It’s difficult not to admire the aggressive approaches of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Boston Red Sox—two of the biggest spenders of the 2015-16 MLB offseason.
No one knows just yet how it will all shake out, but on paper, the upcoming campaign is looking awfully promising for those two franchises. At the same time, some clubs’ offseason overhauls don’t look nearly as impressive.
Let’s take a trip around the league and explore which teams have orchestrated the best and worst winter rebuilds.
Makeovers are all about total transformations, not just refurbishing already-competitive teams. For the purpose of this exercise, only squads that weren’t in contention (and weren’t on the right side of .500) in 2015 were eligible for consideration.
To determine which front offices executed the best and worst makeovers, we took one central factor into consideration: how effectively the given brass addressed their most glaring weakness from 2015.
The outlook for each team’s division also factored into the equation, and for a couple of American League hopefuls, that’s bad news.