JABO: Dave Dombrowski’s Achilles Heel
Just days after completing a pair of trades, sending both David Price and Yoenis Cespedes out of town for five pitching prospects, Dave Dombrowski was “released from his contract” by Tigers owner Mike Ilitch. The timing of the move was perhaps more surprising than the end result, as Dombrowski’s contract expired at the end of the season, and Jon Paul Morosi had speculated that this might be his final season with the Tigers a month ago. After 14 years at the helm, perhaps it was time for both sides to get a change of scenery.
Certainly, Dombrowski’s legacy in Detroit is already secure. He took a moribund franchise and turned it into a perennial winner, putting together rosters that managed a .500 or better record in eight of the nine seasons after they posted the worst record in baseball history. They made the playoffs five times during that stretch, and went to the World Series twice. Unquestionably, Dombrowski’s tenure with the Tigers was a smashing success, even without bringing Detroit a championship that has eluded Mr. Ilitch for so long.
The foundations of this nearly decade-long run of success was built on the back of some of the most successful trades in baseball during his tenure. While many organizations preach the value of building from within, Dombrowski put good teams on the field that were often pieced together with players extracted from other organizations. Whether it was outright heists for quality players like Carlos Guillen, Jhonny Peralta, or Doug Fister, or blockbusters like his deal for now franchise icon Miguel Cabrera, Dombrowski seemed to come out on the winning end of more than his fair share of trades.
And even when ownership boxed him in with a bad free agent signing — like the nine year, $216 million commitment to Prince Fielder that forced Cabrera to masquerade as a third baseman — Dombrowski figured out how to salvage that deal, picking up a valuable contributor in Ian Kinsler while dumping the majority of Fielder’s remaining contract on the Rangers. Certainly, he wasn’t perfect — his deal sending Doug Fister out of Detroit was as bad as his original deal to acquire Fister was good — but Dombrowski’s trade record can stand up next to any other executive in baseball.
But for his many strengths, Dombrowski’s Tigers had one critical weakness that he could seemingly never overcome. For whatever reason, Dave Dombrowski was absolutely terrible at putting together a Major League bullpen.
Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Quoting Morosi on fangraphs? What the hell is this world coming to?
The world currently rushes towards climate chaos, resource wars, a Cubs World Series victory and other rare but calamitous events.
Climate chaos? Shots against Fox? Silly little stupid liberals (pardon the redundancy).
I believe you clicked a faulty link on your way to Drudge Report.
To Fox. This world is coming to Fox.
“his deal sending Doug Fister out of Detroit was as bad as his original deal to acquire Fister was good”
It’s almost as though I haven’t put up more WAR in 71.2 IP this year alone than Fister has put up since he left DET nearly two seasons ago.
I guess you’d have to consider Shane Greene as the end product, then. That didn’t work out too well, even though I thought he had some nice potential. I guess he still does.
Agreed, Ray and Greene combined for -0.1 WAR in their time in DET so far, vs. 1.5 WAR for Fister. It also necessitated them later trading Smyly, Austin Jackson, and Willy Adames for Price, who has since turned into Daniel Norris and Matt Boyd. The loss of Jackson also resulted in the trade of Devon Travis for Gose. So the real question is would you rather have Fister, Smyly, Jackson, Travis, and Adames or Greene, Norris, Boyd, and Gose. They got younger, but for a win-now type team, the former group is probably preferable. I guess the jury is still out, but when you trace the full lineage, none of those trades look great.
bRef disagrees. Ray’s been worth about half a win over two seasons, Fister’s been worth over 4. And if that’s not enough of a mark against DD (with these players only, he’s certainly had a number of big wins), Ray was flipped for Shane Greene. Not only did the Tigers miss out on Ray’s “good” (average) year, they missed it to acquire Greene’s awful year.
Fister = 4+WAR over the last two years, while Detroit has seen his replacements be worth nearly 3 wins BELOW replacement over the same period.
* (Yeah, I used bWAR on Fangraphs, I love the writing here, but the stats are so much easier to navigate there.)
Less than the ease with which statistics are viewed (I find fangraphs to be much easier to work with), there is a not-half-bad argument that a FIP-based WAR calculation could uniquely penalize a pitcher like Fister while the bWAR approach might better capture his value.
His trade of Fister to get Ray was fine. Giving up on Ray after allowing him to pitch only 28.2 major league innings was the real blunder. He ended up effectively trading Fister for about a month’s worth of a not-quite-ready Robbie Ray and Shane Greene. That’s not a good deal.
Interestingly article, Dave. Dombrowski’s signing of Ivan Rodriguez early in his tenure (February, 2004) ought also to be mentioned as an important factor in the revitalization of the club.
Incidentally, fWAR is not the best measure for reliever performance because of its reliance on FIP rather than xFIP in a small sample. The 2006 pen had Joel Zumaya and finished 8th in baseball in WPA. Zumaya’s FIP was pedestrian, but in his particular case, the FIP was not a good representation of his abilities. Over the 2005-2015 period, Dombrowski’s bullpens were at +18 WPA which ranks 14th out of 30 teams. There’s a knot of teams between 15 and 23 WPA, with the Yankees being far and away the best (hello Mo and David and Dellin and Andrew) and the Astros being far and away the worst.
Good article although, I don’t think WAR is the best indicator of the value of Dombrowski’s bullpens. He’s had great pitchers who have pitched deep into ballgames. This is going to keep his bullpens from getting innings so, even when they are good, their WAR is low. Although, when they’ve been accumulating negative WAR, the fewer innings actually helped.
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Great article on Dombrowski’s problems with creating a good bullpen, it was very insightful.
To corroborate the importance of the bullpen, there was a study about a dozen years ago, by Tom Tippett, then of Diamond Mind, now he’s in charge of the the Red Sox’s defensive analytics, showing the importance of bullpens for a team to make and do well in the playoffs. DM dumped his great studies but luckily it was also published on ESPN: http://a.espncdn.com/mlb/s/2003/0519/1556396.html
So, to the point of the article, this was his Achilles heel. Looking at the ineptitude of the bullpen during his tenure as Tigers GM, just makes that very clear. Even the WPA analysis only put them middle of the road in the majors, and as Tippett’s study showed, you need to be in the elite if you expect to win it all. Dombrowski needs to find a scouting director who can help him with this blind spot, and a manager who can manage the bullpen well.
Dombrowski also used a great number of high draft picks on relievers, and got basically no contribution from any of those picks.