MLB impact: Ranking baseball’s decision makers for 2018: Part 1
By Bill Felber
MLB impact: How the game’s front office leaders ranked for impacting their teams: Nos. 21 through 31
A baseball general manager’s job is to improve his team and to have the most MLB impact he can each season. But that doesn’t always happen.
This begins a three-part series assessing how well each general manager did during the 2018 season. The ratings are based on the total number of Wins Above Average generated by each player brought to the major league roster either by trade, purchase, free agency, waiver claim, or promotion from the minor league. It also factors in the value – again measured by Wins Above Average – of each player lost to the team due to sale, waiver or free agency.
Wins Above Average is a variant of Wins Above Replacement, the principal difference being that while Wins Above Replacement measures a player’s performance against the baseline established for a minor league replacement, Wins Above Average uses the average of all major league players as its baseline.
Because the Cincinnati Reds changed general managers during the season, there are 31 general managers evaluated for their performance.
This section focuses on the GMs who ranked 21 through 31. Successive installments will focus on GMs 11-20 and 1-10.
At the outset, it is worth acknowledging that not every general manager’s goal is to win immediately. That means some GMs whose goal was long-term restructuring may actually assess themselves as having accomplished more than this listing credits them with – by moving costly stars for upcoming prospects — even if the result was a talent drain during 2018.
It’s also true that not every general manager exercises equal power. Some themselves have bosses, often titled “president” or “president of baseball operations.” This rating generalizes and personalizes the impact as applicable to the person titled GM even though the true responsibility may in certain cases be collective.
We begin with the bottom 11, general managers 21 through 30, those whose moves damaged their team’s performance by at least 4.5 games in the standings.