With regard to general managers, evaluating them can be a tricky business. Since the start of the 1998 season, six of the 13 World Series championships have been won by Epstein or Brian Cashman, who have had the highest (or among the highest) payrolls in baseball during their respective tenures. During that same period of time, the Atlanta Braves have won only four fewer regular season games than the Red Sox have — no world titles, mind you — but the Red Sox and Yankees have so dominated the conversation that maybe we have lost sight of how general managers should be truly evaluated.
In the end, this is all really about the draft and player development, because that is the one area in which teams are generally operating on an even playing field. The free agent market — domestically and internationally — comes down to money. Executives like Epstein and Cashman can make multimillion dollar mistakes that other executives cannot. And more often than not, they can endure them.
So are Epstein and Cashman truly among the best general managers in baseball, more capable than Terry Ryan (former) and Bill Smith (current) of the Minnesota Twins, Andrew Friedman of the Tampa Bay Rays, or Jon Daniels of the Texas Rangers? Or are they just more talked about?
We suggest the latter.
That said, no one is suggesting Epstein is a bad GM, either. But he is hardly irreplaceable. (When you get right down to it, who is?) Under Epstein, the Red Sox drafted and developed, among others, Jon Lester, Jonathan Papelbon, Dustin Pedroia, Jacoby Ellsbury, Daniel Bard, and Clay Buchholz, among others. Why the Red Sox hit a developmental gap in recent years is as much a part of their 2011 story as anything else, and the truth is that we won’t be able to get a real read on Epstein’s tenure until a few years down the road, after his final draft classes have played out, one way or the other.
