The headline front-office metric: how many wins a general manager adds per season above an average front office on the same budget, with the franchise he inherited and the luck of a short sample stripped out.
Every other front-office number on this site measures what happened on a GM's watch. GM WAR asks the harder question: how much of it was actually him? It is the wins-above-budget an executive adds per season, stripped of the franchise he inherited and the noise of a short sample — wins above a replacement GM, an average front office getting the expected return on the same payroll. Units are wins per season.
The build is a ladder, and the first rung is choosing the right outcome. Actual wins (WAB) are more than half luck — one-run games, bullpen sequencing, health — that a GM does not control and that does not repeat. TAB (talent above budget: roster WAR versus what payroll predicts) strips that conversion luck and measures what the executive actually builds. The payoff is reliability — how much a number in one season tells you about the next:
| metric | year-to-year stickiness | what it contains |
|---|---|---|
| WAB (wins above budget) | 0.37 | talent + conversion luck |
| TAB (talent above budget) | 0.47 | talent only |
The gap between them — turning talent into wins — has a GM-to-GM reliability of about 0.05: essentially no repeatable skill. So GM WAR builds on TAB and treats WAB as the scoreboard receipt, not a skill signal.
A long-tenured GM at a great organization looks good partly because of the organization — its farm system, analytics group, market. To pull the two apart we fit a crossed random-effects model over every team-season since 1985, estimating a franchise effect and an executive effect jointly:
\[ \text{TAB}_{t} \;=\; \mu \;+\; \underbrace{\text{org}_{\text{franchise}}}_{\text{the machine}} \;+\; \underbrace{\text{gm}_{\text{executive}}}_{\text{the person}} \;+\; \varepsilon_t \]The 46 executives who ran more than one franchise are what make this identifiable: when a GM's edge travels with him to a new org, the model can tell his skill apart from the building he left behind. The variance splits cleanly:
| source | share of single-season TAB variance |
|---|---|
| the franchise (org) | ~5% |
| the executive (GM skill) | ~21% |
| year-to-year luck / noise | ~74% |
Two lessons hide in that table. First, the org is small — most of the persistence is the person, not the logo. Second, three-quarters of any single season is noise, which is why the last step matters.
Because one season is mostly noise, a GM with three lucky years should not outrank a proven twenty-year veteran. GM WAR is an empirical-Bayes estimate: each executive's org-adjusted TAB is shrunk toward zero in proportion to how little we have seen, and carries a ±2 SD band. A five-season GM is pulled roughly halfway to zero with a wide band; a twenty-season GM barely moves. Reliability of the pooled career estimate climbs with tenure (Spearman-Brown):
| tenure | reliability of the GM WAR estimate |
|---|---|
| 1 season | 0.23 |
| 5 seasons | 0.61 |
| 10 seasons | 0.75 |
| 20 seasons | 0.86 |
Every executive is credited over his own tenure window — a President of Baseball Ops and the GM beneath him both get the seasons they shared, exactly like the franchise-level columns, so no one is starved and no senior is diluted by his lieutenant.
Across 19 completed seasons, the model estimates Friedman's GM WAR at +9.31 wins per season, with a 95% range of +5.77 to +12.85.
In plain English: after accounting for payroll, separating Friedman's contribution from the Rays and Dodgers organization baselines, and shrinking the estimate for sample size, his rosters contained about nine more wins of talent per season than an average GM would be expected to build with the same budget.
This is not 9.31 extra wins in every club's final record, and it is not a sum of transaction grades. It is the model's career estimate of Friedman's personal, annual roster-building contribution above a replacement front office.
Player WAR is wins above a replacement player. GM WAR is wins above a replacement GM — one who simply spends to expectation and gets the league-average return on his budget. It is not roster WAR and not wins-above-a-replacement-player: the baseline is the budget, and the number is org-adjusted and shrunk. Same idea, different replacement level.
The org-vs-executive split is identified two ways: the abundant within-franchise GM turnover (every team ran 5–12 executives since 1985) and the 46 executives who switched franchises. We tested how much it leans on the switchers and on the non-random timing of hires and fires:
Why org-adjustment lowers stickiness — and why that's correct. The more you strip out the organization, the less sticky the number (no adjustment 0.66 → org-isolated 0.61). That is expected, not a flaw: some of what makes an executive look consistently good genuinely is the durable quality of his organization, and removing it leaves a smaller, noisier personal signal. The stickiness cost is the price of measuring the person rather than the logo.
Fit on full team-seasons (≥100 games), 1985–2024/25. All figures are franchise-level outcomes credited to the decision-maker in the relevant year — see the GM profiles for per-executive numbers.