2019 MLB Season: The AL East’s best GM in 2019? Not him

Brian Cashman’s Yankees may have won the division title, but the guy pictured above actually did more to improve his team during the 2019 MLB season.

With each passing season, the role of front offices generally – and general managers in particular – grows in significance. The recent departures of such veteran field managers as Joe Maddon and Clint Hurdle should provide fresh evidence of that for any still requiring such evidence.

Front offices are assuming increasing roles in the determination of game strategy. Yet by far their most important role remains what it has always been: the accumulation of talent. Anybody who has ever hired or fired an employee – or drawn up a budget – understands the vital nature of such decisions.

In the American League East, five men held primary responsibility for front office decision-making during the 2019 MLB season.  Those five are Mike Elias of the Baltimore Orioles, the recently fired Dave Dombrowski of the Boston Red Sox, Brian Cashman of the New York Yankees, Erik Neander of the Tampa Bay Rays, and Ross Atkins of the Toronto Blue Jays. Although none acted alone or dictatorially, they are the faces of the processes by which their respective clubs were assembled.

Obviously not all began the season operating on the same plane. Cashman and Dombrowski had both more money and more talent on hand than Elias, who inherited a woeful Oriole team and whose focus thus had to be on long-term versus short-term growth.

Having conceded that, the most valid question remains: To what degree did each man – and each front office he directs – improve his team during the 2019 MLB season?

The method of evaluating the answer to that question isn’t all that complicated. We’ve assigned a value to all player-related movements occurring since the conclusion of the 2018 season. That value is determined by Wins Above Average, a zero-based variant of Wins Above Replacement.

For each GM, the calculation considers his positive or negative impact on his team in five respects: players acquired in deals with other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim; players traded, sold or waived to other teams; players signed at free agency or extended (beyond the normal; beyond the normal period of team control); players released onto the open market; and players who considered rookies.

For each GM, there is a summary of his performance followed by a brief synopsis of the numerical weight of their performance in each of the five categories and their total rating. Any rating above 0.0 represents the number of games by which a GM improved his team’s talent base, and any negative rating denotes regression. The average will always be about 0.0.

One important note: These ratings do not always follow the standings. A team may succeed because of its talent base on hand rather than due to what the GM did to that talent base. What we’re measuring here is only the impact of personnel decisions made since the end of the 2018 season.

For purposes of context, the best performance of the 2018 season was +10.2 by Milwaukee’s David Stearns. The worst was -20.5 by Miami’s Mike Hill.

In order of the standings, here’s how the five AL East GMs rated.