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The Fallacy of the Five-Year Rebuilding Plan (Part IV) It’s Friday! The end of the week means we’ve also arrived at the final column in this four-part series outlining the inherent fallacy of a five-year rebuilding plan for a small market MLB franchise. Please be sure to collect your valuables as you exit the train. Over the first three segments of this series, I’ve made the argument that: 1️⃣ Pittsburgh has a history of hasty assessments of GMs, bouncing the great Branch Rickey for his failed five-year rebuild in the 1950s, a season after he acquired Roberto Clemente and set in motion the 1960 championship. 2️⃣ A rebuild should be viewed as being comprised of two timetables -- an organizational development clock and a championship window clock -- which overlap but have distinct, measurable milestones. 3️⃣ Ben Cherington’s tenure can be split into two 3.5 year segments, with the first half somewhat underwhelming while the second-half has been downright epic. The organizational development phase is complete, with the Pirates ranked by Baseball America as having the #1 system in the sport at the end of 2025. Starting in 2026, the championship window clock started up in earnest. In today's column, we will seek to further justify a ten-year window for the rebuild of a small market franchise through the introduction of a new theoretical stat: xGM. A Quick Primer on Sabermetrics Computers are a wonderful thing. Well before they connected us chuckleheads to debate topics like this, they allowed folks like Bill James and other sabermetricians to build models designed to “separate performance from results.” Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sabermetrics challenged baseball assumptions and gave rise to modern day assessment criteria. As computing power and data improved, analysts got better at estimating what a player’s performance should have produced. By the 2000s, the “x” -- short for “expected” -- began appearing more often in baseball statistics. Statcast supercharged the concept beginning in 2015. With cameras and radar measuring literally everything happening during a game, analysts could estimate what typically happens on similar batted balls. That gave us the stats you find showing up in this column and elsewhere: xBA, xSLG, xwOBA, xERA. Introducing xGM It boil down to this: if you are disinclined to measure the worth of a starting pitcher by his W-L record, why would you use such a blunt instrument to measure a MLB GM? We have come to accept that errors, sequencing and just plain old luck play a huge role in baseball. The same thing is true at a macro level across the entire construction of the major league franchise. If there was a way to estimate what a team’s W-L should have been based on both the actual outcomes and the statistical trend line heading into a season, we’d be able to “separate performance from results” for a GM as well. We already have the beginnings of it with xW-L, which looks at what a team’s expected win-loss should be based solely on the team’s runs score and runs allowed. Right now, with a +29 run differential, the Pirates xW-L is 73-68, four games better than their actual record. What is more elusive is how to project expected performance based on recent data. We have it for individual players (e.g. ZiPS and Steamer), but we don't have it in aggregate across the entire team. Combined with actual outcomes, you'd get the xGM metric. Cherington’s 2026 xGM Assessment It's been a rough season for the Pirates. Consider: ▫️A plague of injuries resulted in 290 cumulative days on the IL for Ryan O’Hearn, Konnor Griffin, Oneil Cruz, Endy Rodriguez and Spencer Horwitz. ▫️The bullpen that was top-third in the sport in 2025 regressed to bottom-third in 2026 through the trade deadline. ▫️The reigning Cy Young Award-winner put up a 3.23 xERA, a 0.75 increase year-over-year. I’ll confess that I have no idea how to calculate xGM. I can only infer it based on these data points. Yes, there were misses and justifiable criticisms. The GM of a team with a $105M payroll has little room for error, either for himself or the team he puts together. He can’t miss on a trade, draft the wrong guy or sign a free agent who underperforms. In 2026, Marcell Ozuna represents the sort of mistake that serves as a drag on performance. His outcomes actually matched the downward trendline. But suffice it to say, despite the modest misses, the conditions were in place for a playoff appearance this season that is going unrealized. Looking to the Future With 793 runs projected for 2026, the Pirates have put together an incredible offense (the best since 1940) that will remain largely intact for 2027. If baseball could be counted on to start in late March as usual, a few tweaks would put the team on a trajectory to once again compete for a playoff berth. The looming lockout introduces a wrinkle that seeks to upend the championship window phase of this rebuild. Pieces like O’Hearn and Luke Weaver are only in place through the end of next year. At the same time, emerging talent like Murf Gray and Easton Carmichael are likely to join the team sometime next year. It’s a recipe for a meal without a clear dining schedule, which is one of the big reasons I suspect Cherington’s job is secure. Plus, of course, the fact that his contract runs through the end of 2027. What, you think Bob Nutting is made of money?! The Bottom Line 📌 As Cherington enters an uncertain year eight of his rebuild, we can start to understand why 10 years is a logical horizon for playoff contention in Pittsburgh. Just as the genius of making a Rule 5 claim for Clemente took a few years to reveal itself, so too does Griffin need a minute to fulfill his destiny, or Skenes to reclaim his, or Gray to pronounce his. This entire four-part series is meant to refute those who believe "someone has to pay" for the lack of contention in year 7 of the rebuild. That sort of emotional response and seeking for vengeance is the stuff of lynch mobs. You are free to have it as an opinion, but it doesn't mean anyone should respect it. While I am hopeful to move negative perspectives to more neutral, I can't hope that people will admire Cherington as I have come to do. His last few years on the job have been truly special -- if not worthy of comparisons to Rickey and what he meant to the sport, certainly deserving of groupings that include Andrew Friedman, Erik Neander, Mike Chernoff and Pat Murphy. The hatred for him, forged by unscrupulous journalists, is unjustified. And I suspect, given time, Cherington will be thought of as among the Pirates' most consequential GMs of all time. Seriously. #letsgobucs