Baseball’s Best GM’s

In a recent Sports Illustrated article, Tim Marchman ranked Baseball’s General Managers.  He states correctly that there is not a good objective way to measure a GM’s success because of so many variables to factor in.

His criteria?  Simple things really:

1. Success
2. Not Doing Stupid Things
3. Efficiency
4. Dislike for Your Team (pretty funny joke)
5. Tenure

You know me by now and know that number 4 is definitely going to factor in to my rankings rantings.

Here’s what he said about the Yankees:

No team spends more per win than the New York Yankees, but few would say that Brian Cashman is anything other than one of the best in the game at his trade.

Um…put me in with that few.  I don’t know how you say that the GM for the top spending team in baseball by a wide margin is one of the best.  I guess you can call Cash-man successful in the way that Hugh Hefner is the best lothario on the planet.  I mean really…throwing more money around than anyone else to get the best players does not make a great GM, in my opinion.

Why?

It’s all about the Benjamins.  And that weighed heavily on my mind when reading the article.  Cash-man is good.  Theo Epstein of the Sawx is good, too.  They’re always at the top of the GM list.  The Minnesota Twins are very good every year and seem to lose a superstar every other year and most times don’t miss a beat.

I wanted to try and figure out how to tell.  Can someone be a great GM with all the money in the world?  I think I could be.  Give me Omar Minaya’s job.  I really wanted something along the lines of what Bum Phillips said about Don Shula:

He can take his’n and beat your’n and take your’n and beat his’n.

And that’s where efficiency comes in.  I think wins per dollar spent is a very good metric for that.  And this metric is not factored in to the Marchman rankings.  However, I believe that success is a great metric as well.  After all, you can spend cheaply and lose a ton of games and your win per dollar ratio looks pretty good.

And the only way you can measure success is wins.  Throwing money at the best players should make you fairly successful (except you, Omar Minaya), but it’s not necessarily efficient.  And just because you in the job for a long time, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing a great job either.

So, in order to be more objective in my rankings and using only 2009 data, my criteria is as follows:

1. Success – if you won more than you lost, you are eligible for the top rankings.  So 1-15 are teams that are above .500 and 16-30 are below.
2. Efficiency – I am using the dollars per win metric as the second criteria.  Same as above.  If you are 1-15 in the dollars/per win column, you can make the top.  If not, sorry.

That’s it.  The most successful team with the best efficiency has the best GM.  The least successful team with the least efficiency has the worst.  The teams that are either efficient or successful fall in the middle.   Simple enough, eh?

Success

The top 5 teams all spent money to win.  But the cost per win ranking shows that these GMs are not really all that efficient.

Efficiency

Three of the top five here are efficient and successful.  Florida has the lowest payroll in the league and still was successful.

The Worst

So without further ado, here are BBI’s five worst GMs – the ones that were neither efficient, nor successful.

Mark Shapiro of the Indians tops our list.  Go Tribe.

The Best

The Question

Could Cash-man do in Florida what Beinfest does?  And could Beinfest do in NY what Cash-man does?

Complete Table

^ = wild card
* = division winner
** = World Series loser
*** = World Series winner

Sources: 2009 MLB Salary data from CBSSports.com; 2009 MLB Regular Season Standings from MLB