'We’re a product of Alex’s success': How 3 friends grew together to become some of MLB's most influential execs

Dana Brown didn’t realize when he offered an eager intern a job in the Montreal Expos’ front office that he was laying the foundation for a juggernaut team — one that would bring him a World Series ring, create a blueprint for sustained success that has proven largely impossible to replicate and eventually serve as some of his stiffest competition.

It was 2002, and Omar Minaya had just been installed as the general manager of the Expos, who were owned by the other 29 teams after Jeffrey Loria decamped to buy the Marlins. Loria had taken most of the front-office staff with him to Miami, leaving Minaya to fill out the ranks of a flailing team.

Alex Anthopoulos was already there as an unpaid intern. When he was 20, his father died, and for a few years, Anthopoulos helped his brothers run the family heating and ventilation business, balancing vocational engineering night classes with a career he couldn’t imagine doing for the rest of his life. And so he saved up enough money to take an unpaid internship in baseball, knowing he could afford to try for only so long.

In his second spring as an intern, then-24-year-old Anthopoulos was assigned Perry Minasian as a roommate. The son of the Texas Rangers’ assistant clubhouse manager, Minasian was there to help for the spring before he returned to work as an attendant in the Rangers' clubhouse. They bonded over long days at the complex.

“We would stay late and watch draft video from previous drafts, and we'd be there until 1 in the morning, 2 in the morning,” Minasian said this spring.

With less than a month to go before the '02 season, Minaya hired Brown — then a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates — to be his director of amateur scouting, and one day, as Brown was walking through the office, he stopped to talk with Anthopoulos.

“I started interacting with him about the amateur draft, and the energy, the excitement, the teachable spirit — he had all that,” Brown said recently.

“I didn't know who he was,” Anthopoulos said. “I was just thinking, like, I'd love to get a job at the end of this.”

“And I went into Omar's office and said, ‘Hey, we gotta hire this guy,’” Brown said.

Just like that, Anthopoulos became the Expos’ scouting coordinator, managing the administrative side of the department. Brown offered him $25,000 and then had to fight to make good on it after being told that was too much. On the flight back to Montreal from spring training, catcher Michael Barrett noticed the intern was now on the team plane. “Hey, you made the team,” he said.

Anthopoulos never told Brown that he was weeks away from leaving baseball altogether. A few years prior, he’d turned down a job offer at Fidelity, and if not for that first break from Brown, he would’ve traded baseball for finance forever.

“I didn't tell anybody. I just knew that I can't afford to do this anymore,” Anthopoulos said. “So if I wasn't able to get something out of it by the end of spring, I was probably done with my career.”

Twenty-one years later, the Houston Astros hired Brown to be their general manager. Minasian is starting his third season as the GM of the Los Angeles Angels, and Anthopoulos is in his sixth year as GM of the Atlanta Braves. For two decades, they’ve grown together — in their baseball savvy and executive style, as well as away from the field, watching one another get married and start families — and now they each oversee their own kingdom within the game. They made one another better, and now, when the situations arise, they will try to bring each other down.

“Dana uses this phrase,” Minasian said, “iron sharpens iron.”

'My best draft was Alex Anthopoulos'

Anthopoulos tells a story about how, shortly after he was hired for that first full-time job, he was working late at the Expos’ Florida complex. When he finally went to leave, it was close to 3 a.m., and the parking lot gate was locked. He was concerned that if he stayed overnight, the staffers who arrived in the morning would think he wanted it to look like he was working harder than everyone else. Mind you, he was, but he also worried about the optics of performative hustle, that his genuine dedication to the job was so extreme that it seemed insincere.

His plan to sleep on some towels until he could sneak out was foiled when Ken Rosenthal showed up for a 5 a.m. interview with Minaya, who arrived minutes later to find his young scouting coordinator disheveled and sleep-deprived. The GM lent Anthopoulos his car to go home and shower before returning to work. Less than eight years later, Anthopoulos would be a GM himself.

This piece is supposed to be about the relationship among three men who have all ascended to the pinnacle of baseball operations, a three-pronged profile presented without preferential treatment. But the truth of the matter is a little less egalitarian.

“Both of us — and I think Dana would tell you the same thing — we’re a product of Alex’s success,” Minasian said. “If Alex doesn't have the success he’s had in that role he has, I'm not sitting here with this job, and [Brown’s] not sitting in Houston with his job. We owe him a lot.”

“I’ve often told people,” Brown said, “my best draft was Alex Anthopoulos.”

(We’ll pause here to let Anthopoulos quibble with this kind of praise: “You do interviews like this, they're gonna say nice things about me.”)

In Montreal, Anthopoulos displayed a hunger to learn and a dedication to dominate, whatever the task at hand — a lesson those around him learned from watching him work and one he continues to espouse to this day.

“He was young, and he had so much energy,” Brown said. “I would get home for just a couple of days, and my wife would say, ‘We got to find this guy a wife. He's calling you at 12 at night talking about players, and you're only home for two days.’”

When the Expos, along with Brown, moved to Washington to become the Nationals, Anthopoulos did not go with them. As a Canadian, he was concerned about visa issues, so he took a pay cut to work for the only other Canadian team, joining the Toronto Blue Jays as their scouting coordinator before the 2004 season.

In 2009, after Anthopoulos had risen to assistant GM, the Blue Jays hired Minasian, who was scouting for the Rangers at the time, to be a scout. Minasian was eager to reunite with Anthopoulos. “That was a huge reason why I went,” he said.

When he became the GM, Anthopoulos promoted Minasian to director of scouting and hired Brown from the Nationals to be a special assistant. The three worked together in Toronto until Anthopoulos decamped to the Los Angeles Dodgers at the end of 2015. Along the way, they learned not just how to acquire talent but also how to build a team.

“By failing,” Anthopoulos said.

Dana Brown: 'Ultimately, you're buying into people'

When they disagreed about players, Brown used to shut down the conversation by saying, “The problem is I saw him.”

His point was that, for even the most modern front offices, there’s value in knowing what lies beyond the data. Minasian understood that perspective innately as someone who had been in clubhouses his whole life, watching his father work. But Anthopoulos didn’t play professionally and didn’t grow up around the game.

“I was all about Bill James, and I looked at the numbers,” Anthopoulos said of when he was first trying to break into baseball. “My first five years, we had some really talented players, some really talented teams, and we couldn't get over the hump.”

He took over as Toronto’s GM after 2009, and for the next five seasons, the Blue Jays never finished better than third in the AL East. The 2013 season was the toughest.

“There were high expectations for the team. We made a lot of trades, were on the cover of [magazines], predicted to win the World Series,” Minasian said, “All those things.”

They finished last in the division.

“That was something that we all talk about to this day,” Minasian said. “‘Remember in '13, you gotta keep going.’”

The following year was a little better but not enough.

“And I remember talking to Mark Buehrle about it — he was still on the roster,” Anthopoulos said, “basically saying, ‘I’m going to be really aggressive, and I’m done doing it the way I’ve done it. I’m just going to commit to this.’”

This was prioritizing makeup.

“We used to evaluate our own drafts. We would go back over the drafts and say, ‘Hey, where did we miss on this guy? Where did we miss on that guy?’” Brown said.

That started in Montreal. All three of them are obsessive about retrospective evaluation.

“Self-torture with decision-making,” Minasian calls it.

“Cross-checking ourselves,” Anthopoulos calls it. “We spent a lot of time looking back, but I think in a really productive and healthy way.”

“And oftentimes on the higher picks, it was usually, like, makeup if you missed on the guy,” Brown said. “We always said we’ve got to put more time into this because ultimately, you're buying into people. If you don't like the person, or if you don't think the person's a hard worker or he's dedicated or loves the game, it's tough to buy into that player. So one of the things we used to talk about is never miss the person, and that's probably the most important part of evaluations.”

After 2014, Anthopoulos began prioritizing players’ makeup, passing up opportunities to acquire talent even if it fit a particular need for the sake of protecting the clubhouse culture. That paid off with an ALCS run in 2015 and has been a guiding principle for him ever since.

After the team brought in Mark Shapiro as president of baseball operations at the end of the 2015 season, Anthopoulos turned down a five-year extension offer to stay in Toronto. Instead, he went to the Dodgers to work under Andrew Friedman as vice president of baseball operations.

“Alex has a phenomenal sense of timing,” Minasian said. “Timing is everything, especially in this sport.”

“I left Dana and Perry. It was definitely hard to do that,” Anthopoulos said. “And I remember Dana telling me — Dana is very faith-based — and he was just like, ‘Look, this is going to work out. You're gonna see. We're going to work together again. We're gonna win a World Series together one day.’”

'That does not happen everywhere'

It was Minasian who went to Atlanta first, in September 2017. About a week later, general manager John Coppolella resigned in the wake of a scandal that would result in him being banned from MLB for life (though he was recently reinstated). Minasian, who was an assistant GM in Atlanta, heard that the Braves were considering Anthopoulos as a replacement.

“I thought it was a great fit,” Minasian said. “I think any club, all 30, would be lucky to have that person running their club. He’s that good.”

In Atlanta, Anthopoulos has become a school of thinking in and of himself; the success has been that undeniable, and the strategy has been that clear. Since he arrived in November 2017, the Braves have finished first in their division every season. In 2021 — though Minasian was gone by then, hired by the Angels after 2020 — baseball delivered on Brown’s prediction. Two years after Anthopoulos brought Brown to Atlanta as VP of scouting, the Braves won the World Series.

Already a trend was emerging, but since then, the Braves have systematically promoted young players and quickly signed them to long-term extensions. The current core of proven winners will be in Atlanta for years to come. Brown credits the focus on makeup and players who can reliably access their ability — while avoiding those who are “just a big dream” — combined with a willingness to call up young players. It’s a product of trusting one another and the process honed over decades together — and of building something enviable, even to those on the inside.

“I know everybody talks about the extensions, and they’re great extensions. I don’t blame people for talking about it,” Minasian said. “But you have to get players to want to stay. That’s what’s most impressive. The environment that's created, the people that he surrounds himself with, what he does for the families and what he does for the players from a clubhouse standpoint and from a travel standpoint — that does not happen everywhere.”

Other organizations have, of course, taken notice, hiring Anthopoulos’ most trusted disciples, the people who helped make him the executive he is today.

“He was one of my first phone calls,” Brown said of when he got the Astros job this offseason. “I felt like he was tearing up, he was so excited for me.”

Beyond baseball they've got Eddie Murphy

It’s not all baseball, of course. You know a guy for 20-plus years, and there’s plenty of other stuff that comes out.

“He loves sushi,” Brown said of Anthopoulos. “Very picky eater.”

“He’s a connoisseur of sushi. He could have his own blog with sushi restaurants across the country,” Minasian confirmed.

And it’s not just Alex.

“Dana can speak Hebrew,” Minasian said. “He’s just like, ‘Hey, I wanna learn Hebrew.’”

Perry is the movie buff, but he mostly uses that to poke fun at Dana.

“Perry likes to tease Dana about Eddie Murphy, like, ‘What happened to his career?’” Anthopoulos said.

“We have, like, a little text chain that we use all the time, and funny things come up,” Brown said. “We love to go back to quotes from ‘Trading Places,’ so that's one of the ones that we talk about all the time. Sometimes we talk about the ‘Beverly Hills Cops.’ But we always do an Eddie Murphy thing to cheer each other up.”

“We talk about all kinds of different things,” Minasian said. “But Eddie Murphy is always a hot topic.”

And then, of course, there’s the family stuff, such as how to know when to get serious with the woman who will become your wife. It’s probably for the best that the relationship among the three of them has grown way beyond baseball, given that now they meet up on the field only as opposition.

“I gotta tell you, I don’t like,” Anthopoulos said of facing off against his friends. This past weekend, the Astros came to Atlanta for the first time under Brown and swept the Braves. “I want to see him do well, but not at the expense of the Braves.”

Anthopoulos said he had the same problem when his team faced the Dodgers in the postseason, and he was forced to root against Friedman, who has also become a friend. And so while, yes, meeting Minasian’s Angels or Brown’s Astros in the World Series this year would be nice because it would mean both teams played well, “it's hard because you have friends, but you also want to win, and you know one of the two of you is not gonna be happy.”

For what it’s worth, Brown doesn’t buy that. He thinks Anthopoulos is just deflecting — he does that.

“Oh, it would be unbelievable,” Brown said of meeting his prodigy-turned-mentor in October. “Nerve-wracking but unbelievable.”

And the results will matter, of course. Part of what these three have in common is the relentlessness, the drive to succeed so strong that it can only come from torturous self-critique.

But some things are bigger than baseball.

“This will be long gone,” Minasian said of their illustrious careers in baseball, “and I still think we'll be talking about Eddie Murphy.”