Evaluating the GM Candidates: LaCava v. Rizzo

Warning--This post was written with an inaccurate understanding of La Cava's resume. I somehow got it in my head that La Cava was in charge of the drafts in Atlanta and Montreal when he was in those cities, but a quick glance at the old Baseball America executive database would have told me that wasn't the case. He's worked closely with Toronto scouting director Jon Lalonde on the Toronto drafts since 2002, but the Atlanta and Montreal drafts really weren't his at all. Oh well. Tony's supposed to be a really nice guy, so I'm sure he'll forgive me. Everyone else just take this one with a grain of salt...

Stealing shamelessly from a similar post by Bucco Blog, I'm going to begin working through a series of analyses of the various rumored GM candidates getting mentioned by the Great Mentioner.

My method is to simply look at the performances of the various candidates in the draft. Many of them have experience as scouting directors, with the draft as a primary area of responsibility. Obviously the draft is a team effort, and the GM sets the strategy (Ricciardi in particular had a very concrete strategy of drafting only college pitchers, for instance, which LaCava may or may not have totally agreed with--we'll probably never know), but the scouting director probably deserves the largest share of credit or blame for the performances of their teams in the draft. Also, the team's willingness to pay for bonuses and top scouts has an impact, etc.

Still with all that acknowledged, I compiled the total win shares of every player drafted by LaCava and Rizzo from 1999-2004 ('00-'04 in La Cava's case, since he didn't start in Atlanta till then). In case you aren't familiar, Win Shares is a Bill James concept that quantifies every player's contributions in wins. One win share is worth 1/3 of a win. I'm using the slightly refined Hardball Times version of the stat, mainly because the info is there for free. You can read more here or also here. I'm cutting off at 2004 just because the 2005-'08 draft classes are all still too young to really even begin to draw conclusions.

Here's what I found:

Year	Player	Round	Overall	CWS
2000	Adam Wainwright	1	29	36
2000	Scott Thorman	1	30	4
2000	Kelly Johnson	1s	38	48
2000	Blaine Boyer	3	100	3
2000	Zach Miner	4	106	17
2000	Adam LaRoche	29	880	71
2000	Trey Hodges	17	520	0
2000	Charles Thomas	19	580	9
2001	Michael Hinckley	3	82	2
2001	Josh Labandeira	6	172	0
2001	Chad Bentz	7	202	0
2001	Chris Schroder	19	562	3
2002	Jeremy Guthrie	1	22	27
2002	Brian Slocum	2	72	0
2002	Ben Francisco	5	154	11
2003	Aaron Hill	1	13	48
2003	Josh Banks	2	50	1
2003	Shaun Marcum	3	80	28
2003	Jamie Vermilyea	9	260	1
2003	Tom Mastny	11	320	4
2003	Ryan Roberts	18	530	0
2004	David Purcey	1	16	1
2004	Zack Jackson	1s	32	1
2004	Curtis Thigpen	2	57	3
2004	Adam Lind	3	83	17
2004	Casey Janssen	4	117	13
2004	Jesse Litsch	24	717	20
				368

Rizzo
Year	Player	Round	Overall	CWS
1999	Casey Daigle	1s	31	1
1999	Chris Capuano	8	238	35
1999	Matt Kata	9	268	12
1999	Doug Devore	12	358	2
1999	Lyle Overbay	18	538	82
2000	Mike Schultz	2	69	0
2000	Bill White	3	99	1
2000	Josh Kroeger	4	129	0
2000	Tim Olson	7	219	1
2000	Brandon Webb	8	249	114
2000	Brian Bruney	12	369	10
2000	Doug Slaten	17	519	6
2000	Andy Green	24	729	0
2001	Jason Bulger	1	22	0
2001	Mike Gosling	2	66	2
2001	Scott Hairston	3	98	22
2001	Chad Tracy	7	218	57
2001	Brandon Medders	8	248	14
2002	Chris Snyder	2	68	48
2002	Lance Cormier	4	129	9
2002	Dustin Nippert	15	459	1
2002	Brian Barden	6	189	0
2003	Conor Jackson	1	19	43
2003	Carlos Quentin	1	29	36
2003	Matt Chico	3	96	5
2004	Stephen Drew	1	15	44
2004	Garrett Mock	3	86	2
2004	Ross Ohlendorf	4	116	0
2004	Mark Reynolds	16	476	29
				576

So what does this tell us? First, both these guys have done pretty damn well. But Rizzo has been great. With 576 win shares in 6 drafts compared to La Cava's 368 in one fewer draft, he blows him out of the water.

It's been pointed out that the team was particularly willing to spend (which is how Rizzo ended up getting Stephen Drew, the top position player in the '04 draft, at #15). We need to keep this in mind with all the comparisons between Rizzo and other drafters.

Still, even if you take out Drew and Rizzo's solid 1999 draft (since La Cava didn't draft that year), he's still ahead 400 WS to 368.

Because there is an element of luck involved, I think it's useful to see what each guy accomplished if you knock out any top 6-7 picks in the first round (where the odds of getting a good player are really much higher) and also eliminate the highest career win share players from each team, just to eliminate any real Albert Pujols-like flukes. For Rizz, that means taking out Brandon Webb and for La Cava, Adam La Roche. With these adjustments, Rizzo leads 462 to 297. If you further assume that Drew wasn't a top 6-7 pick but was a top talent and therefore remove him from Rizzo's tally, that drops his lead to 418 to 297. Then if you further correct for Rizzo's one-year advantage by eliminating his 1999 draft results, you finally get to near-parity--actually a slight 297 to 286 lead for La Cava. Of course, that's an awful lot of "fairness adjustments." Rizzo should get credit for his solid 1999 draft and for hitting on Brandon Webb.

I could look much deeper at these lists to see who does best with pitchers, hitters, and try to detect any other patterns, and I may do that in the future, but for now this is as far as I'm prepared to go. Tomorrow, I'll continue the post by looking at La Cava v. Rizzo v. Chuck LaMar.