If you missed it, Forbes came up with its own ranking of general managers throughout the major sports. "Forbes?" you say? Yes, that bastion of sabermetrics. That makes about as much sense as their CEO running for president (twice).

Forbes found that Kevin McHale of the ever-underachieving and ever-mediocre Timberwolves was the best. Aside from the fact that McHale may be the one sports figure I despise the most, there is not a whole lot to recommend him for this vaulted position. Baseball's best was Billy Beane, a good choice, but he came in 26th overall. And don't get me started on Billy King ludicrously coming in third overall while running my Sixers about as well as Dick Cheney shoots quail.

The basic problem is that Forbes made no adjustments for the wildly varying winning percentages across the major sports. This is exacerbated by the fact that they range from 16-game to 162-game schedules. That Kevin McHale took on a faltering expansion team with a .250 or so winning percentage and made them mediocre for many years is not as impressive as, say, converting a perennial sub-par baseball team with a .400 winning percentage like, say the Braves in the Eighties, into a perennial division winner as, say, John Schuerholz did.

So I thought I would try to rank them, just the baseball GMs, given that the each sport has different schedules, playoff systems, central bargaining agreements, etc. (and besides I don't have data for the other three sports). But what criteria should we use?

Clearly, Forbes approach of looking at the improvement from one's predecessor is inherently flawed. Why is a one-year change so important? What if use the previous five? How about ten? And what happens to Brian Cashman who took over a successful team and kept it successful? He ends up looking no better than Dave Littlefield, who took over an abysmal team and kept it abysmal.

I reject this approach. I prefer to look at what the individual accomplished. What makes a successful GM anyway? The three main criteria in my opinion is that his team wins, that he accomplishes this while spending his payroll dollars as wisely as possible, and that he keeps his job. Therefore, I ranked the current crew of GMs based on career winning percentage, total games, and adjusted payroll (i.e., his team's payroll adjusted for the overall major-league average, averaged over his career).

Here are the results. First, winning percentage and games:

Next, the adjusted salary:

Finally, here's the overall ranking:

So I got the same results as Forbes: that's embarrassing. But I can't disagree with Beane coming in number one. Also, Hendry coming in near the bottom makes sense. I would like to run each GM's transactions to determine who was at the best at acquiring talent, but I can't say that I disagree with the results from these three quickie metrics. At least Billy King didn't come in number three.