Milwaukee Brewers president of baseball operations David Stearns announced that he was stepping down on Thursday to take an advisory role within the organization. General Manager Matt Arnold will take over as the lead decision maker in baseball operations. MLB.com's Adam McCalvy was first to report the news.
Stearns is entering the final year of his contract with the Brewers, and rather than sign an extension, he's opting to resign his position and take a lower role, handing the reins over to Arnold. Other teams such as the New York Mets have been trying to get Stearns out of Milwaukee for years, and this looks like the first step toward making that happen.
Stearns was the lead decision maker in baseball operations for Milwaukee for the past seven seasons, first hired late in 2015. He started when the team began a rebuild and he oversaw one of the shortest rebuilds baseball had ever seen, taking the team to within one game of a playoff spot in just his second season in 2017. Then, he acquired Christian Yelich in a blockbuster trade with the Marlins and signed Lorenzo Cain to kick that 2018 club into high gear, winning the NL Central and getting to within a game of the World Series.
Stearns' accomplishments as a baseball executive are numerous. Two division titles plus two more Wild Card appearances in four years is an incredible achievement for an organization that had just four playoff appearances combined in the 48 years priors. But the one that evaded him was a World Series. They haven't gotten to the NLCS since 2018 and missed the playoffs this year.
Now, the decisions will be made by Matt Arnold, who was hired by the Brewers shortly after Stearns and has been his right hand man these past seven years.