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.

2019 MLB Season: The NL West’s best GM

Andrew Friedman, Los Angeles Dodgers

Friedman built the Rays into a contender during his tenure there starting in 2006. With the Dodgers, he adopted a measured approach befitting the team’s status as two-time defending National League champions.

Friedman incorporated a relatively modest 23 new or re-signed faces into the 2019 team, several of them rookies (such as Alex Verdugo and Caleb Ferguson) who had had brief prior experience. The most significant, though, were very familiar hands. Clayton Kershaw re-upped for three more seasons at $31 million each, and Hyun-Jin Ryu looked briefly at free agency, then re-signed with the Dodgers for $17.9 million.

Together they provided 5.7 WAA, and Ryu – at 14-5 and a league-leading 2.32 ERA – might win the Cy Young Award.

Verdugo and catcher Will Smith came up and also delivered WAAs in excess of 1.0, allowing the Dodger rookie class as a group to net  +1.5, the fourth-best rookie performance in MLB.

Were one to try to find fault with Friedman’s approach, it would probably involve his trade acquisitions, which as a group were uninspired. There were four, the most impactful being substitute infielder Jed Gyorko…and his impact was -0.5 WAA. At the same time, such was the Dodger talent base that none of those four played more than filler roles.

Overall, only  Atlanta’s Alex Anthopoulos and Minnesota’s Thad Levine had better front office seasons than Friedman’s Dodger operation.

Short-term acquisitions: -0.6

Short-term trade losses: +2.7

Short-term free agent signings: +4.6

Short-term free agent losses: +1.2

Short-term rookie production: +1.5

Short-term total: +9.4

2019 MLB Season: The NL West’s best GM

Mike Hazen, Arizona Diamondbacks

Hazen earned his GM stripes under Dave Dombrowski in Boston, leaving prior to the 2017 season when the chance to operate the Diamondbacks opened up. His season was a succession of controversial moves, beginning with the December trade of Paul Goldschmidt to St. Louis for a pair of youngsters, and including the deadline deal that sent star pitcher Zack Greinke to the Astros for four prospects.

If that sounds like a tear-down strategy, it wasn’t. The D-Backs made a serious run at the NL wild card, eventually falling four games short of the Milwaukee Brewers. That marked a three-game improvement over 2018.

The curious question is what, if anything, Hazen had to do with that improvement, or whether he merely happened to inherit it.  Given that Goldschmidt and Greinke combined to provide just +1.5 games of value for their new teams, it would be a stretch to argue that the D-Backs might have done significantly better if Hazen had not traded away his big stars.

At the same time, the sum total of Hazen’s short-term impact on his 2019 team was actually negative, albeit by less than half a game.

Obviously it’s not fair to assess the Goldschmidt or Greinke deals in isolation. Overall, Hazen brought 29 new players into the Diamondbacks system, counting re-signings. Those new faces included pitchers Luke Weaver and Zach Gallen plus catcher Carson Kelly, none of whom would have gotten the chance to contribute to the D-Backs if Goldschmidt and Greinke had not been moved.

For the record, the short-term value of those three players was +2.9.

Still, the sum total of all of Hazen’s decisions was essentially neutral.

Short-term acquisitions: +0.8

Short-term trade losses: -1.5

Short-term free agent signings: -0.2

Short-term free agent losses: +1.7

Short-term rookie production: -1.2

Short-term total: -0.4

2019 MLB Season: The NL West’s best GM

Jeff Bridich, Colorado Rockies

Following back-to-back playoff appearances – a first in Rockies history – there certainly must have been hoping for Bridich’s Rockies entering the 2019 MLB season.  That hope was largely undermined by a series of decisions that went sour.

The first, obviously, was the judgment that it was time to let D.J. LeMahieu walk to free agency because Garrett Hampson was ready to replace him at second base. LeMahieu nearly won the American League batting title for the Yankees, while Hampson batted .206 through the season’s first three months and was largely out of a job from that point on. The difference between the two was 5.1 games.

The collapse – or was it a return to mile-high reality – of the Colorado pitching staff also hurt. Following a surprisingly good 2018 when the staff compiled a representative 4.33 ERA, the Rockies this season fell back their accustomed spot at the bottom of the National League stat sheet with a 5.56 ERA. Bridich called on three rookies plus seven other new faces to buttress the staff, but their compact impact amounted to -1.5 WAA.  That wasn’t the major pitching problem – Kyle Freeland and Antonio Senzatela both regressed – but it hurt.

As a group, Bridich’s rookie class was MLB’s third-worst, ahead of only the Royals and Tigers. There were nine of them, none producing a greater impact than outfielder Sam Hilliard, a late-August call-up, who hit +0.3.

Bridich’s most productive decision – an easy one – was his decision to re-sign star third baseman Nolan Arenado to an eight-year, $260 million deal. To no one’s surprise, the game’s best third baseman produced a 3.7 WAA season.

But among the 19 other players Bridich brought in at some point during the 2019 MLB season, none contributed as much as one-half game of positive impact.

Short-term acquisitions: -0.2

Short-term trade losses: -2.6

Short-term free agent signings: +1.3

Short-term free agent losses: -2.3

Short-term rookie production: -5.5

Short-term total: -9.3

2019 MLB Season: The NL West’s best GM

A.J. Preller, San Diego Padres

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Preller made one of the two big moves of the off-season, the signing of free-agent infielder Manny Machado to a 10-year, $300 million deal. Machado returned a +1.0 WAA based on a .256 average and 32 home runs.

Substantially more impactful was the presence of rookie Fernando Tatis, who – prior to his August injury – batted .317 with only three fewer home runs than Machado, and who generated a +3.1 WAA. Rookie pitcher Chris Paddack also out-generated Machado in WAA.

The MLB salary scale is sufficiently skewed toward an experience that although Tatis and Paddack combined to generate 3.7 more WAA than Machado, Machado out-earned both of them by close to $11 million this past year.

Obviously Preller doesn’t control the game’s salary scale. But neither his 2019 MLB season on-the-job performance nor his career track record works to the advantage of his reputation. In five seasons as San Diego’s GM, Preller has only once generated a positive short-term impact, and that came during his first season. On his personal scale, 2019 was a middling season, his -4.2 rating the third-best, or third worst, depending on one’s perspective.

Short-term acquisitions: -1.1

Short-term trade losses: +0.8

Short-term free agent signings: -0.5

Short-term free agent losses: +0.3

Short-term rookie production: -3.7

Short-term total: -4.2