CLEARWATER, Fla. - The two sides of Matt Klentak's baseball mind developed at Dartmouth University, formed with equal influence from who he was and where he happened to be.
In October, the Phillies hired him, at age 35, to be their general manager, and any attempt to anticipate what sort of executive he will be - what qualities he will look for in players, what decisions he will make, why he will make them - has to begin with the four years he spent on that bucolic campus in Hanover, N.H. Klentak graduated in 2002 with a degree in economics, a fact that carries with it all the presumptions about any young baseball executive: that he spends hours each day squinting at spreadsheets on his iPad, that he views a ballplayer less as a human being than as an asset or liability to be evaluated based purely on the numbers and decimal points dotting his stat line.