MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

The 10 most successful general managers in MLB of the decade. The ranking is based on the cumulative WAR of players brought into the organization by the GM.

In these hyper-analytical days, the fates of teams rise and fall with the decisions made by their front offices. That makes the success of a team’s front office chief – commonly although not always the general manager – vital to on-field performance.

As the second decade of the 21st Century concludes, it’s a good time to assess the performances of the decade’s best front office bosses.

Our standard of measurement is the total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) generated by the players acquired by each GM during the decade.

That value is calculated both on a short-term and long-term basis. Simply put, short-term value is the value contributed to the team by players obtained since the conclusion of the preceding season. Long-term value is the value contributed to the team by players who had been obtained prior to the conclusion of the preceding season.

Generally speaking, players can be acquired in any of several ways: by trade, purchase or waiver claim, by free agency, or by farm system development.  For our purposes, however, the method of acquisition is irrelevant.

All general managers who ran an MLB  team for at least one season during the decade were considered, although – since the standard is cumulative WAR – tenure plays a role in the ranking.

None of the GMs who made the top 10 ran front offices for fewer than five seasons during the decade; three were in place for all 10…two of them with the same team.

Here are the top 10. Summary data includes the total number of games – as measured by WAR – they brought to their teams, and their tenures with each team they ran during the decade.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

9. Ned Colletti, +61.4 games (Los Angeles Dodgers 2010-2014)

The Dodgers have been so successful during the 2010s that it might be surprising their highest- ranking GM only stands ninth for the decade. Colletti supervised the team’s operations through 2014, taking them to the 2013 and 2014 post-season. His successor, Farhan Zaidi, had a higher profile, partly because LA never failed to make the post-season during Zaidi’s three seasons at the Dodgers’ front office helm. But Zaidi’s record, while good, lacked sufficient volume to make the top 10.

In four of Colletti’s five seasons during the decade, his combined short-term and long-term moves enhanced LA’s status by double digits. That included a 19.9 game impact in 2014 when the Dodgers won the NL West but lost to the Cardinals in the division series.

. Colletti came from a curious background for a highly successful general manager. A Northern Illinois University graduate in media, he landed a job in the Cubs’ media relations department in the mid-1980s, Colletti gravitated into management with a focus on arbitration and mediation cases. He was named director of baseball operations for the Giants in 1994 and was named assistant general manager under Brian Sabean in 1996. He was hired as GM of the Dodgers in November of 2005.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

8. Brian Sabean, +66.9 games, (San Francisco, 2010-14)

As the decade’s only general manager with more than one World Series title to his credit, Sabean’s presence on this list is probably a foregone conclusion.

Sabean actually joined the Giants as GM in advance of the 1997 season, making him at the time of his departure the dean of the game’s general manager cadre. When the Giants won the 2010 World Series, Sabean’s mark was all over that accomplishment. He re-upped the heart of the team’s rotation Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, then promoted both catcher Buster Posey and pitcher Madison Bumgarner for the season’s second half.

The net impact of Sabean’s short-term decisions on the Giants’ 2010 hopes was +19.6 games.

Posey and Bumgarner were both prominent holdover pieces of the team’s 2012 and 2014 World Series titles.

Sabean, who had started as a coach at the University of Tampa, was named the senior vice president of player personnel for the Giants in 1995, and general manager at the end of the 1996 season. He was promoted to team president following the 2014 World Series title, naming his top aide, Bobby Evans as his successor. He remained with the organization until the appointment of Farhan Zaidi as team president late in 2018.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

7. Andrew Friedman, +67.0 games (Rays, 2010-14, Dodgers, 2019)

Forced to take one general manager to turn a franchise around, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a better choice than Andrew Friedman. The Rays were awful when he took it over and inside of two years he put it in the World Series.

The Dodgers were so impressed by Friedman that they lured him to be president of the organization following the 2014 season, in the process rebranding their own very successful GM, Ned Colletti, as “senior advisor”.

The odd thing is that Friedman has perhaps the least typical resume of any modern GM.

An avid baseball player as a youth, his career, and plans were cut short by an injury while playing college ball at Tulane. Instead, following graduation in 1999 Friedman put his classroom knowledge to work as a young and successful analyst for major investment firms. That success brought him in touch with Stuart Sternberg, who at the time was putting together a syndicate to purchase the Devil Rays from Vincent Namoli. When Sternberg sealed the deal in 2004, he hired Friedman as director of baseball development. Friedman succeeded Chuck LaMar as GM following the 2005 season.

Since Friedman was not yet 30, many assumed his hiring represented one more desperate “save a buck” measure by the new ownership of a futile franchise. Wrong. Drafting brilliantly — Jeremy Hellickson, David Price, Reid Brignac – Friedman built a foundation. In 2008, that foundation exploded upon the American League East. The Rays, who had won just 66 games a season before, won 97, knocked the Yankees out of the playoffs altogether, and reached the World Series before losing in five games to the Phillies.

The Rays repeated in 2009, then made the post-season again in 2011.  In 2012, for the first time, Friedman’s moves backfired, actually costing Tampa a playoff spot. But it cemented his reputation as a mover and shaker, representing the third season in four that his decisions had been the reason for his team’s success or failure.

Moving to LA, he hired Farhan Zaidi as general manager, then opened up the checkbooks to record levels. It bought Friedman an NL West championship and a first-round playoff exit in five games at the hands of the New York Mets.

When Zaidi left for San Francisco following the 2018 season, Friedman calculated that he could do the GM job as well as anybody he could hire. His various moves improved the already strong Dodgers by 9.4 games, although the vagaries of post-season play caused them to bow out to the surprising Washington Nationals in the Division Series round.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

6. Jeff Luhnow, +83.5 games (Houston Astros, 2012-19)

The sign-stealing scandal may in time force a rethinking of Luhnow’s front-office genius. But until that moment arrives, his record is obviously one of the decade’s best.

One of the ironies of that investigation is that Luhnow’s career in Houston was more or less born in the scandal. Shortly after his hiring away from St. Louis, reports surfaced that Cardinal personnel were under investigation for allegedly attempting to take advantage of Luhnow’s move by hacking into the team’s databases.

Luhnow immediately engaged a rebuild of the downtrodden team he inherited. Since that rebuild took full effect in 2015, his imprint o0n the Astros’ rise has been obvious. His signings, trades and farm system have annually created double-digit improvement in Houston’s status and brought the team a World Series win in 2017.

Most of that improvement has occurred via the building of a stable core of talent under team control, which has in turn allowed Luhnow to largely avoid the risky process of continually chasing free agents.

This is clearly in his long-term and short-term valuations. The sum of his short-term moves – those made since the conclusion of the previous season – is an undistinguished -4.2 games. But the sum of his long-term impact – the value of moves made prior to the conclusion of the previous season – is +87.7 games.

He is a graduate of the Kellogg School of Management at the University of Pennsylvania.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

5. Frank Wren, +83.9 games (Atlanta Braves, 2010-14)

Frank Wren fell into a wonderful situation in Atlanta, and for several seasons had the skill, sense or luck not to screw it up. That success finally ended in 2014 when the Braves collapsed and Wren was fired as part of an organizational house-cleaning.

A minor leaguer in the Expos system following a couple of years at St. Petersburg Junior College, his admittedly fleeting hopes for hitting the big time were waylaid at the tender age of 22 when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Following his recovery, Wren became a minor league coach, beginning a to-decades long hegira through various front offices capacities, including a brief stint as general manager of the Baltimore Orioles.

Schuerholz believed in Wren, bringing him in to be his top assistant in 2000. That gave Wren a lengthy apprenticeship that finally ended when Schuerholz became team president in 2007 and Wren took over the GM duties.

His Atlanta tenure produced three post-season appearances, although none extended beyond the division round. Wren was a major part of the 2012 wild card berth and 2013 NL East title, creating combined short-term and long-term impacts exceeding +25 games on both teams.

His products included Jason Heyward, Freddie Freeman, and Craig Kimbrel.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

4. Brian Cashman, +97.6 games (New York Yankees, 2010-19)

Cashman has run operations in the Bronx for more than two decades, making him the current dean of GMs and also the longest-tenured Yankee GM since Ed Barrow, who he is on course to surpass in 2022.

The Yankees famously – notoriously among their fans – failed to win a World Series during the 2010s for the first decade in a century. Cashman’s problems lay in his frustratingly mixed record at short-term improvement. During four of the decade’s 10 seasons, his short-term moves actually hurt the Yankees’ performance, creating a net short-term impact for the decade of just 5.3 games.

Long-term of course Cashman was as good as expected, improving the team’s core by 92.3 games. That explains the team’s seven postseason appearances during the decade.

What he seemed to have lost the magic to do was to identify the one available player who could put the Yanks over the top in those critical post-season situations.

Cashman is a graduate of Catholic University in Washington who caught on as a Yankee intern during the mid-1980s and worked his way through the ranks. He was appointed to succeed his own boss, Bob Watson, following the 1997 season.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

3. Jed Hoyer, +100.5 games (Padres,2010-2011, Cubs, 2012-19)

It’s hard to discern how much of the Cubs’ improvement should be credited to Hoyer and how much to his boss, Theo Epstein, the team president. Since front offices tend to work best when they work in concert, the debate is probably titular.

A graduate of Wesleyan, Hoyer started out working for Epstein before taking the San Diego GM job.

Hoyer was Epstein’s first hire when Theo signed on following the 2011 season. In San Diego, his first GM stop, he produced mixed results, and those continued in Chicago where his/Epstein’s 2012 impact was -13.3 games.

That was to be expected; it was, after all, a rebuilding season. Hoyer neutralized those talent drain numbers in 2013, and by 2015 was consistently improving the Cubs at a rate exceeding 20 games per season.

In 2016 he and Theo famously brought Chicago’s North Side franchise its first World Series win in more than a century.

Although the Cubs haven’t been back to the World Series since, the long-term core Hoyer put in place – Jon Lester Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo – has continued to produce. Since 2015, the average long-term impact of Chicago’s holdover players on team success has exceeded 18 games. That has kept the Cubs more constantly in the pennant churn than at any point in the team’s history since the early 1970s.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

2. John Mozeliak, +135.3 games (St. Louis, 2010-17)

Mozeliak came to baseball following graduation from the University of Colorado, a school so poor in baseball tradition that it doesn’t even field a team. His degree and brief experience as a high school coach proved to be enough of a resume to land him a job in the front office of the newly born Colorado Rockies in 1993. Two years later he followed Rockies assistant GM Walt Jocketty to St. Louis as an assistant in the scouting department, becoming general manager following the 2007 season.

His tenure, which included the 2011 World Series win and three straight NL Central titles between 2013 and 2015, was consistently solid. Between 2010 and his promotion as team president, Mozeliak’s clubs never finished lower than second place or with fewer than 86 wins.

As GM, he showed an ability to assess his team’s needs and fill them while maintaining a solid core. Mozeliak produced 39.7 games of short-term value atop 95.6 games of long-term value. In none of Mozeliak’s season at the St. Louis helm did his short-term impact ever stray into negative territory.

Following the 2017 season, Mozeliak was promoted to team president. He named a top aide, Mike Girsch, as his successor, and continues in that role today.

MLB: Ranking the decade’s best general managers

1. Mike Rizzo, +143.0 games (Washington Nationals, 2010-19)

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The Nationals’ 2019 World Series title provided a capstone to Rizzo’s decade-long tenure as general manager.

Until that win, the Nats had been more post-season disappointment than regular-season success to their fans. But Rizzo’s record has been consistently solid, generating annual positive long-term impact and – with the exception of 2018 – annual short-term impact as well.

A University of Illinois graduate, Rizzo was an assistant coach at the University of Illinois when he attracted the attention of White Sox GM Larry Himes, who hired him as a scout.

From 2000 to 2006 he served as director of scouting for the Arizona Diamondbacks when he was named assistant GM of the Nationals by Jim Bowden. He succeeded Bowden following the 2009 season.

His short-term moves have favored the Nats to an almost mystical degree. Those have included his free-agent signing of Patrick Corbin (+4.0 games in 2019), his promotion of Bryce Harper (+3.4 games in 2012), and his trade acquisition of Gio Gonzalez (+3.2 games in 2012).

Over the decade, Rizzo’s short-term dealings improved the Nats by an average of 4.1 games per season, peaking at +15.1 games in 2015. His signing of Max Scherzer (+5.1 games) was the defining characteristic of his tenure.