MLB: The century’s worst GMs
By Bill Felber
An MLB general manager’s job is to build a successful team. Not everybody succeeds with that task.
The MLB general manager has probably the most important job in the organization…team-building. Any ballclub’s success or failure depends to a great extent on the player-evaluation decisions made by the team’s chief executive.
Some guys, of course, do that job better than others. And when a GM fails – usually by mis-evaluating talent either on hand or available – the organization’s prospects for success can be crippled.
A general manager has five primary responsibilities: to acquire talent via trades, waiver claims or purchases, to acquire talent on the open market, to identify and promote talent from within the organization, to evaluate existing talent for purposes of trade, sale or waiver, and to evaluate the potential of existing talent whose contracts are up for renewal or termination.
Baseball writers devote a significant amount of time to praising the guys who do the GM jobs well. That’s understandable; they’re generally the ones leading their teams to post-season success.
In this essay, we’re looking at the other end of the spectrum. The GMs identified below all struggled, pretty much constantly, and in their struggles, they took their teams down to chronic defeats.
Out judgment criteria is Wins Above Average, a zero-based variant of Wins Above Replacement. For each GM, we’re measuring the overall impact of their moves on their team’s success.
Along the way, we’ll also look at each GM’s career record. That’s obviously important, although it’s not our ultimate standard. After all, a GM who took first place talent and turned it into a fourth-place club ought to be judged at least as harshly as one who began with last place talent and brought it home fifth.
This essay considers MLB general managers who have been active in this century. They are considered in two blocks: the past most recent five seasons and the period between 2001 and 2015.
GMs are presented in order of the damage they did from 10th worst down to the very worst of the era. The headers include the years of each GM’s service, number of games lost due to the GM’s moves, and the team’s record for that period.