The acquisition of CC Sabathia has the Brewers knocking on the door of the playoffs for the first time in over a quarter century. Without him, they're contenders, but not favorites. It's tempting to give CC the lion's share of the credit for this accomplishment, but the truth is that the Brewers have mostly been built from the ground up in the draft. CC himself was aquired in large part because the Brewers turned a draft pick into a top prospect, Matt LaPorta.

Anyone reading this doesn't need a list of the players drafted and developed by the Brewers to know how important they are to the team. Being in Milwaukee in the current incarnation of the game means that for the Brewers to have success on the field, they need to have success developing their own stars, because they simply cannot compete for top end free agents and even in the middle market they have to be very selective.

While the benefits of contending with cheap homegrown talent are obvious, it may be even better than originally thought. From Buster Olney's ESPN.com blog (sorry, you need to be an insider to read the whole thing):

A general manager speaking on background last week used an interesting phrase to describe the recent phenomenon of veterans quickly descending from productive players into something much less than that: "False echoes."

He was referring to players who, in retrospect, probably were users of steroids or human growth hormone or amphetamines or some other substance that greatly enhanced their performance. And now that there is greater scrutiny of PEDs, by Major League Baseball and by federal investigators, some of those players are probably clean and are suddenly much less productive.

...

Many executives are reassessing the logic of giving long-term deals to players over 29 or 30 years old, having come to believe that a lot of players -- "including some I would have never suspected," said one GM -- were hitting and pitching effectively well into their 30s in large part because of drug use.

....

"You've already seen the industry shift to an emphasis on younger players," said an AL GM. "Teams are focusing on draft picks, and on acquiring younger players. We saw that at the trade deadline. The whole sport is getting younger.

"And the long-term deals almost never work; there's no doubt about that. Never. A guy becomes a free agent at 30 to 32 years old, and you give him big money over four or five years and count on him to be productive to 35 or 36 years old? That's crazy talk now."

Think of teams that gave out huge 5+ year deals to players in their late 20's and early 30's; are they starting to wonder what they've gotten themselves into? It isn't necessarily that any one particular player or players were using, but that the widespread use created unrealistic expectations of what the new "career arc" was going to look like and contracts were given on these false assumptions. Chances are good that some very tough lessons are going to be learned in the next few years by teams that built around those sorts of contracts.

If it is true and players are going to have shorter peaks and swifter declines out of their peak production, it will only increase the value of home grown players. Teams that control players in the pre-free agency period of their careers will now hold a larger percentage of that players career VORP in control, leaving a lower percent for the player to sell and be bought on the open market. If that holds true, teams that rely on building by acquiring players at or near the end of their team control years will be getting less production, on average, than they used to. That would mean that the competative advantage of holding a players pre-free agent years is and has been increasing.

The Brewers need to develop players because they cannot afford to build around a core of market-value deals and compete consistently. If all of this turns out to be true, the Brewers method of team building will be even more benficial in the future than it was in the past.