General Manager All-Star teams

Years ago, Bill James published several “All-Star teams” for several managers, teams that picked a best season the manager had at each position. These were not only fun, but revealing of preference -- it was a good way of illustrating the quirks and preferences of each manager. You might notice that John McGraw rarely had a traditional slugging first baseman (Bill Terry was an outlier) or that Whitey Herzog’s representative team really was, with only mild exaggeration, eight switch-hitters stealing 50 bases each. It occurred to me that you could do the same thing with general managers, but the results would be more revealing because in the modern game they were the men acquiring the players. You can see the results for Dayton Moore and Pat Gillick; I figured I might as well start at opposite ends of the spectrum. I’ll leave you to decide what spectrum that is, and where the two men in suits belong on it.

Having said that, it’s worth debating whether Zduriencik has suffered an outsized streak of bad luck or there has been a built-in self-destruct sequence to his best players. The Mariners haven’t been able to consolidate player breakthroughs and build on them. Consider his best position players: