How underrated is Dave Dombrowski as a GM?

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His first opportunity to run a ball club came with the Montreal Expos back in 1988, when he was 31 years old, making him one of the youngest GMs in modern baseball history to that point. In four years at the helm, he built the foundation for the legendary 1994 Expos team that might have won a championship but for the strike. When he left after the 1991 season, the organization was stuffed with talent, including Larry Walker, Marquis Grissom, Moises Alou, Cliff Floyd, Rondell White, Delino DeShields, Wil Cordero, Jeff Fassero, Kirk Rueter, and Mel Rojas.

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Dombrowski’s talent for player development shone through again: Despite being such a young franchise, the 1997 Marlins fielded homegrown stars at catcher (Charles Johnson) and shortstop (Edgar Renteria), and Cuban defector Livan Hernandez had become an instant sensation as a rookie.

Dombrowski’s knack for major league scouting, which has played such a role in his success in Detroit, manifested in Miami as well. The Marlins picked up a hard thrower with no command named Robb Nen for next to nothing, then molded him into an elite reliever. They got a converted shortstop named Trevor Hoffman in the expansion draft, then traded him for Gary Sheffield. They signed Kevin Brown as a free agent right before he turned into Kevin Brown. They signed Al Leiter, who had just come off the first good season of his career, and he proved it was not a fluke. And so on.

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Overall, the Tigers have won their trades by a factor of more than 2-to-1 since Dombrowski was hired, for a surplus total of 104 wins over 11 years.6 That’s more than nine wins a year. Think about that: The Tigers have won roughly nine additional games every season under Dombrowski by using the trade market. Take away nine wins each year, and the Tigers would have posted a losing record over the last eight years, and would have made the playoffs just once, in 2011.

The only blemish on Dombrowski’s record came in 2007, when he made three bad trades in the span of three months. He traded Jack Hannahan (7.7 bWAR over the next five years) for Jason Perry (-0.5 bWAR) in August, and after the season traded Jair Jurrjens (10.7) and Gorkys Hernandez (-0.6) for Renteria (1.1), then swapped Infante (11.0) for Jacque Jones (-1.9). Incredibly, Dombrowski has made only one other truly bad trade during his entire Detroit tenure. Here’s a list of every significant trade on his ledger in which either side got at least 5 bWAR out of the deal over the five proceeding years:

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The Tigers won 11 of these 15 trades, and their five best trades were all more lopsided than their worst trade. It’s even debatable whether two of the trades they “lost” should count against them. Cody Ross didn’t hit for another three years after the trade, having been dumped or waived by both the Dodgers and Reds in the interim; Hannahan is a defensive whiz at third base, but has never really hit. That leaves just two trades the Tigers really regret making in 12 years. Other than that, they hit home run after home run, and their surplus figures continue to grow over time. They acquired four of the best players — Sanchez, Max Scherzer, Austin Jackson, and Cabrera — on the current roster in these trades.

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