As a result, it is becoming harder and harder to argue with tanking as the means for long-suffering franchises to rebuild and return to or, in the case of the Astros, finally arrive at the top. For owners and fanbases frustrated with the cycle of mediocrity that has plagued many small or mid-market teams who have spent and spent in futile attempts at perennial contention, the success of the Astros and dazzling potential of the 76ers will have an undeniable appeal. 

The Milwaukee Brewers, undoubtedly, were subscribers to this ideology upon Doug Melvin’s exit in 2015. It should be no surprise considering the new head of their front office, David Stearns, was indeed one of the architects of the champion Astros. The Brewers emptied the cupboards and dealt almost every player of note. The trades of Carlos Gomez and Jonathan Lucroy in particular have refreshed Milwaukee’s farm system, turning it from one of the worst in the league to one of the best in just a few years’ time.

These moves undoubtedly maximized Milwaukee’s return on these assets. This club was going nowhere in 2015 nor 2016, and trading these players on expiring contracts for controllable assets was a no-brainer. But this is not what makes the ideology governing Milwaukee’s plan over Stearns’s first few years one of austerity. These moves were accompanied, however, by a drastic reduction in payroll at the major league level. The Brewers fielded payrolls ranging from $80 million to $105 million from 2008 through 2015, but dipped to just $63 million in 2016 and 2017, both times lowest in the league. And perhaps more notably, the club entered the 2017 offseason carrying just one multi-year contract: Ryan Braun’s.  Even this contract is one that likely would have been dealt if not for the stigma surrounding Braun, his history with steroids, and his injury-prone nature since returning from the Biogenesis suspension.

I have no doubt that many aspects of the ideology that brought the Astros to success and have 76ers on the brink of a breakthrough are indeed the keys to breaking the cycle of mediocrity, which has portions of fanbases across the country clamoring for their teams to join the tanking fad. Collecting young talent and purging assets that have value solely in the present moment are both behaviors that put floundering teams in a better position for future success. 

But here is where I quibble with The Process and its copycats: Why must payroll be pushed to its lower limits, even when it wouldn’t interfere with the acquisition of young talent or other future-focused assets like draft picks or bonus pool cash?; or, even when it would help to meet those goals?

I think the 2017 Brewers provide a perfect example of this question. No, there was no legitimate way to predict that this Brewers squad would be a winning team, would challenge the mighty Cubs deep into September, and would fall heartbreakingly short of just Milwaukee’s fifth playoff appearance since the Brewers returned baseball to the city in 1970. But I can’t help but wonder, had the Brewers made a few acquisition in the free agent market to bring their payroll back up near the $80 million mark the club hovered around for most of the 2010s, would they have been able to win the National League Central, or at least a spot in the Wild Card Game?

This is especially relevant when considering the way the club’s season went. The Brewers used an early season hot streak to force themselves into the conversation as contenders. Although many of the players who fueled that hot start regressed — Eric Thames, Jett Bandy and Eric Sogard, for instance, never could replicate the brilliance of their first 100 or so plate appearances — the acquisitions of players like Stephen Vogt, Neil Walker, and Anthony Swarzak allowed the club to remain competitive and continue to play well throughout the second half when many expected them to fade, albeit not quite well enough.

What if the club had been willing to spend on these positions of weakness before the season began? What if Milwaukee had acquired a more expensive and reliable reliever than Neftali Feliz, whose incompetence cost the Brewers multiple games early on? What if they had spent on a starting pitcher to support a woefully inexperienced rotation?

The answer from those who support the austerity ideology would be that any such acquisitions would have been a heavy investment in the present at the expense of the future. The fact that Houston resisted such impulses and avoided the free agent market as they incurred historically horrific seasons in 2012 and 2013 only served to set the stage for their 2017 squad, as the draft picks they received as a result of those losses turned into players like Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman.

But I think it’s important we remember that the Astros’ success can’t entirely be credited to the tank. There was the disastrous selection of Mark Appel and the selection of Brady Aiken, who went unsigned. And there were also the players in place before the tanking even began; Jose Altuve, lest we forget, had been in the Astros system well before Jeff Luhnow’s arrival, and key players like Dallas Keuchel and Marwin Gonzalez were major league holdovers from the pre-Luhnow era as well. George Springer was an 11th pick overall, the fruit of a 76-win season, the last year before the big tank. 

I believe it is erroneous to credit the success of these tanking teams to the fact that they were austere with their payrolls. Spending on payroll is one of very few ways teams have to acquire talent, and more and more, baseball’s rules are making it harder and harder to go above and beyond to get better. To this point, look at the limits on bonus pools and international free agents. Even if that major league talent isn’t going to carry a team to the postseason immediately, teams always need help at the deadline, and with the right bet, a slick free agent acquisition even in a non-contending season could lead to a big prospect haul in July to aid the rebuilding effort.

I would be more open to the idea that the Brewers would need to save money if not for the fanbase’s consistent support of this club through good times and bad. Wisconsin baseball fans have consistently delivered with attendance figures over two million for a full decade now. The cash was there to make a splash with the reliever or back-end starter the Brewers needed to get over the hump. Even if the Brewers hadn’t turned into surprise contenders, such moves would have given them assets to play with either at the trade deadline or over this offseason.

Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong, but it looks to me like the Brewers may have cost themselves a year of their competitive window because they weren’t ready to open up the checkbook. I believe the same thing happened to the Astros, who won 86 and 84 games in 2015 and 2016 with the 29th and 21st largest payrolls in the game respectively as their front office was slow to spend and surround their first wave of prospects with the supporting cast it needed to take the next step. Obviously, 2017’s pennant and title soothes all for the Astros, but teams looking to follow their model should be aware that you can’t guarantee the window will last long enough to afford missing at the first crack.

What I fear will happen in baseball and across the American sporting landscape is that owners will look at the Astros success and only see the austerity without seeing the rest of the philosophy that backed it up: the aggressive acquisition of undervalued talent, the maximizing of future value by spending in the draft and amateur markets, and the understanding of when to cash in and turn future assets into present assets. But for the owners, tanking is a win-win scenario: If the team gets better, great, but if not, ownership cashes the revenue sharing checks and laughs all the way to the bank.

Last year’s Brewers showed the tanking process is not always going to follow a neat and perfect timeline. A team that looked a couple years away showed it was nearly ready for the big time. The front office has done a tremendous job of turning around what was a decrepit roster and farm system after the 2015 season, and the work that David Stearns and company have done to put this team in this position after just a few years is phenomenal. But after missing out on this shot last year, it now must be time to spend. Austerity isn’t what won the World Series for the Astros, and it won’t win one for the Brewers either.

Photo Credit: Gary A. Vasquez, USAToday Sports Images

Yet, this question about rebuilding is doubly meaningful after the 2017 campaign, a season that saw the Arizona Diamondbacks and Minnesota Twins immediately right ship under new GMs, with both clubs making the playoffs following dreadful losing seasons. 2017 also saw the remade Colorado Rockies receive their first taste of playoff baseball in quite some time, as well as a resurgent Brewers club that nearly caught the Rockies to make the playoffs after what has been an incisive rebuilding effort in Milwaukee.

GMs Derek Falvey (Minnesota) and Mike Hazen (Arizona) both overtook teams with 70-71 win averages during the three years preceding their respective tenures, and promptly turned those clubs into playoff contenders. Here’s how Falvey and Hazen compare with other current GMs and their respective scenarios upon entering their current organizations:

By taking a full industry overview, it will be possible to question the merits of rebuilding as a front office standpoint, while also questioning the potential sustainability of clearly non-rebuilding models like Arizona or Minnesota. By taking the full industry overview, unique models like the Cleveland front office system, or the Baltimore front office run by Dan Duquette, as well as efforts by the Dodgers to reorganize while winning, can also be questioned alongside the now-canonical “rebuilding” models of Houston and Chicago. The Houston and Chicago scorched earth rebuilds are indeed outliers in many senses, and current industry practices show that teams can indeed right ship quickly and effectively.

What is worth drawing from this discussion, as a Brewers fan, is that there are both good and problematic aspects of the Milwaukee strategy that defined the club from midseason 2015 through the end of 2017. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons that the rebuild had such a quick turnaround in Milwaukee is that two front office leaders oversaw the build, rather than one front office handing off the reins to another rebuilding entity. It is by now old news that President Doug Melvin’s midseason 2015 moves helped to define the 2017 contending club, but these moves should not be forgotten when assessing Milwaukee’s roster building scenario within the industry as a whole. Yet, it is also worth mentioning that Milwaukee was a middle of the road club to begin with, entering 2016. Given the recent ability of clubs from Boston to Cleveland to Minnesota and Arizona to prove that a substantial losing club can indeed be a 90-win playoff contender, one can continuously push back against the Brewers’ stated need to rebuild the system.

The key here is to understand that negative arguments about the Brewers’ build do not categorically mean that the rebuilding effort was not successful, or that there are not positive aspects to the club’s roster building approach. And indeed, David Stearns himself has proven this by taking a middle road in player transactions, as his best moves (Chase Anderson trade return, Travis Shaw trade return, Jonathan Villar trade return, Junior Guerra waiver claim) are decidedly not rebuilding moves (and in fact are simply “good baseball moves” when all is said and done). Arguably Stearns’s most questionable deals are his rebuilding moves in several cases, and at the very least those trades have the verdict out in the vast majority of cases (from the Jonathan Lucroy deal to the Khris Davis deal to the Adam Lind deal). But this analysis is a shift above the slog of individual moves. The point is to take these industry-wide practices, the problems and the strengths, and understand the proper application of roster building strategies to future contending clubs in Milwaukee.

Dan Duquette is one of the most successful GMs in the current MLB landscape. In fact, by many measures, he’s the best current GM in baseball, certainly a Top Five contender.

It’s worth stating this, and then studying Duquette’s oft-ridiculed or questioned roster building, organization building practices in Baltimore, as the Orioles unceremoniously fired off consecutive wins of 93, 85, 96, 81, and 89 from 2012-2016. These win totals are significant because Duquette inherited the second-worst three-year outlook of any current MLB GM; the Orioles averaged 66.3 wins during the three years preceding Duquette, a total only surpassed by Dayton Moore’s organizational inheritance in Kansas City. It is also interesting to note that Duquette inherited arguably one of the worst performing franchises in baseball during the beginning of the scorched earth rebuilds in Houston and Chicago, but unlike Jed Hoyer and Jeff Luhnow, Duquette instead spun five years of winning baseball fury from his inherited roster. In fact, Duquette’s Orioles win average (86.3), first playoff appearance (2012, his first season in Baltimore), and playoff appearances (three) beat both Hoyer’s Cubs (82.0 wins, fourth GM year, and three appearances) and Luhnow’s Astros (74.5 wins, fourth GM year, and two appearances).

In terms of basic system-building, the average playoff GM took three years to reach the playoffs. This fact alone should raise questions about the merits of a prolonged building approach.

What’s interesting about Duquette’s Orioles, of course, is that the executive will now have an opportunity to prove roster building acumen once more, as the Orioles fell behind the pack in 2017 (his sixth year at the helm in Baltimore). Having been dismissed by the 2012 Yankees, 2014 Royals, or 2016 Blue Jays, Duquette’s Orioles success will always be undermined by those fans and analysts who significantly value playoff success, as Baltimore looks like a club that was able to churn regular season wins while faltering “when it counts.” This is a fine line of argumentation for hot takes, but it is not an adequate line of argumentation to capture the full range of success within the MLB industry: Duquette did what no other current GM has done by taking a perennial mid-60s win team and immediately turning them into five consecutive years of contending or competitive clubs.

Duquette’s success should place a cloud over the rebuilding efforts of the Cubs and Astros. Analysts should not be tempted by the recency bias that “the Astros and Cubs have built better roster cores for sustained success,” as Duquette has already done something neither Hoyer nor Luhnow have yet to prove capable of (five consecutive winning-or-contending seasons in MLB). Moreover, Duquette’s five years of success are interesting in the sense that they offer a satisfying anti-cyclical feel; five years of sustained MLB success is enough time to churn through contractual cycles, injury cycles, and development cycles.

Now, Hazen and Falvey (Minnesota) have a chance to match Duquette’s success in the midst of another group of rebuilding clubs (most notably Cincinnati, Atlanta, San Diego, and now maybe Detroit or Tampa Bay). In one sense, playing the market contrarian may be quite a successful executive strategy, as sharp GMs can take advantage of the MLB talent available via free agency or trade when more than 10 percent of the league’s clubs decide to focus their resources in the minor leagues (or, in “young, future talent”). If the Orioles are the ultimate foils to the Cubs and Astros, it will be interesting to see if the Twins and Diamondbacks can successfully fend off the likely coming accolades to whichever club succeeds with the latest scorched earth building effort. In this regard, it could be noteworthy that none of the existing rebuilding efforts seem as focused or as “good” in terms of talent stockpiled as the Cubs and Astros.

Where do these roster building trends leave Stearns?

The Brewers GM is in a strange place. On the one hand, he’s undoubtedly one of the most successful GMs among those that have failed to reach the playoffs thus far. While overtaking a slightly below average franchise (based on the three years prior to his hiring), Stearns immediately improved the club in 2016 and tied for the best second-year record within this group (86 wins). That’s certainly a significant accomplishment. As demonstrated above, Stearns’s overall improvement during his first two seasons rates as solidly better than average (if not as spectacular as the very best GMs in the game). In terms of on-field product, Stearns has started to deliver tangible improvements to the club.

On the other side of this equation, however, it is worth piling on to the argument against rebuilding in the MLB. Even excusing arguments about the Yankees (although Brian Cashman’s recent revitalization of their roster and system is praiseworthy) and Dodgers as extremely big market clubs and therefore incommensurable with Milwaukee, there are successes by Bridich, Duquette, Falvey, Hazen, and Chernoff that are laudable for several reasons. Without playoffs appearances, it is difficult to gauge Stearns’s success against that of Michael Hill (who improved the Marlins despite a rather tumultuous organizational standpoint), or even Dayton Moore’s early season building effort in Kansas City (this is a much more controversial stance).

Most notably, the rebuilding clubs did terrible jobs at improving their respective rosters within their first three years. With the Cubs, the Theo Epstein-Jed Hoyer group inherited a better-than-average team (compared to their industry counterpart GM changes), in a strong market (albeit with ownership questions), and promptly drove the club into the ground. For this reason, the Cubs front office is arguably one of the least praiseworthy in the game in terms of a purely results-driven criterion; one only need to compare their scenario to the below average situations in Baltimore, Minnesota, and Arizona that were immediately righted and immediately produced playoffs appearances to leap into criticism of the Cubs. Reaching the World Series in five years is hardly impressive, unless one is inclined to heap equivalent praise on the Sandy Alderson Mets or Jon Daniels Rangers.

It is interesting to see Stearns’s name aside generally analytically inclined front offices in Seattle, Tampa Bay, and the Dodgers on this list, for outside of Farhan Zaidi, not one of these GMs has a playoffs appearance with their current club in their current capacity. This is perhaps fitting for Stearns, who generally seems to be well-regarded in terms of MLB pedigree (an Astros background that gets the Brewers within one degree of separate from the consistently praised Cardinals front office). In this sense, one could ask which class of GMs Stearns is competing with most heavily, in terms of pedigree and on-field performance.

Stearns has not orchestrated the fastest turnaround of a club among current GMs, but his overall performance has turned in better than average results within the industry. These results should highlight the importance of competing at the MLB level, and the diverse paths to postseason glory possible within the MLB. Rebuilding is a problematic strategy for many reasons, not the least of which boils down to the simple fact that a club is never out of the running: 90-loss clubs are indeed 90-win clubs with the proper roster management, coaching, development, and farm system in place. If it takes a club four or more years to reach the playoffs under a new GM and system, that system should be endlessly critiqued and questioned.

The industry says 2018 is the Brewers’ year to reach the playoffs under Stearns. Can the GM deliver?

Photo Credit: Danny Wild, USAToday Sports Images

This was, I think, the allure of Moneyball for many people. Sociologists like Bronislaw Malinowski found that people tend to believe in magic in situations where there is a marked discrepancy between efforts and results. Moneyball or analytics, or whatever you want to call it, offers the reassuring idea that through some sort of magic — numbers, intelligence, a Process — results can finally be brought in line with efforts and the team will be victorious.

Back when I was in college, I found an old book at a book fair for 50 cents called The Theory And Practice of Gamesmanship, Or The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating. Written by an Englishman named Stephen Potter, it’s a hilarious satire that reveals in all its glory the absurdity of the Victorian ideals of sportsmanship. While it doesn’t sound like it’s related to Moneyball at all, I think Potter’s ideas of gamesmanship have some fascinating similarities to the analytical approach to solving the problem of rebuilding a baseball team.

Chapter III, “The Game Itself,” begins brilliantly: “‘How to win Games Without Actually Being Able to Play Them.’ Reduced to the simplest terms, that is the formula, and the student must not at first try flights too far from this basic thought.” This is the core of gamesmanship. “The assiduous student of gamesmanship has little time for the minutiae of the game itself — little opportunity for learning how to play the shots, for instance,” Potter writes. “His skill in strokemaking may indeed be almost non-existent.”

This is the question I felt like I was trying to answer on the podcast, and the problem it sometimes feels like we’re asking GMs with a Process — whether a stats-type like David Stearns or an old-school scout like Dayton Moore — to actually solve. How can a team win games without actually being good? Now that would truly be magic.

Analytics aren’t going to do that. At one point in baseball’s history, some executives were able to use statistics as a tool to manipulate the predictability of the old guard. Those days are gone. Knowledge of analytics simply isn’t going to allow teams to bridge big gaps in talent, whether acquired through financial resources or assembled through excellent drafting and development.

Gamesmanship works by exploiting the predictability of the opponent’s play style and mindset. That’s the way Billy Beane’s Athletics and other early teams to employ analytics won. But the league adapted quickly, and analytics are no longer magic, they’re simply part of the game. And that’s why I think Stearns and the Brewers — or any other team that sets out on a rebuilding mission — will have to display more than just gamesmanship, more than just an ability to make the right choices and the right calculations.

The real trick for Potter’s gamesman isn’t that he has found a way to magically change the outcome of games. It’s that it never truly matters whether he wins or loses the game itself. “The true gamesman knows that the game is never at an end,” Potter writes. “Game-set-match is not enough. The winner must win the winning. And the good gamesman is never known to lose, even if he has lost.”

I’m excited and hopeful to see what David Stearns and his philosophy can do. But I doubt he will be the one to answer that holy grail of a question to which Potter devoted his book, that question of how to win games without actually being good. Because that’s what I see now when I see somebody peddling a Process. I see somebody selling the idea that no matter what happens, they have still played the game correctly. I see somebody selling the idea that even when they have lost it should not be seen as losing. And that isn’t the work of a magician, just the work of a plain old gamesman.

This is a credit to the Royals’ players — while it’s tempting to think it might be easier to construct a team like this considering the exhorbitant sums top starters and sluggers fetch in free agency, there just aren’t that many players that have the all-around skillsets necessary to power a team like the Royals. Good luck finding too many quality two-way players like Lorenzo Cain, Alex Gordon and Salvador Perez or shutdown relievers like Greg Holland and Wade Davis. Usually by the time players like these reach free agency, either the league has caught on to the fact that their skillset is worthwhile, or they’ve already started their decline phase — particularly since pitcher velocity and position-player defense are usually the first skills to decline for each group.

But that doesn’t mean teams aren’t going to try to copy the way the Royals won, by losing for years, racking up tons of high draft picks, waiting for a wave of prospects to come around, and carefully spending to fill the few holes that remain. Of the Royals’ core players, Mike Moustakas (pick 1.2 in 2007), Eric Hosmer (pick 1.3 in 2008) and Alex Gordon (pick 1.2 in 2005) were all the fruits of selecting high in the draft after terrible seasons. Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar were acquired in exchange for Zack Greinke, pick 1.6 in 2002.

From 2003 through 2008, the Royals had a payroll between $36 million and $67 million, ranking between 24th and 27th in Major League Baseball in all six seasons. This is when they drafted most of the core talent from their 2014 and 2015 playoff runs, or the players who were traded to improve the team around them. The Royals slightly increased their payroll in the latter part of the decade with ill-advised deals for Jose Guillen and Gil Meche, but in 2011, the Royals entered full Process mode and whittled their payroll down to a league-low $38 million. They then slowly built the payroll up as their young players moved up the salary scale, up to $64 million (26th) in 2012, $82 million (22nd) in 2013, $92 million (19th) in 2014, and fueled by their AL Pennant, $113 million in 2015 (13th).

You can’t deny the effectiveness of the Process. Everything that was supposed to happen for a small-market team to win happened. The prospects showed up, they grew together, the front office filled in the gaps, an exciting and improbable first playoff run then gave them the experience and confidence to bring the championship home a year later.

But this is part of the problem I’ve been writing about here for the past couple of months. The reason small-market teams are going to copy the Royals is because every other route to contention has been closed off. And this isn’t just about money — it’s about rules like the qualifying-offer system, revenue sharing, and caps on draft and international amateur spending that have made it impossible to take other routes to contention. Having to surrender draft picks for mid-level free agents makes it difficult to slowly build year-by-year, and the spending caps in the amateur market make it impossible to go above slot to keep top-tier talent coming in if a team improved (and improved its draft slot) slowly but steadily.

So, sure, teams probably aren’t going to “copy the Royals” in the sense Crasnick discusses. It’s going to be near impossible to cobble together a group of uniquely defensively talented contact hitters like the Royals had in 2014 and 2015. That’s what their scouts and system were good at identifying and developing, so that’s what came out, much like how the Brewers rose to contention in the late 2000s behind a roster filled with Jack Z Specials — young sluggers who could win despite their defensive deficiencies. But you can bet teams are going to copy Kansas City’s process — and they already have, in Houston, and to a lesser extent, on Chicago’s north side.

However, it can’t be forgotten that a critical part of this process is years and years — maybe a decade, maybe more — of losing. That would be just fine with most fans, I think, if it always worked out as cleanly as it did for the Royals. But it won’t, as we saw with the Brewers in 2008 and 2011. Next year isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, and a talented core can disintegrate quickly. So to all the teams getting ready to copy the Royals and look to the future: Best of luck when your window finally comes, and don’t blink or you might miss it. Hopefully all the losses are worth it.

Of course, Melvin didn’t always struggle in this facet of management. The first five years of his tenure (2003-2007) saw the Brewers draft Ryan Braun, Yovani Gallardo, Rickie Weeks, and Jonathan Lucroy, among others. Those players combined with Prince Fielder and Corey Hart, J.J. Hardy, and Bill Hall — whom the team had selected in the pre-Melvin seasons — to form a strong nucleus that helped the club make playoff runs in 2008 and 2011.

After that, however, the prospect well dried up — such that, for five years running, the Brewers have placed in the bottom five of BP’s organizational rankings:

[Note: These rankings began in 2008.]

With the aforementioned core heading to the Major Leagues, Milwaukee sorely needed to replenish its system. Melvin responded with the opposite due to the club’s competitive window. In deals for CC Sabathia, Zack Greinke, and Shaun Marcum, he sent away Matt LaPorta, Zack Jackson, Rob Bryson, Michael Brantley, Lorenzo Cain, Jake Odorizzi, Alcides Escobar, Jeremy Jeffess, and Brett Lawrie. Some of those players didn’t end up accomplishing much, but the prosperity of some of them — particularly Brantley and Cain, each of whom has played at a borderline-MVP level in the past couple years — have made many fans regret the trades retrospectively.

Inadequate drafting compounded the woes of those deals. Jack noted in his piece that the club’s picks from later years haven’t yet amounted to much. Over the past few years, teams such as the Rangers have managed to maintain a solid minor-league system despite swinging big trades, and they’ve done so by constantly restocking their affiliates through the draft and international free agency. Part of that is good scouting, too, while part of that is a willingness to spend money. Melvin’s Brewers partook in the former half of the equation while neglecting the latter half, though, and it has come back to haunt them.

With that said, Milwaukee has made recent strides. BP’s writeup of the farm system stated that it possessed “talent to makes several teams quite jealous” — a massive improvement from its standing over the past several seasons. After spending the first half of the decade in the minor-league cellar, the 2015 Brewers have taken the necessary steps to move back up to the top half.

Part of this, in fairness, happened before this year. In August, Julien Assouline analyzed the team’s drafts under Melvin, who had perhaps not received the credit he deserved. Some of Melvin’s strengths there stem from the early years, but even in the later part of his run with the Brewers, they fared moderately well. Derek Harvey commented that the club’s drafts from 2009 to 2014, under late scouting director Bruce Seid, provided them with numerous quality players that presently stock their system. Indeed, of the top-20 current Milwaukee prospects, eight — Jorge Lopez, Devin Williams, Monte Harrison, Tyrone Taylor, Jake Gatewood, Kodi Medeiros, Yadiel Rivera, and Michael Reed — came from drafts during that span, while Orlando Arcia and Gilbert Lara signed with the team as amateur free agents in that period.

Still, an improvement of this magnitude, and in this short a span, suggests something different in the past twelve months. Part of the difference stems from the 2015 draft, which has (to this point) yielded incredible rewards. Four of those top-20 prospects came to the team in June: Trent Clark, Cody Ponce, Demi Orimoloye, and Nathan Kirby. Clark stands out as the best of the bunch, but all four have intriguing upside and could continue to blossom further. New scouting director Ray Montgomery, as Harvey observed, seems to have taken off.

The team’s decision to finally rebuild has helped with that. July saw them deal away established starters Aramis Ramirez, Gerardo Parra, and Jonathan Broxton, as well as (relative) stars Carlos Gomez and Mike Fiers. Those trades — which, as J.P. Breen correctly posited, meant the team had recognized that its window has closed — brought back a great deal of prospects. Yhonathan Barrios, Zach Davies, Malik Collymore, Domingo Santana, Brett Phillips, Josh Hader, and Adrian Houser now occupy various levels of the Milwaukee system; Phillips, Davies, Houser, and Hader ranked in the top 20, while Santana has already begun to contribute at The Show. Together with Marcos Diplan, an intriguing top-20 farmhand whom the team acquired in last January’s Yovani Gallardo swap, they amount to a formidable group.

Overall, David Stearns inherited a solid amount of prospects when he became the GM in August. Surveying the trove a couple weeks before Melvin stepped down, Derek Harvey concluded that the system had gone from the bottom to the upper half of the league — a prediction that, as stated previously, we’ve likely seen come true. Stearns didn’t stop there, though. In his four-odd months atop the organization, he’s made several trades to bolster the minor- and major-league depth, further improving the system as a whole.

The first two transactions came in mid-November. Stearns swapped Cy Sneed for the Astros’ Jonathan Villar, then followed that up by shipping Francisco Rodriguez to the Tigers in exchange for Javier Betancourt and a player to be named later (catcher Manny Pina). Seth Victor described Villar at the time as “a good acquisition for a team that needs middle infield depth and flexibility,” a player who won’t make a noticeable difference yet should still provide some value. Betancourt — who rounded out the top 20 — is, in Chris Crawford’s estimation, “a high-floor prospect with a fairly well-defined ceiling.” In other words, he could become a Villar-type player a few years down the road.

After BP published its top-20 list, Stearns has made a few more moves, evidently in an effort to muck up the rankings. First came the Adam Lind trade, which brought back three young pitchers: Carlos Herrera, Daniel Missaki, and Freddy Peralta. While I can certainly see the logic in Jack’s distaste for the deal — Lind gave us something to cheer for in this dreadful 2015 season, and those players always hurt to lose — I ultimately come down on the side of J.P., who expressed cautious optimism regarding it.

Not long after that, three more prospects came to Milwaukee. The day following Lind’s departure, the Red Sox sold Garin Cecchini to the Brewers for cash considerations. BP’s Bryan Grosnick called the deal “[t]he definition of ‘buying low,'” as a disastrous 2015 had caused Cecchini’s stock to plummet. Likewise, the players Milwaukee snagged in the Rule 5 draft — Colin Walsh from the Athletics and Zack Jones from the Twins — don’t carry elite pedigrees, or much upside, for that matter.

These deals nevertheless give the Brewers plenty of options for 2016 and beyond, as J.P. outlined a few weeks ago. (Plus, the quantity acquired from these transactions only increased thereafter, when the Brewers sent Jason Rogers to the Pirates, receiving Keon Broxton and Trey Supak in return.) Overall, the solid 2015 draft, along with Stearns’s willingness to trade anything not nailed down, has translated to a complete turnaround in Milwaukee’s minor-league system.

What does this mean for 2016? Well, as J.P. pointed out, the Brewers have more routes they can take at the Major League level; although few of those will likely lead to wins, the results should give the team some clarity for 2017. More immediately, it means the Triple-A Sky Sox will presumably play better in 2016. Michael Schwarz explained how that affiliate would progress with legitimate prospects filling its roster. The biggest takeaway here, though, is general optimism. Years and years of no future, at long last, appear to have come to an end. Now, more so than at any point in recent memory, there could be hope on the Milwaukee horizon.

With that being said, new general manager David Stearns didn’t necessarily negotiate a poor return for a player who hit .277/.360/.460 in 2015 with 20 homers. The trade is just more difficult to understand because the assets in question are unknown quantities. Hell, even many within the scouting community have never heard of these players or have never seen them in person. As such, the long-term gain is too abstract to evaluate with any sense of certainty.

The Brewers obviously like the three pitchers they received in the deal. Right-hander Carlos Herrera (who just turned 18) spent last season in the Dominican Summer League, posting a 3.26 ERA with a solid strikeout-to-walk ratio (5.62 K/BB). He throws in the high-80s and low-90s with some projectability. A couple scouts told me that he’s the real prize in this deal, even if he’s a bit of a mystery. Daniel Missaki is another right-handed hurler (only 19 years old) who is best known for his time with the Brazilian national team. He’s currently rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, but reportedly has good feel for multiple pitches. Finally, Freddy Peralta (also 19) popped up on the prospect radar in 2014 when his velocity ticked upward into the mid-90s. The heater regressed this past season, though, and his 4.11 ERA won’t capture one’s attention. Still, the 8.38 strikeout-to-walk ratio is tremendous and eases some of the concern about his ugly run prevention.

David Stearns told Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Whenever you acquire players that are farther away, there is more variance….So, in a deal like this, we’re really targeting that variability to find an impact-type pitcher, even if it’s multiple years down the road.” This means that Herrera, Missaki or Peralta could flame out before Double-A or they could become useful Major League arms. And given the fact that we’re perhaps talking about another three-to-five years until the muddled picture becomes somewhat clear, this trade cannot possibly resonate with the vast majority of Brewers fans. It requires patience with absolutely no guarantee of any return on that investment.

That’s why the Adam Lind trade is best understood through its process, what acquiring three no-name teenagers can tell us about David Stearns and his overall strategy for the club.

It appears that Stearns is carrying over a key piece of the Houston Astros’ rebuilding playbook, in which a club cannot be afraid of targeting extremely young pitchers in the low minors — especially in return for non-elite Major League assets. The Astros, for example, got David Paulino for Jose Veras and Francis Martes as the “throw-in” in the Jarred Cosart deal. Both of those formerly no-name prospects are now two of the hottest prospects in the Astros’ farm system. It’s a conscious approach that Evan Drellich of the Houston Chronicle profiled in September. This Lind trade is an example of David Stearns trusting his scouting department, trying to bring unknown prospects into the Brewers’ system before they have a chance to mature and have a breakout season. Because after that hypothetical breakout, the Brewers would no longer be able to afford the asking price. The ultimate buy-low strategy, if you will.

Of course, this type of strategy puts a premium on scouting and player evaluation. They have to get it right enough to make it worthwhile. Fortunately, recent success in drafts leads one to believe that the Brewers’ scouting department has quality members who are capable of getting the job done well. Ray Montgomery and his staff have been aces over the past couple years.

All of this doesn’t mean Stearns and the Brewers will consistently eschew big-league players or guys in the upper minors. This simply indicates that the Brewers will not rely on Doug Melvin’s strategy of targeting players who have already found success in the Double-A level or above. Stearns already has seen this type of strategy work in Houston and appears to be transitioning it over to Milwaukee.

It is also important to recognize that quantity should not be ignored during a rebuilding process. The Milwaukee Brewers must stuff the farm system with as much talent as possible and across the minor-league spectrum. This isn’t just to spread out one’s hypothetical competitive window, nor is it some kind of “throw dozens of prospects at the wall and see who sticks” argument. Instead, I’m acknowledging the fact that Milwaukee needs excess minor-league talent. It’s not enough to have the next core of homegrown players in the minors. An organization must also have the depth necessary to trade for more Major League players. Just as the Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros, and Toronto Blue Jays are all beginning to flex their prospect muscles to maximize their windows of contention (which are of varying sizes), the Milwaukee Brewers must have the prospect depth to both develop a core and supplement it.

In the end, this Adam Lind deal should be understood as an attempt to acquire quantity and quality. The latter is more abstract and won’t pay dividends for perhaps a half-decade, but it is clearly a conscious attempt at acquiring high-end prospects — just a year or two before they become high-end prospects. This is just more evidence that David Stearns and his staff are willing to be creative and patient, a highly desirable combination during a full-scale rebuilding process. Brewers fans should be happy, regardless of how the three young pitchers turn out.