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Grading Ben Cherington and the Pittsburgh Pirates front office at the season’s midway point

By Bill Felber

Jul 18, 2021; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington (left) introduces catcher Henry Davis (right) who was selected number one overall in the 2021 MLB first year player draft by the Pirates at a news conference before the Pirates play the New York Mets at PNC Park. Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports
Jul 18, 2021; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA; Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington (left) introduces catcher Henry Davis (right) who was selected number one overall in the 2021 MLB first year player draft by the Pirates at a news conference before the Pirates play the New York Mets at PNC Park. Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports /
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This must have been a challenging first half of the season for Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington.

His team opened play with low expectations and immediately burst into first place in the NL Central. Then May brought a collapse back to reality, and Pittsburgh hit the 81-game mark at 39-42.

That probably beats preseason hopes, but it does leave the Pirates 4.5 games out of first.

Through the ups and downs, Cherington has kept a fairly even keel, avoiding the instinct to make a lot of personnel moves in the hope that one of them might reinvigorate his still-contending team.

But the question of the moment isn’t how much Cherington has done, but how effective, if at all, it’s been.

Grading the Pittsburgh Pirates at the midway point of the 2023 season

What follows is a mid-term assessment of Cherington’s 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 Cherington 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 Cherington stacks up by those five yardsticks.

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