2019 MLB season: Rating the NL West general managers

The Los Angeles Dodgers front office gets high marks, but all four of the other NL West front offices actually hurt their teams 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 helped set salary levels – understands the vital nature of such decisions.

In the National League West, two of the five teams operated through the 2019 MLB season without a general manager. When Farhan Zaidi left the Los Angeles Dodgers to become president of the San Francisco Giants, the Dodgers opted not to hire a replacement GM, instead of running the team by committee under the oversight of president Andrew Friedman.

In San Francisco, Zaidi took much the same approach, choosing to handle GM responsibilities himself rather than hiring a replacement for deposed GM Bobby Evans

The division’s other three general managers are Mike Hazen in Arizona, Jeff Bridich with the Colorado Rockies, and A.J. Preller with the San Diego Padres..

They are the faces of the processes by which their respected clubs were assembled.

To what degree did each man – and each front office he directs – improve his team during the 2019 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.

In the order in which the teams finished, here’s how the five NL West GMs – or management teams — rated.