As the Mets' front office search continues, former Washington Nationals vice president and assistant GM Adam Cromie has emerged as a serious candidate for the GM job, SNY's Andy Martino reported on Tuesday.
Cromie worked for the Nats from 2007 to 2017 before leaving to work as an associate in mergers and acquisitions at the law firm Jones Day, where he is still employed.
He was viewed as a rising star in baseball and a potential future GM when he left to pursue a career in law.
After attending Allegheny College (and playing football there for four years), Cromie earned his Master's degree in sports management from the University of Massachusetts.
He then interned as a video scout for Baseball Info Solutions and with the independent ball team the Washington Wild Things, and was eventually offered a chance to come work for the Nationals in an unpaid entry-level position.
In an interview he gave to CBS Sports in 2017, Cromie explained that when he was growing up, he thought he would either have a career in baseball or a career in law.
But Cromie's career in baseball started first.
Cromie moved up the chain rapidly and worked in various areas for the Nationals, including player development, analytics, and baseball operations.
He was named director of baseball operations in 2010 and promoted to vice president and assistant GM in 2014.
"Every moment I was awake, I was starting to build some database infrastructure and do things that would help us make decisions," Cromie told The Washington Post in 2013.
"It was a very small front office with a lot of jobs or job functions unfilled. When I got here, there was a lot for me to grab on to. I was able to get a lot of responsibility very quickly, and that's not the case for a lot of people who worked just as hard or harder than I have."
During his time with the Nats, Cromie began attending night classes in order to complete his law degree.
Cromie left the Nats in 2017 to join Jones Day, a decision he said took some of his friends by surprise.
"A lot of my close friends either picked up the phone and called or texted and asked, 'Hey, is everything okay?' Sometimes telling people that you intend to pursue other opportunities can be code for 'I was let go' or 'told that my services weren't needed anymore,'" Cromie told CBS Sports in late 2017. "But the people I knew the best, and the people within the organization understood this was always something I may do."
While with Jones Day, Cromie has been working in mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance, among other areas.
While Cromie will be returning to baseball after four years away from the game if he gets the job as Mets GM, going from a different field to the leader of an MLB front office is not unheard of.
The most famous recent example is of course Brodie Van Wagenen, who was an agent and had no experience in baseball operations before being hired by the Mets. But that's not a fair example.
Unlike Van Wagenen, Cromie has a decade of experience working in an MLB front office.
Frank Cashen, who took over the Mets' baseball operations in 1980 and assembled the team that won the 1986 World Series, first worked as an executive for the Baltimore Orioles, who hired him to lead their baseball operations in 1965 after Cashen worked as a sportswriter, a publicity director, and in advertising.
But again, as is noted above, Cromie has 10 years of experience working in baseball -- with some of those years near the top of a front office.
So while his candidacy might feel outside the box or strange, it really isn't.
