The Yankees are easy to rip because they are known better and their minor leagues are by and large older players. The Yankees have done well in the draft since 2004/6 time period. They also did great in the Stick era. The time in the middle was a time when the Yankees got rid of prospects for short-term fixes. There is a bias of uninformed fans when it comes to the Yankees that says they are all bought with huge salaries. My perspective is most Yankees were kept at large salaries. Years past the Yanks would have traded for Santana and given their best prospects away. Signing CC/AJ kept the prospects and acquired the player thru FA but the Yanks had to be patient. The league will suffer if the RSox & Yanks are patient.

So are you saying that Beane is washed up?

Innovation is one way to win games. But if that’s going to be your strategy then you’ll need continuous innovation or you’ll wind up irrelevant.

the yankees have a ton of guys helping on & off from their system.

i just don’t understand the lack of love.

if hughes & joba turn into good pitchers,we can produce one good infielder,of , catcher,bullpen arm wich it looks like we might we are in great shape.

montero,ajax,melancon & an infielder along with the guys helping us now we have done great.

That seems like an unfair criticism to me – that’s pretty much the fate of all innovators. Thomas Edison hung onto to direct current a lot longer than he should have in the face of the alternating current challenge but he’s still a Hall of Famer!

irony noted. Didn’t you know that wealthy people don’t pay for anything. They expect to receive everything for free.

“Add Mo, Jeter, Cano, Pettitte, Wang and Posada and tell me another team in the race right now that has 13 of their 25 guys, 52% of their roster homegrown that’s in the pennant race.”

Good point, but many teams could not afford to keep their home grown talent. For example the Marlins could have a pitching staff of allstars.

Like I said, I’m no minor league expert – I’m sure that with your nephew you take a lot more interest in that than I do – but Baseball America ranks the Oakland system #3 (as of April 1, 2009).

They do have a good system and you have to give Beane significant credit for that. He’s assembled a number of promising pitchers.

That said he didn’t do that through the draft at all. Nearly all of the A’s young talent came through trades. They gave up assets for those younger players.

How you arrive at having a good system matters. Trading Dan Haren to revive your system is a real cost. The trade off was clearly worth it for the A’s but that’s not the same as drafting well and building your system that way.

And over the past 5 years or so the A’s have drafted very poorly. That might be changing now with Jemile Weeks and Grant Greene but it’s still not clear how they’ll do.

Beane kept using the old approaches that worked for him in prior years in the draft despite the fact that more and more teams were using those techniques that made him successful.

That team can’t be good on a sustained basis unless it drafts very well. And they haven’t done that for years.