Out of Cheese

Peter Gammons published a terrific column today that lists 25 things wrong with baseball. I don’t agree with his example for the first item on the list — the Phillies’ pursuit of Jim Thome, Tom Glavine, and David Bell isn’t a PR stunt — but the list is largely spot-on.

If you take a look at baseball in recent years, you can come to a couple interesting conclusions that contradict traditional thinking. You don’t need a massive amount of money to win; instead, you need a focus on good scouting and development. You need players with good tools who are willing to learn, and then you need to teach them to value getting on base over hitting home runs, and throwing strikes over throwing fast. The teams that follow these strategies and have a strong focus on worthwhile statistics to back up their beliefs — Oakland is by far the best example, with Toronto and Boston likely to follow in the next few years — can do better than teams with much higher budgets simply because they know how to put together a team that can win.