Red Sox: The case against Dave Dombrowski
By Bill Felber
Dave Dombrowski, removed as president of the Boston Red Sox on Sunday night, was let down by the collapse of the team’s veteran core this season.
Dave Dombrowski, whose release as president of baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox was reported Sunday night, was completing the worst season of his four-year tenure in that position.
The defending World Series champions stood 76-67 at the time of his ouster, deep in third place in the American League West and all but mathematically certain to miss the chance to defend their title during post-season play.
When that reality is ratified – the team’s elimination number is 14 – the Sox will become the first World Series champs to fail to qualify to defend their title since the Kansas City Royals in 2016. Expectations, of course, were far higher in Boston this season than in Kansas City three years ago.
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Dombrowski becomes the first front-office chief executive or field manager to be let go this season.
Yet from a personnel acquisition standpoint, it was not an especially bad season for Dombrowski. He brought 23 major league contracts into the fold during the 2019 season, either via trade, purchase, free agency, extensions or minor league call-ups – and those 23 netted 3.8 games of value to the Boston profile as measured by Wins Above Average.
Wins Above Average is a variation of Wins Above Replacement that is particularly suited to the assessment of general manager performance because unlike WAR it is zero-based. That means the cumulative weight of those personnel decisions more precisely reflects the impact of those moves on the standings.
In short, Dave Dombrowski’s acquisitions made the Red Sox a three-game better team than they would have been had he made none of those moves.
Why then did the Red Sox fail so miserably this season? They are, after all, on pace to finish between 15 and 20 games behind the New York Yankees, their worst performance relative to their rivals since 2012.
The honest reason lies in the relative collapse of the team’s core personnel, most of whom are in the midst of multi-year commitments unaffected by Dombrowski’s 2019 decisions.
Begin with Mookie Betts, the defending American League Most Valuable Player. It’s not that Betts had a bad season; his 4.2 WAA attests to that. But that’s less than half his 8.9 2018 WAA, meaning Betts’ decline has to date cost the Boston Red Sox more than four games in the standings.
Up and down the team’s core, similar fallbacks can be found. Andrew Benintendi was a 1.7 WAA player in 2018; this season he’s worth 0.6. J.D. Martinez is off from 4.2 in 2018 to 2.5 this year.
Among the core rotation elements, the declines have been even more noticeable. Here’s how the 2018 and 2019 Wins Above Average numbers compare for the team’s five 2018 rotation starters:
Pitcher 2018 2019 Change
Rick Porcello 1.4 -0.9 -2.3
David Price 2.8 0.6 -2.2
Chris Sale 5.5 0.7 -4.8
Eduardo Rodriguez 1.9 3.2 1.3
Nathan Eovaldi 0.3 -0.3 -0.6
Total 11.9 3.3 -8.6
In short, it is the decline in the team’s core – with special emphasis on starting pitching – rather than the inadequacy of 2019 moves that has sunk the Boston Red Sox to the point of dispatching Dombrowski.
Dave Dombrowski was widely criticized for his failure to substantively offset the loss of key bullpen elements, notably free agent Craig Kimbrel. He also walked away from Joe Kelly, a key member of the 2018 pen. The numbers suggest that while Dombrowski may have been derelict in not identifying effective replacements for those key departures, the departures themselves were not the problem. Both Kelly and Kimbrel have been ineffective in their new, high-dollar free agent settings.
This is in the manner of relievers everywhere, easily the least predictable aspect of any team. In fact, the five most frequently used Bosox relievers have a collective 3.78 ERA this season, only marginally higher than the 3.60 ERA accumulated by that World Series-winning pen of a year ago.
Next. Astros to move forward with four man rotation. dark
The starters’ ERAs? Glad you asked. It’s 4.62 this season, more than a full point higher than last season’s 3.47.