2019 MLB Season: Rating the NL East general managers

Alex Anthopoulos put together an exceptional 2019 MLB season, boosting his team to the division title. For Miami’s Mike Hill, the story was less rewarding.

With each passing MLB season, the role of front offices generally – and general managers in particular – grow 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 helped set salary levels – understands the vital nature of such decisions.

In the National League East, five men held primary responsibility for front office decision-making during the 2019 MLB season.  Those five are Brody Van Wagenen of the New York Mets, Alex Anthopoulos of the Atlanta Braves, Matt Klentak of the Philadelphia Phillies, Mike Rizzo of the Washington Nationals and Mike Hill of the Miami Marlins. Although none acted alone or dictatorially, they are the faces of the processes by which their respected clubs were assembled.

Obviously not all began the season operating on the same plane. In Miami, Hill is bound by financial constraints that do not affect VanWagenen or Klentak to the same extent.

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

The method of evaluating the answer to that question isn’t all that complicated. For every general manager, 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.

Here’s how the five NL East GMs rated fort the 2019 MLB season.