In the biggest little hire of the week, the Brewers surprised no one when they went in house and hired Bruce Seid to replace the departing Jack Zduriencik as scouting director. Those are big shoes to fill. Judging by lack of responses to the story on the JSonline blog (the story has so far generated three, compared to the fifty-five that a post about Ned Yost and Willie Randolph not being considered for the Mariners manager job generated since then) this is flying almost totally under the radar amongst Brewer fans. This is understandable, because very few fans have ever heard of Bruce Seid and there really isn't much to say about the hire other than he was hired by a good scouting director and hopefully he's ready to take over the reigns.

Still, it's not an understatement to say that the job that Seid does hiring and evaluating the recommendations of his staff will probably have a much greater impact over the franchise's fortunes for the next decade than any other move that's been made or will be made this off season. The Brewers, like just about any team not playing in New York, Boston, Chicago or LA, are only going to be able to consistently contend when they have a steady stream of talent coming up through the farm system ready to contribute at the major league level. This all starts with scouting, drafting and signing the right players, and that is largely the province of the scouting director.

There's more too it than just that because keeping the talent flowing to the majors involves some other people too. Most important, the overall emphasis within the organization needs to stay strongly on player development. That means efforts have to be made to develop and keep healthy the prized talent so that it can contribute some day. The general manager needs to know who to keep, who can be traded away and when the right time to break someone in is. Most important, the team needs to commit the money to sign the talent found by Seid and his staff and they need to commit to allowing many of these players come up and contribute, even if that means they have to take some time to "rebuild" every once in a while.

There is an understandable temptation for those running a franchise to, having rebuilt from the ground up in a long an laborious process, put everything they have into squeezing out a few extra wins when they feel they have a contender, because those wins can make all the difference in making the playoffs and winning in them. The vaunted Oakland A's under the watch of Billy Beane fell into the trap of allowing their farm system to dry up while pushing for contention every season. Everyone thinks that the famous Moneyball draft in 2002 was an exercise in trying to be the smartest guy in the room. In reality, it was trying to squeeze as much talent out of a shoestring budget as possible. It would be a shame if the Brewers allowed the same thing to happen.

Everyone knows that the Brewers of 2008-09 will not have one of the top few picks in the draft, which is how they aquired some of the key talent that makes up the major league sqaud now. That makes it tougher to find true superstars, because more often than not those guys have talent that stands out to everyone. What the Brewers of 2008-09 have that the Brewers of 2002-05 didn't have was a lot of extra picks in the top end of the draft. If used correctly, those can help fill out a roster and build a contender. The Brewers just need to make sure they keep developing talent as a top priority and fight the urge to allow it to become an afterthought. Money may not be able to gaurantee success for the big market teams, but failure to develop talent in house will gaurantee failure for those not in the big markets.