From best to worst, evaluating the performances of the five general managers running AL West teams for the 2019 MLB season.
As with GMs in the NL West – assessed in a previous piece – the five AL West general managers get generally tepid to low marks for their impacts on their teams across the 2019 MLB season’s first half.
Only one of the five statistically improved his team based on the collective impact of moves made since the end of the 2018 season. The sum drain of talent from the AL West teams to other clubs thus far in the 2019 MLB season is -4.1 games.
This is the second of a series of six articles through the All-Star break looking at the impacts of general manager moves. Teams will be analyzed on a division-by-division basis. Wins Above Average, a variant of Wins Above Replacement, is the preferred method of assessment because it possesses all the statistical advantages of WAR while being pegged to the average performance of a current major league player rather than to a replacement player. That means an average score is, quite conveniently, 0.0.
Because teams are judged only on the basis of moves made since the end of the previous season, the assessment won’t necessarily mirror the standings. Some teams – in the AL West the Astros are a superb example of this – are populated principally by players contractually obligated to the team since before the end of 2018, meaning their performances do not figure into this rating.
All we are interested in here is the impact of general manager decisions made since the end of the 2018 season. Still, those decisions could take several forms: acquiring a player by trade or sale, trading or selling a player, signing a free agent, extending a player already on your team to a new contract carrying into his normal free agent years, or allowing a player to leave via free agency.
Use of players who retain rookie status also counts.
From best to worst, here’s how the general managers of the five AL West teams have done to date.