Tom Verducci: You win by limiting their scoring

[Sorry, this was originally posted missing the last paragraphs.]

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci has an interesting new article, The best offense: Quickest way to improve is through run prevention on SI's web site.

Verducci starts with an interesting point on the White Sox' quick ascent from mediocrity to World Series champ:

Can the White Sox teach us something about how to quickly become an elite team? Yes, and it has nothing to do with grabbing the biggest headlines of the winter or adding a big bat.

By dint of brilliance or luck or the influence of manager Ozzie Guillen -- or most likely, a sprinkling of each ingredient -- the White Sox moved ahead of the curve when it came to the performance-enhancers crackdown. Scoring dropped 5 percent in the AL and 4 percent in the NL last year, the first season in which first-time steroid offenders drew announced suspensions. It could dip again next season if the new ban on amphetamines causes, as many baseball people speculate, the need to use bench players more often.

As Verducci points out, the Sox succeeded by building a team around pitching and defense, a philosophy that I've always believed in, but for some reason took a beating from the boys on WFAN this hot stove season when they were pushing for the Mets to acquire Manny Ramirez or Alfonso Soriano. In profiling teams that made a dramatic improvement this year by cutting down the number of runs that they gave up, Verducci lists 4 common denominators for these teams:

1. They didn't sink big money into a closer.

2. They resisted the urge to overpay for mediocre starting pitching (think Jaret Wright, Carl Pavano, Eric Milton, Russ Ortiz, Matt Clement, Odalis Perez, Kris Benson and much of the rest of the free-agent pitchers who were available last winter).

3. They reaped the benefits of sticking with young starting pitchers (Garland, Lackey, Patterson, Lee), who are to baseball what young quarterbacks are to the NFL: except for the rare gifted ones, they must be allowed a long learning curve.

4. They hit the lottery on inexpensive relievers (Politte, Vizcaino, Howry, Majewski, Carrasco, Walker, Speier, etc.). One of the trends of this offseason is the escalation of salaries for setup men. Too often, though, relief pitching is an unreliable commodity, and teams tend to pay for it at the height of a reliever's value, which only means the likelihood of a bubble about to burst.

Despite the money the Mets spent on Wagner, they were actually quite frugal in acquiring set up men, and I really don't have a problem with that. I'm a big believer in a team developing its own bullpen talent, and hope that the Mets can produce something out of some of the good young arms in their minor-league system.

What concerns me about the Mets is point number three. There is an attitude in New York that seems to favor mediocre polished and consistent veteran pitchers over young, promising but erratic youngsters. It's the kind of attitude that served as a justification for the Kazmir deal.

It does take years to develop a young pitcher, and you have to take the bad (walks, mental errors) along with the good while it's happening. It requires patience, and a manager (like Bobby Cox in Atlanta) who is secure enough in his job that he can give a kid time to work the kinks out of his game. If Mike Pelfrey is ready for the majors late in 2007, but the Mets are in a pennant race, will he be given a chance to develop into a possible top-of-the-rotation starter, or will there be pressure to trade him for a veteran player who is ultimately less talented but likely to provide more in the near term?

In my mind, the fifth starter slot should be filled by a young pitcher with potential rather than a middling veteran. When the Mets won in 1986, their fifth starter was a promising youngster named Rick Aguilera. He was erratic at times, but you could see that he was going to be a good one. (Too bad they traded him for Frank Viola in July of '89, but that's another story.)

It's getting more difficult all of the time to get a hold of a top-of-the-rotation pitcher from another team. Even guys who are just decent cost too much. The Mets are going to have to change their organizational philosophy to allow for the patience to develop young talent in New York, and we fans will need to show the same patience and allow this to happen. If we don't, we'll all pay for it down the road.