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

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.

Acquired or traded

Friedman and Gomes only went after three major league talents in their dealings with other teams, and one of those moves washed out before it began. In December, they acquired veteran reliever J.P. Feyereisen from Tampa Bay in exchange for a minor leaguer. Feyereisen was to be a key piece of the team’s bullpen, but he underwent shoulder surgery over the offseason and was lost for all of 2023.

Having lost Trea Turner to free agency, the Dodgers picked up Miguel Rojas from Miami in January as a shortstop candidate. With the season-ending injury to Gavin Lux, Rojas has gotten increasing time, even though his bat (.234, 0 home runs) is a liability.

Infielder Yonny Hernandez got a quick look after being bought from Oakland in December. He was sent out in late April and recalled again last week.

Since Rojas is carrying a +0.1 WAA at the halfway point and Hernandez is at -0.1, the Dodgers’ movement via the acquisition process can be put at 0.0.

The two players they sold or traded, Austin Wynns and Dylan Covey, have both generated -0.5 WAA for their new teams, creating a modest if largely irrelevant +1.0 advantage to the Dodgers. Spoiler alert: that’s about the last nice thing to be said about Dodger front office dealings.

Historically, the Los Angeles Dodgers dominate the free agent market. That was the case last season when they big-footed the race to sign Freddie Freeman.

Since the close of the 2022 season, Friedman and Gomes have signed, re-signed or extended 17 players. This time, however, the results have been less laudatory.

To complicate matters, they also lost a dozen players to the free agent process, among them big names of the stripe of Trea Turner, Cody Bellinger and Justin Turner.

The combined impact of those arrivals and departures has set the Dodgers back nearly two games in the standings.

The exception was Clayton Kershaw, whose contract expired at the end of 2022. Nobody really expected Kershaw to leave L.A., and Friedman-Gomes were able to come to terms with their ace on a one-year, $20 million arrangement.

Kershaw has been his usual self, going 10-4 with a 2.55 ERA in 16 starts. That values out to +2.4 WAA. But what did you expect? He’s Clayton Kershaw.

As for the rest of the free agent world, the news has been not so good. The Dodgers signed Noah Syndergaard and got a 7.16 ERA in 12 starts. They re-signed backup catcher Austin Barnes and he’s been terrible: a .101 average in 101 plate appearances.

Max Muncy re-signed, this time to replace Justin Turner at third, and he’s slumped to .189.  The fact that the power is still there (Muncy has 18 home runs among his 42 hits) keeps his WAA at 0.0 instead of solidly in negative numbers, but the Dodgers expect more than neutral production from Muncy.

Meanwhile Cody Bellinger, Chris Martin, Justin Turner and Trea Turner have all gone elsewhere and succeeded.

Overall

Here’s the first half report card on the Dodgers front office. Note that grades for players departing the organization are based on the reverse of those players’ WAAs with their new teams.

Mode                    WAA               Grade

Acquired                 0.0                    C

Traded                  -1.0                     B

Signed                  -0.6                     C

FA Lost                 +1.2                    D

Rookies                -3.9                     F

Overall                  -4.7                    F

The striking thing here isn’t that Friedman and Gomes have accumulated a failing mid-term report card, although that’s pretty striking in itself. The really striking thing is that there is only one area of performance it’s possible to cite as a positive … and that involves trading people away.

It’s also a sharp performance turnaround from their first season working together in 2022. By the end of last year, Friedman and Gomes had infused 11.7 games worth of new talent into the Dodger system, largely explaining their climb back to the division championship.

That creates more than a 16-game difference between last season and this one to date.

Friedman and Gomes have made 39 personnel moves involving major league talent since the end of the 2022 season, of which only 15 have worked out to L.A.’s advantage. A striking 22 have hurt the Dodgers, while two were neutral.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are able to remain in contention despite this negative front office performance because they have a solid base of talent. That base begins with Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin and Will Smith. A team that can bring back that core is never going to be far from contention.