Let’s have a little post-season quiz. Here are two lists of names, and the idea is to match one name in Column A with one name (or blank) in column B. For extra credit explain how and why the names are linked and for extra, extra credit with whom they are linked.

The names are significant and timely because the general managers’ meetings were held in Arizona last week, and this is the beginning of their season. Free agents are waiting to be signed, and trades are waiting to be made.

This signing and trading season, however, is marked by an expansion of a modern title in baseball front offices: president of …

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This is old news, but it has a new twist.

When the Mets fired Omar Minaya as their general manager after the 2010 season, one of the primary criticisms of him was that after seven years in the position he was leaving the Mets with a fallow farm system. Four years later that charge deserves reconsideration.

The Mets actually showed some respectability last season, playing better than .500 post-All-Star game and finishing in a tie for second place in the National League East and matching their best won-lost record in six seasons.

But the highlight of the season came after the season:

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It would be difficult to find a flaw in George Will’s academic life or his professional career. His life reads like a bold-faced entry in Who’s Who.

Academically, he earned bachelor’s degrees from Trinity College and Oxford University, master’s degrees from Oxford and Princeton and a PhD from Princeton. He has taught at Harvard.

Professionally, he has won a Pulitzer Prize, has been a celebrated conservative syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek and has served as an analyst for ABC News and currently Fox News.

With those credentials and that background, how could Will come up with the astounding idea he expressed recently …

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