Quote:
Originally Posted by BigRapidsJackass
Heltonfan, don't keep us in suspense ... who are your Top 5 and Bottom 5 GMs?
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You guessed pretty well; you got three of the top five, and four of the bottom five.
Top 5: Towers, Beane, Byrnes, Shapiro, Epstein.
Jocketty and Schuerholz miss out because I'm trying to evaluate how good they are
now, not rank their whole careers, and both have done some really stupid stuff in recent years. Jocketty managed to screw up not only in acquiring Mulder in the first place, but then in re-signing him this winter; he's also shown a Purpura-like resistance to finding a catcher who can at least hit his weight. Schuerholz gets docked for a) deciding not to bother attempting to assemble a bullpen last year, and b) this winter's nonsense, spending $6 million on Bob Wickman and then non-tendering Giles because of the budget restrictions. Both Jocketty and Schuerholz are very good deal-makers, but their talent evaluation skills aren't good enough for a top 5 ranking.
Terry Ryan barely made my top 10. Aside from the Pierzynski trade, he really hasn't made any impressive major league transactions, and he's made some truly awful decisions. Exhibit A: beginning the '06 season with a left side of the infield consisting of Juan Castro and Tony Batista. When a GM shows such a poor understanding of major league talent, I'm inclined to think that he doesn't deserve too much of the credit for the team's great farm system (certainly, we know that they delegate; that's why every team has a director of player development, or some equivalent position, in addition to the GM).
Stoneman is like Ryan, but even dumber at the major league level. There's no excuse for a team with a top-5 payroll and a top-5 farm system not to be dominant. But when you're paying eight figures a year to the likes of Garret Anderson, such things happen. I had him ranked #20 overall, just behind O'Dowd; his only discernible skill is an ability to cobble together good bullpens on the cheap. It's pretty clear that he has no idea how runs are created.
Bottom 5: Purpura, Krivsky, Bavasi, Flanagan, Hendry.
I should also add: generally speaking, I'm judging on expected results of transactions rather than actual results. I'll give some extra credit to a GM for a deal that turns out better than it "should have," since in theory, such things ought to reflect that they know more than we do about the players involved, but I don't dock them for deals that look good at the time and end up backfiring. So, for instance, I don't view the Beckett trade as a black mark on Epstein's record. It looked like (and was) a great deal for the '06 Red Sox, and no one in their right mind would have expected Hanley and Anibal to develop anywhere near as quickly as they did. This is purely a philosophical preference, of course, but I think the reasoning behind it is pretty compelling, and it sure makes the list (and list-making process) much more interesting than it would be if I used overall team success as the primary criterion.