The sports world continues to turn and like so many things, it’s a mixture of big things and little things. Here’s some of both.

In case there was any doubt, baseball in Milwaukee has changed

Doug Melvin, the present general manager is 63. College was not part of his game plan. He was a minor league pitcher until he realized he should be in the front office.

The new general manager, David Stearns, is 30. He went to Harvard and has a degree in political science. Nobody seems to know if he actually ever played baseball. Being from the city he probably played stickball.

He is from New York and grew up a Mets fan. A Mets fan!  This is his first crack at running the show and he is a real advocate of using analytics to develop a team. Gone are the days of the grizzled scout making all the calls based on which way his tobacco juice spit landed.

However, to his credit, Stearns said it would be wrong to just call him an analytics guy.

"I think we have a chance to get information from lots of sources," he said. "My job is to take all that information, not just some of it, and end up making decisions. The more information you have, the better it is when you make some of these decisions."

Now it’s numbers, numbers and more and or numbers.

We are going to hear about metrics.

"It was a very detailed and comprehensive process," said team owner Mark Attanasio of the search for a new general manager. "Korn Ferry (the search firm) gave us 40 data points and said to try to rank them. We came up with a profile of 11 points or skill sets we felt were important in what we looked for."

Stearns obviously met those skill sets, both from a modern standpoint and from the experience in talent evaluation standpoint.

"The philosophy of building a sustainable playoff team is not a secret," he said at his news conference at Miller Park on Monday. "You need to acquire, develop and keep controllable, young talent. If you look at the sustainably competitive teams throughout the industry, regardless of market size and city, that's what they have to do.

"You can't build a team through free agency. Even the biggest-market team in baseball can't do that. The trick is to develop a process and a system that allows you to constantly regenerate that pipeline even as you're competitive at the major-league level."

Showing that he truly is a Harvard man, Stearns wouldn’t be baited into predicting how long it would take to turn the Brewers into something a lot better they are now in this summer of sadness. He also wouldn’t comment on what he thought about the unbelievable collapse of the team last season.

In other sports news:

Wide receiver James Jones might well be the greatest story in the first two weeks of the NFL season. The Packers let him go two years ago in free agency. He had his all-time receiving season last year with Oakland, which let him go after the season in a youth movement. He went to training camp with the Giants and was let go. Hello Green Bay. He was a touchdown machine when he was a Packer and doesn’t look like he’s forgotten how to get into the endzone on the end of an Aaron Rodgers pass.

The Milwaukee Bucks, version 2.0, are about to open their season. The first practice is a week away. After last season it’s going to be interesting to see how this team does. One problem is that they aren’t going to sneak up on anyone this year. People know how good the Bucks are and will treat those games accordingly.

Speaking of the Bucks, while summer was going on two of their players showed they are heavily invested in the kind of community relations for which the Bucks are famous. The team has long been one of the leaders in the league and Jabari Parker and Michael Carter-Williams have shown that they are not only eager to reach out, but have that special touch that makes kids listen to a message about how important it is to read and to stay in school. The cool thing about both of them is that they both do this, not just on days when TV cameras are rolling. They show up when it’s just them, the teachers and the kids. These two are the kind of guys who should be role models for our kids.