2019 MLB Season: The AL East’s best GM
Dave Dombrowski, Boston Red Sox
Dombrowski was fired as president of baseball operations both due to the team’s on-field failures and because of philosophical differences with Red Sox management.
His actual personnel decisions, the focus of this analysis, managed to net a modestly positive short-term impact on the 2019 Sox. But the disappointing performance decline of the team’s core fatally undermined that small positive step and torpedoed playoff hopes.
That long-term core – the heart of virtually every team – managed only a +1.9 score. Compare that with the +13.2 long-term score produced by Brian Cashman’s Yankees, or the +8.3 a far less distinguished core generated for Tampa Bay’s Erik Neander.
Of that world championship core, Chris Sale, David Price, Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez alone saw their performances decline by a combined 13.6 games in the 2019 MLB season. Admittedly that quartet had set a formidable bar in 2018 – Betts was the American League’s Most Valuable Player – but their production falloff proved impossible to offset.
Dombroski tried to offset those losses, but his acquisitions and signings/re-signings – Andrew Cashner, Steve Pearce, Jhoulys Chacin, Nathan Eovaldi – never had a chance to generate that kind of production.
Nor did Boston’s rookie class provide re-enforcements. The most highly touted of a dozen first-year players, infielder Michael Chavis, managed only a .254 average and fanned 127 times. Eight of those rookies were pitchers; they worked a combined nearly 300 innings and did net 2.1 WAA. That’s good for a rookie group, but way short of what was needed to offset the core’s failures.
Short-term acquisitions: -0.1
Short-term trade losses: +1.2
Short-term free agent signings: -2.9
Short-term free agent losses: +3.4
Short-term rookie production: -0.6
Short-term total: +1.0