homegrown talent can be a 26 year old AAAA OF’er who is given a starting job after 3 cups of coffee. Or a AAA Closer that is promoted and demoted in place of veteran relievers.

i still think there’s room for discussion vis-vis la russa’s disposition toward youngsters. while it’s true that young players have gotten chances under him in 2008, that’s not entirely by tony’s choice -- the organization rolled out a new personnel model that emphasized homegrown resources. tony has used the material he’s been given, and his options this year -- far more so than in the past -- have been restricted to in-house guys.

a lot of fans of my generation tend to contrast tony’s handling of young players against whitey herzog’s. whitey didn’t ease youngsters into their roles nearly as cautiously as tony does. herzog would often hand a young player an everyday job and let him sink or swim; by contrast, tony likes to have his players “earn” their jobs (or “prove their mettle,” to use the term he and duncan applied to anthony reyes). it’s a different managerial philosophy.

to take a current example: the cardinals could, if they chose, go into the off-season on the assumption that colby rasmus will be their everyday centerfielder in 2009 -- just hand him the job, and base other roster decisions off that assumption; i suspect that’s how herzog would play it. tony doesn’t operate that way; he’ll force rasmus to elbow his way into the mix. the kid will eventually do so, and tony will get credit for giving rasmus an opportunity. but some people will still question how that opportunity gets extended; they’ll question whether the team might have been better off commiting to the youngster early on, instead of keeping redundant resources on hand and forcing rasmus to claw his way to the top of the heap.

ultimately, the debate is about resource allocation (which is what you’re analyzing here). i think that la russa’s cautious style of breaking in young players sometimes -- not all the time, but sometimes - places an unnecessary drain on organizational resources.

your conclusions about tony and all that are your own, i don’t have the wisdom or experience necessary to comment really. but this is just a nice breakdown and comparison of the teams and their current construction. it also is a nice reminder that acquiring players is not as simple as farm, free agent, or trade; there are more categories to look at.
as much as i hate to say it, the astros deserve some sort of credit for what they’ve accomplished. it might be mostly smoke and mirrors, but when everybody (myself included) felt sure they wouldn’t have a chance of pulling off another second half surge, they went and did it. i wonder what their team construction looks like?

i think it would be neat to go back and look at teams through the years to see if there are any trends. For example, if you were to do that for the 2004 Cardinals I would think there would be a much lower percentage in the drafted column, with guys like Edmonds, Rolen, and Renteria playing a big part in the team’s success.

As far as the Cubs are concerned I imagine you would have to go back quite a few years to find a team that had a major contribution from primarily home grown guys. My guess would be last succesful cubs team to have the majority of it’s guys be homegrown would be the 89 division team that had quite a few in house guys.

take Kennedy and Looper and make them free agent acquisitions?

In thinking about this, there’s an easy explanation with this kind of analysis if you believe that TLR doesn’t like to play the youngsters.

That problem is this: Win Shares aren’t proportional to playing time necessarily. Guys like Izturis and Villone probably earned very low win share percentages, but got plenty of playing time, whereas someone like Chris Perez probably has equal or better Win Shares in minimal playing time. This type of analysis makes it seem like two players with 5 win shares each get equal playing time. That’s not true.

The other part is that it should be an obvious conclusion that draftees would have the higher percentage because of two reasons:
1) We have a phenomenol player who is a once in a generation player in Albert Pujols who we were lucky enough to draft (although it’s obvious we didn’t even know what we were getting in drafting him with the round he was selected in)
2) If a rookie beats out a veteran on a TLR managed team, it’s because he’s noticeably better. Ludwick vs. some random scrapheap league average outfielder is an easy call. Someone like Stavinoha vs. the scrap heaper isn’t so easy, and the scrap-heaper would likely win that battle if it was for a starting job.

I like the idea, but I think it’d be more valuable to use this in conjunction with an analysis of percentage of at bats and innings pitched that each category received. Also, as someone pointed out, since Looper and Kennedy were traded off and then signed, they fall more under the FA category, especially since they never reached their peak with the Cardinals. I’d give you a pass with McGee when he came back as a draftee (if he, in fact, were one), since his ascent as a player was clearly with the CArdinals (at least on the major league level)