As always, I’ve included the opening excerpt to read, but please follow the link at the bottom for the article in its entirety.)

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To think Billy Beane entered the 2012 season in an unenviable position. His Athletics had won 70-something games for the third time in four years, spurring the ever-active general manager to retool his roster for the umpteenth time. Beane removed the veterans; he traded Gio Gonzalez, Trevor Cahill, and Andrew Bailey for prospects, and wished David DeJesus and Josh Willingham all the best as they departed through free agency. Beane would later balance the subtractions by adding Coco Crisp and Bartolo Colon—moves that (seemingly) doubled as peace offerings to the union—but the net result was a payroll trimmed of about $15 million.

All the departures caused the A’s to abandon their short-term aspirations in pursuit of the future. Beane, who has worked with a bottom-six payroll since 2011, was left to improve his roster using one of the game’s best farm systems. Built mostly through trades—the A’s have picked in the top-10 just once since selecting Barry Zito in 1999—Oakland’s farm system entered that pivotal 2012 season ranked fourth in the league; however harmful those aforementioned trades were to fan morale, the returns had nourished a once-weak prospect stable. It’s been said that in baseball you’re either selling hope or selling wins.

In the past half-decade, money-strapped teams like the Rays and Pirates have validated the tried-and-true methods for building good teams with young talent. The process goes something like this: collect prospects by the wagon-full, develop them, keep them as long as the cost is low, and trade the aging and expensive to fill the holes in the system. This practice can be slow and painful, but it has become known as the “Right Way” to rebuild.

Given the A’s aforementioned collection of prospects and their recent success—no team has won more games since the start of 2012—you would think they had authored the all-American rebuild story. But they didn’t; the A’s actually built a winner by ignoring that construct.

Beane has disassembled his farm over the past two years at nearly the same pace he had used to build it. Seven of the 11 top prospects ranked by Kevin Goldstein in January 2012 have been traded, including three of the top five. In fact, Goldstein’s current employer, the Astros, employ as many of those 11 players on their active roster (two) as the A’s do—though Jarrod Parker would give the A’s the lead if he weren’t disabled. Beane’s aggressive prospect trading extends beyond those 11: he moved two players from the bottom nine, pushing the total to nine of the 20 players listed. The A’s didn’t just trade the spare parts. They traded half their farm.

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Ned Yost could have thrown up his hands many times in the initial years of his first major league managerial job. Worse yet, he could have deviated from the plan General Manager Doug Melvin devised. That plan wasn’t about bringing back the glory years for the Brewers-after all, this is a franchise with two postseason appearances in 38 seasons since being born as the Seattle Pilots in 1969 in baseball’s second round of expansion-but to simply make Milwaukee competitive.

“A lot of times people would ask why I didn’t bench J.J. Hardy or pinch-hit for him in a tough situation,” Yost said. “They would ask why I didn’t take Rickie Weeks out for defensive purposes in the late innings when we had a lead. If I had made those moves, perhaps we would have won a game or two more in the last couple of years. That wasn’t what we were looking for. We were taking the long-term view of things, and that was to make this franchise competitive again. To do that, it meant playing the young guys and letting them learn.”

That meant that Yost, who grew quite accustomed to winning after a 12-year run as a coach on Bobby Cox‘s staff in Atlanta, had to suffer through a lot of losing. Yost took over a club that went 56-106 in 2002, and would lose 94 games in each of his first two seasons. The Brewers made a 13-game improvement to 81-81 in 2005, their first non-losing season since 1992, but fell back to 75-87 last year during an injury-riddled season.

“I get asked a lot if losing all those games was tough, and it honestly wasn’t,” Yost said. “It’s not that I like to lose but I knew there was going to be a payoff down the road. I was convinced we were going to have a good ballclub. Knowing that day would come is what kept my spirits up and everyone else’s.”

That day has arrived this season, as the Brewers have the best record in the National League at 53-40 and lead the Central by 4 games over the hard-charging Chicago Cubs. Buoyed by a 25-12 start, the Brewers have been able to withstand challenge so far by going 28-28 in their 56 games since, though their division lead has been whittled from a season-high 8 games on June 23, and is even more tenuous now that staff ace Ben Sheets will miss at least one month with a finger injury suffered last Saturday.

Left fielder Geoff Jenkins has suffered longer than any Brewers’ player. A homegrown product of Milwaukee’s farm system, he made his major league debut in 1998, and played all the way through the dark period. He had the chance to escape when he became a free agent following the 2004 season, but he decided to stay, signing a three-year, $23 million contract.

“The biggest reason I signed back was because I was excited about the future,” Jenkins said. “We had lost for so many years here and I really wanted to be in Milwaukee when the Brewers finally won. I saw the young guys we had on the major league club and coming up through the farm system, and I was also convinced Doug Melvin and Ned Yost were the guys who were going to get this turned around. I’m glad I stayed, that’s for sure. It’s been tremendous to see all the excitement in Milwaukee. The fans have waited a long time for this, and they are so jacked up. I can only imagine it’s only going to get crazier as we get later into the season.”

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