Call to the pen
Fansided

Ranking baseball’s general managers for 2018: Part 3

By Bill Felber

OAKLAND, CA - AUGUST 13: General Manager David Forst of the Oakland Athletics sits in the clubhouse prior to the game against the Seattle Mariners at the Oakland Alameda Coliseum on August 13, 2018 in Oakland, California. The Athletics defeated the Mariners 7-6. (Photo by Michael Zagaris/Oakland Athletics/Getty Images)
OAKLAND, CA - AUGUST 13: General Manager David Forst of the Oakland Athletics sits in the clubhouse prior to the game against the Seattle Mariners at the Oakland Alameda Coliseum on August 13, 2018 in Oakland, California. The Athletics defeated the Mariners 7-6. (Photo by Michael Zagaris/Oakland Athletics/Getty Images) /
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PHOENIX, AZ – OCTOBER 10: General Manager Mike Hazen of the Arizona Diamondbacks addresses the media at Chase Field on October 10, 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Diamondbacks were eliminated from the National League Division Series by the Los Angeles Dodgers. (Photo by Sarah Sachs/Arizona Diamondbacks/Getty Images) /

10. Mike Hazen, Arizona Diamondbacks, +2.1 games

By most accounts, the Arizona Diamondbacks were a disappointment in 2018. They finished just two games above .500, fell with a thud from the NL West race in September, and lost 11 games in the standings from 2017.

So what’s Mike Hazen doing this high up on the list?

The truth is that the D-Backs’ problems had far more to do with ill fortune than with any problems Hazen created. Arizona’s Pythagorean record – what it should have done based on runs scored and allowed – was 86-76, four games better than its actual record and one game better than the Rockies’ Pythagorean record. Arizona out-scored its opponents by 49 runs, Colorado by 35. Translation: to a fatal degree, fate intervened against Arizona in 2018.

Nothing Hazen did was spectacular, but the aggregate was solid.  The May minimum-dollar signing of Clay Buchholz, who had been released by Kansas City, got little attention but paid off when Buchholz went 7-2 in 16 starts. He found Yoshihisa Hirano in the Japanese leagues and got a solid season’s worth of relief work that was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise leaky Arizona pen.

The indictment against Hazen would be his inability to persuade any new big-name talent to come to the desert. You can scan the list of arrivals and find no name more prominent than Steven Souza, Brad Boxberger or Jarrod Dyson, none of them calculated to turn a contender into a winner.

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