his best-seller Moneyball for his role in using analytics to help the then-Oakland Athletics during the early 2000s.