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The Most Valuable Man in the History of Baseball was a Met

batmagadanleadoff Jul 29 2014 10:48 AM

Nate Silver at 538 approximates WAR for GM's. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bil ... eane/#fn-4 excerpt: Beane’s 12 wins per season above what we would expect of an average general manager is slightly more wins than Barry Bonds earned when he hit 73 home runs in 2001 (11.9 WAR). The most WAR earned by any batter over his entire career was 163 by Babe Ruth.12 In fact, if you assemble the top 15 position player seasons of all time, they still trail Beane’s 15 seasons as GM, with 180.1 WAR combined versus Beane’s 180.2 wins above expectation. No one can get that lucky. If you’re expected to win 1,116 out of 2,364 games, winning 1,296 games instead may not look impossible, but that’s because our intuitions about these things are terrible. Excel’s binomial distribution function makes calculating such odds pretty easy: In this case they’re somewhere around one in 13 trillion — effectively zero. If anyone doubts the positive correlation between winning percentage and payroll, look here: [fimg=533]http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/morris-feature-beane-1.png?w=863&h=690[/fimg] Teams above and to the left of the line (A's) win more with less. Teams below and to the right of the line (Mets) spend more than most but win less than most. [fimg=533]http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/morris-feature-beane-41.png?w=863&h=680[/fimg] How little bang do the Mets get for their buck? [fimg=533]http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/morris-feature-beane-51.png?w=863&h=1119[/fimg] [fimg=533]http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/morris-feature-beane-31.png?w=863&h=1193[/fimg] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bil ... eane/#fn-4

Edgy MD Jul 29 2014 11:03 AM Re: The Most Valuable Man in the History of Baseball was a M

It's hard to distinguish how much of a GM's performance is his own and how much is the talent around him. How much of Bobby Cox's success was Leo Mazzone and how much was the pitchers Leo was putting in place. But I'd like to see the payment structure turned upside down, and GMs start receiving pay commensurate with their authority over billion dollar corporations staffed with multi-millionaire employees.