A bonus for Falvey is that he had a firsthand opportunity to see how the other person did it earlier in his career.
“I watched Mark [Shapiro] personally in Cleveland take on this role during my tenure there,” said Falvey, who joined the Twins after the 2016 season. “It was obviously one of the first of its kind at that time.”
Shapiro, a longtime member of Cleveland’s front office, shifted from general manager to team president in 2010. Shapiro left Cleveland in 2015 to become the team president and CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays. Tampa Bay’s Matthew Silverman, who was a team president for nearly a decade before he led baseball operations, has experience in both roles, but it doesn’t appear he did them both simultaneously.
It has taken unique circumstances to push a person into a dual role. Cleveland was comfortable moving Shapiro to team president because it wanted to give Chris Antonetti, now Guardians president of baseball operations, a top role within the organization. Silverman assumed baseball operations for a few years when the Rays lost top baseball leader Andrew Friedman to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“It got me, which was not true of people who led baseball in other places around the game, a real deep understanding of what decisions were being made within the business operation for a long time, and that’s persisted over the years,” Falvey said. “I’ve been involved in even more of those conversations around long-range planning, around what is going on in this ballpark, around investments throughout our system in Fort Myers and other places.
“I don’t think if I had had a traditional baseball path alone that I would even be in a position to be able to have this conversation. It was because I’ve been in those conversations with them for a long time.”