2019 MLB Season: Rating the AL Central GMs
By Bill Felber
From best to worst, evaluating the performances of the five general managers running AL Central teams for the 2019 MLB season.
It takes only a scan of the mathematics behind moves made by the five American League general managers to see why its the Minnesota Twins are running away with the division during the 2019 MLB season.
Twins general manager Thad Levine has improved his team’s talent base by 5.9 WAA since the end of last season. None of the other four GMs has contributed as much as 1.0 Wins Above Average to his team’s improvement. The average score of Levine’s four divisional competitors is -3.7
This is the fourth 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. WAA 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 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 personnel 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 GMs of the five AL Central teams have done during the 2019 MLB season.