Ben Cherington had a lot of money to work with in his days as Boston Red Sox general manager. That’s been the primary knock on his resume as he’s assumed the same role with the small-market Pirates this week.
Yes, the Red Sox won a World Series under his leadership in 2013. But couldn’t a lot of executives have success with the ability to hand out hundred-million dollar contracts every offseason? What part of his track record suggests he can replicate the success without that ability here?
Cherington gave a clue in his introductory news conference Monday.
“Obviously the bigger the payroll, it gives you more margin for error on certain types of decisions,” he said. “But if you peel back the layers in Boston and look at what really drove winning, I think, in most of the best years it was really good work in scouting and development.”
That sounds boilerplate, but peeling finds that Cherington’s World Series team and subsequent rosters were more efficient than you might think, with a few glaring exceptions.
Let’s start with cost per win. It’s a popular statistic because it’s easy to understand. You just divide the payroll by the win total to find the teams that got the most bang for their buck.
The Red Sox were third in total payroll in 2013 at $170,734,264. With a number that large, you’d expect them to be toward the bottom in cost per win, even with 97 victories. Instead, they ranked 21st at $1,553,149. That mark was the best among MLB’s top eight payrolls.
Granted, Boston ranked no better than 28th in any of Cherington’s three other seasons in Boston, 2012 and 2014-15. That’s, in part, a product of some bad contracts we’ll talk about later.
Still, this fact doesn’t square with the criticism that he simply spent his way to the World Series win. He spent, but he got a lot of value for his money in most circumstances.
Fangraphs’ Dollar Value of Performance helps us quantify how much. It gives each player’s production a dollar value based on the cost of a win above replacement in that preceding winter’s free agent market, and the 2013 Red Sox were full of bargains with DVP figures much higher than their actual salaries. Among them:
● Dustin Pedroia: 4.9 WAR, $36.0M DVP, $10.25M salary
● Shane Victorino: 4.7 WAR, $34.7M DVP, $13.0M salary
● Jacoby Ellsbury: 4.6 WAR, 34.1M DVP, $9.0M salary
Those three guys alone accounted for surplus value of $72.55 million in a free agent market that paid roughly $7.2 million per WAR, according to Fangraphs. And of the team’s top 10 active salaries, only pitcher Ryan Dempster at $13.25 million in salary was paid more than he produced: $3.4 million in DVP.
That top 10 alone was worth $248.4 million in DVP. And that’s before you add numbers like $22.7 million from Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s $4.5 million salary or $19.9 million from Daniel Nava’s $505,000 salary.
The point? Yes, the group Cherington assembled cost a lot, but it probably should have cost much more.
Surplus value was a consistent theme in subsequent years, too, even as the Red Sox struggled to crack the .500 mark. Six of the team’s top 10 salaries over-produced in 2014 and ’15. And the 2015 campaign ushered in Cherington’s most lasting legacy in Boston: a crop of excellent, home-grown players who produced enormous value on cheap contracts.
Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts alone contributed a staggering $73.8 million in surplus value that year. They’ve since gone on to form the core of the team that won the 2018 championship. If that’s not a tribute to good scouting and development, it’s hard to know what is.
Of course, the story of Cherington’s Boston tenure is incomplete without mention of the stinker contracts he handed out. Five years, $95 million for Pablo Sandoval. Four years, $88 million for Hanley Ramirez. Their combined production in their respective Red Sox tenures was sub-replacement level. This rightly crippled Cherington’s overall efficiency numbers.
Those types of contracts almost certainly won’t be part of the equation here, though, and the argument Cherington made Monday is that he’s proven he can build solid, cost-effective cores through quality scouting and development before spending a dime on premium talent in free agency.
On that point, his resume holds up to the scrutiny. So much so that the question shouldn’t be whether he can win without spending big. It’s whether he can spend correctly if and when the time comes to do so.
First Published: November 20, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
