The job of an MLB general manager is to supply his or her team with the talent necessary to make a post-season run. Which GMs did their job in 2021, and which came up short?
Today we look at the performances of the men who filled the role of general manager for the five AL East teams. It is a compelling division since three teams did indeed reach post-season play, and a fourth barely missed.
Our standard for evaluating the performance of a general manager (or other chief executives who holds a functionally similar title) is simple. We attach a value to every personnel move made by the general manager since the conclusion of the 2020 season last October. The sum of the values is the GM’s rating.
The value is determined by the Wins Above Average (WAA) generated by the player during 2021. WAA is an offshoot of WAR, and it is ideal for this purpose because unlike WAR it is zero-based. That means if we say a GM impacted his team by +2.5 games in 2021, he cumulatively improved his team’s fortunes by that many games.
Conversely, an MLB GM with a negative cumulative WAA can be said to have hurt his team’s pennant prospects by that amount.
Broadly speaking, a general manager can impact his team in any of five ways: by the trades, purchase, and waiver claims he or she makes, by free agent signings or extensions, by farm system callups, by the players he or she trades away, and by the players who are releases or lost to free agency.
Each general manager should, of course, be judged in the context of what they are attempting to accomplish. As an example, Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer conducted a mid-season tear-down of his roster that was virtually guaranteed to produce a negative rating for Hoyer by season’s end.
Hoyer would probably be OK with that; the moves were designed for future, not present impact.
In the end, the best way to understand the rating is this: It tells how much better or worse a GM made his or her team’s roster compared with what would have occurred had he (or in the case of the Miami Marlins, she) done nothing at all.
For that reason, the ratings do not necessarily correlate with the final standings. Some GMs are starting from a better position than others.
With that as an explanation, here’s how the five AL East general managers scored in 2021.