Off Season Winners and Abject Disappointments, 2012

By The Common Man

Last year, The Common Man ranked the offseasons, and came down decidedly in the favor of the San Diego Padres doing the best job maximizing the resources they had on hand.  It's hard to argue that their entire season was a big disappointment, but GM Jed Hoyer had put the club on solid footing.  Conversely, TCM was incredibly down on the Minnesota Twins, whose refusal to improve their depth, and the Angels, who missed out on their free agent targets and decided to make a splash with Vernon Wells instead.  Both clubs severely disappointed their fans.  (Of course, in the interest of transparency, TCM was way down on the New York Yankees' moves last offseason, and the clubs' pitching acquisitions helped them win 97 games.)

Now that we finally know that Roy Oswalt isn't going anywhere for a while, and where Juan Rincon landed, it's time to do it all over again.  TCM was surprised how few of the offseasons he was down on this year.  Glaring mistakes not committed by Dan Duquette were hard to come by, and teams that did overspend for some players made excellent moves in others.

So where does your team rank?*   Hit the jump to find out:

Missing the Grade

By The Common Man

The Common Man really didn’t want to write today, at least not about this. He’s getting ready for his big gig on the SweetSpot blog next Monday. But he just couldn’t let Jayson Stark’s offseason grades for the NL West go by without saying something. After all, Jayson gave the Padres a C and the Dodgers a B+ for their efforts this Winter, while TCM ranked the Padres #1 overall in their offseason execution, while Los Angeles fell to #17.


The Common Man knew lots of students in high school and college who never really applied themselves like they could have to their studies. They were smart, they knew it, and they got by on acceptable marks while biding their time until bigger and better opportunities came around. Meanwhile, TCM also knew classmates who would turn in a flurry of paper, assignments and extra credit, pandering to the teacher and reciting back what they had just been told, verbatim. They didn’t learn anything, but they looked like good students. Most of those guys and women are in middle management now. The other guys, the underenthused, tend to be running non-profits, getting PhDs, working for think tanks, and advising US Senators. Jayson doesn’t seem to know the difference.

Off Season Winners and Abject Disappointments

 By The Common Man

With news that the Rangers are in hot pursuit of Jim Thome, The Common Man wondered where, exactly, the Twins’ frustratingly inactive and misspent offseason ranks in the MLB.  So he decided to rank the 30 teams according to how impressive their offseasons have been, adusting for resources available, expectations, and where the team is in the success cycle, to see who had the worst offseason to date.  And away we go, with a surprise, #1: