Blah blah blah

I have a piece here rating baseball's 30 general managers, about which Rob Neyer makes a fair point:

when I see

Andrew Friedman, Tampa Bay Rays

at the top of the list, and

Dayton Moore, Kansas City Royals

at the bottom, I tend to focus more on Rays and Royals than Friedman and Moore. Andrew Friedman is a key performer in an outstanding organization. Dayton Moore is not.

This is absolutely true and something people should always keep in mind when bitching about idiot GMs. Andrew Friedman is a really smart guy, but the 'Andrew Friedman' I rate as the single best GM in baseball is a metonym for the work done by dozens of different people under certain specific conditions. It's not unfair to do this, both because the GM gets the credit or the blame for what goes on and because he has more power than anyone else to decide who those dozens of people are and change those specific conditions if need be, but it is a contrivance. If Omar Minaya were running the Dodgers he'd almost certainly rate in the top half of a list like this, and if Andrew Friedman were running the Royals he'd probably rate in the bottom half.