Professional baseball and higher education are starting to overlap.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

Baseball general managers go to the head of the class

BOCA RATON, Fla. • Major League Baseball’s general managers have become the brainy bunch.

Ivy in the major leagues these days isn’t just a reference to Wrigley Field’s vine-covered walls. Four GMs hired in the last two months have Ivy League backgrounds.

The 30 current GMs include four Harvard graduates, two each from Cornell and Dartmouth, and one apiece from Princeton and Penn. There are also grads of MIT, Amherst, Georgetown and Wesleyan, two law degrees from Harvard, two MBAs from Northwestern and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

“Bottom line is this is big business,” said New York Yankees GM Brian Cashman, a history major who played baseball at Catholic University. “Because we can measure everything that’s taking place on the field and analyze in a very specific way performance and projected performance, this should be run like a Wall Street boardroom where you pursue assets. No different than if you’re in the oil industry and you want to buy some oil rigs out in the gulf.”