Via BBTF, the new Mets front office should work well, according to the book, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance.

First, those analysts who moved from “low-rated firms to high-rated firms” improved their performance, for they were surrounded in their new jobs by more plentiful and useful resources. The Mets, with a 2011 payroll that’s on course to exceed $130 million in spite of a relatively dormant offseason, represent an upgrade in that regard for Messrs. Alderson, DePodesta and Ricciardi. From 2006 to 2009, Mr. Alderson, as chief operating officer, and Mr. DePodesta, as a baseball-operations executive, collaborated in running the San Diego Padres, whose payroll never topped $74 million in any of those years, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, a website that tracks major-league players’ salary information.

…

Second, “stars” who moved to new organizations in teams or “packs” performed better than those who moved individually, for their relationships with each other made it easier to replicate the conditions that had made them successful in the first place. Dr. Groysberg called such connections “relationship human capital.” And for Mr. DePodesta, 38, who regards “Moneyball” as a treatise not on how to evaluate athletic talent but on how to exploit “stagnant systems,” “Chasing Stars” represents another opportunity to test business theories and principles in what might at first seem an unorthodox setting.

I’m interested to see how much of a pass this group gets in the first year. There wasn’t much they could do to change the team this winter, so there isn’t that much of an expectation for improvement outside of the stars staying healthy.