David Stearns inherited a strong infrastructure with the Brewers and managed to improve it.

At the time, general manager Doug Melvin, a baseball lifer, had just stepped aside, leaving the job to a 30-year-old Harvard graduate who rose through the Astros front office. It was a Brewers farm system in September 2015 that included names such as Corbin Burnes, Josh Hader, Wily Peralta and Orlando Arcia, among others.

Stearns, who was introduced this week as the Mets’ new president of baseball operations, had a plan: Let the people Melvin hired continue in their roles, but focus on tweaking the process for evaluating young talent. One key member of the Mets front office, general manager Billy Eppler, will not be returning — he resigned Thursday amid an MLB investigation into improper use of the injured list.

“I credit David for this, he didn’t bring in a lot of people,” said a major league official who worked with Stearns in Milwaukee. “He did add people and did change the philosophy on certain things — obviously everybody has their slant — but I think just more than anything it was a pivot in the front office toward a more analytical and statistical approach.”