2021 MLB general manager ratings: The NL East
By Bill Felber
Much was expected of NL East teams in 2021. The Mets, Braves, Phillies, and sometimes Nats all were widely projected as legitimate postseason threats.
In the end, the fact that only the Braves made it – and they with the worst record of any postseason team – justifies the conclusion that the NL East division was largely a disappointment.
The same was true of the teams’ general managers. Only two of the five people who run NL East teams produced a positive impact by his or her personnel decisions in 2021. The average impact of an NL East general manager on team performance this past season was -1.7 games.
Our standard for evaluating the performance of a MLB general manager (or other chief executive who holds a functionally similar title) is simple. We attach a value to every personnel move made 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 a team by +2.5 games in 2021, that general manager cumulatively improved the team’s fortunes by that many games.
Conversely, a GM with a negative cumulative WAA can be said to have hurt the team’s pennant prospects by that amount.
Broadly speaking, an MLB general manager can impact a team in any of five ways: by trades, purchase and waiver claims, by free agent signings or extensions, by farm system callups, by the players traded away or sold, and by the players who are released 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 midseason teardown 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 general manager made a 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 NL East general managers scored in 2021.