Interesting article in that it identifies the scouting or talent identification approach, the Wall Street / SABR-Moneyball statistical approach and the Grit / Grinder approach (also scouting based) that locally, the White Sox have built an entire marketing campaign around. Many paths to success indeed.
from Yahoo Sports:
Snakebitten? D'backs make peculiar decision to trade Justin Upton's 'superstar' talent - Yahoo! Sports:
What many in this age of baseball homogeneity don't quite understand is a simple principle: There is more than one way to win. One of the game's beauties is its improbability – how, say, Red Sox teams that relied so heavily on numerical analysis won two World Series in four years while half a decade later Giants teams built with a diametrically opposed baseball worldview won two titles in three years. The road in baseball is not a Frost poem. Its fork has unlimited tines.
No matter a team's philosophy, one commonality saturates winners: talent. Perhaps the Red Sox and Giants took different paths to find it, but both aimed more than anything to build the most talented team it could. That is what makes the Arizona Diamondbacks' trade of Justin Upton on Thursday so fascinating – the sort of thing that if successful could alter the sport's calculus and if failed could add another check mark to the assault against intangibles.
As much as any baseball team in recent memory, the Diamondbacks on Thursday publicly embraced the idea of grittiness and guts, of the inherent and unquantifiable. And in doing so, they finished a two-trade whammy over the last six weeks that has seen them ship out their two most talented players in an effort to better embody this belief.
'via Blog this'
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