The GMAT score from the test he took his senior year of college has now expired, and the Mandarin he spent his years at Haverford College learning is pretty rusty. Fortunately for Jeremy Zoll, he didn’t wind up needing to turn to his Plan B.

The Twins announced Tuesday that Zoll, 34, would become the seventh general manager in team history, replacing Thad Levine, who held the role from 2016 until this offseason.

“I’ve always tried to throw myself at whatever opportunity was in front of me to the best of my ability,” Zoll said. “When this all finally came to pass, it, in a real way, was a validation of a lot of hard work.”

Zoll, who was a catcher on Haverford’s team, knew his path in baseball wasn’t going to be as a player. He had read “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s book on then-general manager Billy Beane and his use of sabermetrics to build the low-budget Oakland Athletics into a winner, and it resonated with him.

“You read it and it’s like, ‘Wow, that sounds really cool. I’d love to find a way to get to do that,’ ” he said.

He didn’t have “the faintest idea” of what it meant to be a general manager back then, but Haverford had a number of alums who had gone on to hold prominent positions in MLB front offices — including Levine — making it seem as if working in baseball was a real possibility for him.

“I worked hard to find a way to get an internship and just hoped one thing led to another at that point,” Zoll said.

It did.

He got his start in professional baseball interning for the Cincinnati Reds and then the Toronto Blue Jays. After graduating from college, he started yet another baseball internship, this one with the Los Angeles Angels. If he hadn’t gotten a job by the end of a full-year internship, he would try a different path, he told himself.

That wouldn’t be necessary.

That internship turned into a full-time job as the coordinator of advanced scouting. Then, it was off to the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he was their assistant director of player development for two seasons.

In 2016, he interviewed to be Cleveland’s farm director, which is how he really first landed on Twins president of baseball operation Derek Falvey’s radar. That job went to James Harris, now the Cleveland Guardians’ assistant general manager, but Falvey, who had come to the Twins from Cleveland earlier in 2016, had heard only good things from his former co-workers about Zoll.

When it came to Falvey hiring his own new farm director in Minnesota, Zoll stood out.

“I kept getting these pings that this guy is really talented, incredibly hard working, he’s not afraid to have difficult conversations and push some things through when they needed to get pushed through and challenge some people to be the best they can be,” Falvey said. “When we went through the interview process and we started doing the references, we thought, ‘This is a guy to bet on.’ ”

The Twins’ farm system is ranked among the best in the majors — and no one, Falvey said, has been more impactful in evolving the player development group over the past few years than Zoll.

Zoll helped design offseason pitch development and velocity camps for minor leaguers. He filled a number of key coordinator positions and built out the staffs at the minor-league affiliates, bringing in an additional hitting and pitching coach at each level.

He also has played a leading role in the work the organization does in the sports psychology space, Falvey said, and in recent years, as an assistant general manager, has been involved in trade and free agency conversations.

What his day-to-day will look like in his new role is still to be fleshed out, particularly as Falvey is transitioning to a new job of his own — in addition to leading baseball operations, he will also become team president early next year, taking over for Dave St. Peter.

But the Twins are excited to find out what it looks like.

“I’m really proud of the work that he has done, and I’m really excited to watch him grow and push us forward, because I think he can push us forward,” Falvey said. “I think he can do some things that even as I was sitting there, I wouldn’t do as well as he does, and that’s what you hope you’re getting.”