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Grading Friedman, Gomes and the Los Angeles Dodgers front office at the season’s midway point

By Bill Felber

May 31, 2022; Los Angeles, California, USA; Los Angeles Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman reacts during the game against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Dodger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
May 31, 2022; Los Angeles, California, USA; Los Angeles Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman reacts during the game against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Dodger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports /
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Under team president Andrew Friedman and general manager Brandon Gomes, the Los Angeles Dodgers have just completed the worst first half of a season since 2018.

L.A.’s 46-35 record, which puts them in a tie for second in the NL West with the San Francisco Giants, and just two games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks, doesn’t sound like a disaster in the making.

But there is pause for concern in the performance data for the Friedman-Gomes front office. For the Dodgers, it’s been unusually bad.

Only one Dodger office in the past decade has shown a negative impact on team performance by its player transactions. Friedman and Gomes are on a solid course to do so, and they have a mathematical chance by season’s end to run up the franchise’s most damaging front office season since 1944, when Branch Rickey’s performance may have been hampered somewhat by World War II.

Grading the Los Angeles Dodgers at the midway point of the 2023 season

What follows is a mid-term assessment of the Dodgers’ personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 World Series with a particular focus on the extent to which those decisions have helped or hindered the team’s performance.

The standard of measurement is Wins Above Average (WAA), a variant of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For this purpose, WAA is preferable because unlike WAR, it is zero-based. That means the sum of all the decisions made by Friedman and Gomes impacting the 2023 team gives at least a good estimate of the number of games those moves have improved (or worsened) the team’s status this season.

A team’s front office impacts that team’s standing in five ways. Those five are:

1.       By the impact of players it acquires from other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim.

2.       By the impact of players it surrenders to other teams in those same transactions.

3.       By the impact of players it signs at free agency or extends.

4.       By the impact of players it loses to free agency or releases.

5.       By the impact of players it promotes from its own farm system.

Here’s how Friedman and Gomes stack up by those five yardsticks.

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