BEREA, Ohio — Part of Paul DePodesta still feels like he should be back at Citi Field these days instead of here conducting one of the most unusual experiments in recent NFL history.
Nearly eight months have passed since DePodesta made the unprecedented leap from vice president of player development and scouting for the Mets to “chief strategy officer” for football’s moribund Browns, but it still hasn’t entirely sunk in for the 43-year-old Harvard graduate.
Not only is one of the most well-known proponents of sports analytics bringing “Moneyball” to the NFL, but DePodesta himself is changing sports entirely.
That just doesn’t happen, yet here DePodesta is, watching the Browns go through training camp Tuesday afternoon decked out in brown-and-orange coaching gear while trying to find his way through a thoroughly unfamiliar — and unforgiving — world.
“I didn’t want to be sitting there 20 years from now and saying, ‘Geez, what if?’ ’’ DePodesta told The Post. “I didn’t want to be saying, ‘What if I hadn’t gone down that unique road?’ ’’
That unique road opened to DePodesta last winter, when Browns owner Jimmy Haslam — his franchise a bigger laughingstock than usual in the wake of the Johnny Manziel debacle — decided to think outside the box after cycling through three coaches and three general managers in his first three years of ownership.
DePodesta, who played football at Harvard and worked for a Canadian Football League team for one season in the 1990s, was intrigued by the out-of-left-field offer but took a month before finally saying yes to Haslam.
“Why? Twenty years in baseball, to be honest,” DePodesta said. “I really did think long and hard about what could I really contribute to a football team.
“I also knew that I was literally at ground zero when it came to working football knowledge,” DePodesta added. “Baseball had become my world, and to leave that all behind to embark on something new and different was a little scary at first.”
DePodesta technically is part of a group running the Browns’ personnel department that is headed by another relative football novice, former corporate attorney Sashi Brown.
Don’t be fooled by titles, though: DePodesta is calling the shots. The only person DePodesta reports to is Haslam, and the expectation is DePodesta’s public profile will grow once he becomes more comfortable with the sport.
It didn’t take long for DePodesta to turn his philosophy into reality. The Browns have fully embraced the analytics approach of building entirely through the draft, repeatedly trading down to stockpile picks while gutting a roster that went 3-13 last season.
The results were pure DePodesta: Cleveland ended up drafting 14 players (the most of any team and the most by the Browns since 1979, when the draft had 12 rounds), and their 90-man camp roster features 56 players with less than two years of NFL experience — including a staggering 28 rookies.
DePodesta also is a go-between for new coach Hue Jackson and Brown after an ugly cold war between former coach Mike Pettine and ex-GM Ray Farmer split the franchise apart the previous two years.
“Part of my role is to make sure that we’re all on the same page all the time, and that there are no silos,” DePodesta said.
One of the few veteran holdovers of the Brown-DePodesta regime, perennial Pro Bowl left tackle Joe Thomas, endorsed DePodesta as “a great move for the team.”
“He’s really just taking the anecdote out of the equation,” Thomas said. “I don’t think this is as big of a leap as everyone thinks, because the draft is a crapshoot in any sport.”
What makes the situation even more unusual is that DePodesta will continue to live in San Diego and commute to Cleveland, extending the arrangement he had in his five seasons with the Mets.
Some observers in baseball thought DePodesta was next in line to replace Sandy Alderson as the Mets’ general manager when the 68-year-old Alderson retired, making DePodesta’s sudden leap to the NFL even more curious.
But DePodesta told The Post that his firing in 2005 after a failed, two-year stint as GM of the Dodgers left him disinterested in ever taking the same role with the Mets.
“Those years [with the Dodgers] were a good lesson that taught me the title on my business card wasn’t my end goal,” he said. “After that experience, I just want to enjoy what I’m doing.”
DePodesta admitted he still feels the pull of the Amazin’s after their trip to the World Series last year.
“I’m still very emotionally invested in the Mets,” DePodesta said. “In some respects, it made it easier that I left baseball entirely rather than going to some other baseball team, because I can still be a Mets fan. I don’t go to bed very often without reading their boxscores, even going down through the minor leagues.”
That explains why DePodesta needed weeks to decide on Haslam’s offer.
“If I had felt this might come again in five years or 10 years, then maybe I wouldn’t have left the Mets,” DePodesta added. “But I didn’t really [think] that this kind of opportunity would ever resurface.”
How long that opportunity lasts remains a big question in NFL circles. Not only are there old-school coaches and executives who remain resistant to the idea of analytics in football, but Haslam’s notorious impatience looms over everything with this franchise.
“If I didn’t feel really good about [Haslam remaining patient], I wouldn’t have made the leap,” DePodesta said Tuesday. “I think he has a clear direction where they want to be, and hopefully all of us here are part of that for a long time. All of us believe we will be if we’re productive.”