This is an excerpt from a post at Zone Coverage. It appears in full here.

It’s not terribly controversial to suggest that the Houston Astros just climbed the summit to reach heights that fans hope are possible in the near future for the Minnesota Twins.

Like, winning the World Series is the ultimate goal, and seeing a team that was -- at least for a stretch -- going through their rebuild concurrently with the Twins should give fans at least a semblance of hope for the future.

But what it seems to do around these parts is gets fans all up in a frenzy about how the Twins can reach those heights. How can they copy that team’s method to reach the ultimate goal?

That was true in 2015, when the Kansas City Royals used a ridiculous bullpen, tons of contact and an iffy starting rotation to win the World Series. Now maybe it’s more because that Royals team is identifiable to Twins fans -- it almost exactly mirrors the Twins from the decade before that -- due to roster construction, payroll and that sort of thing, but it also feels like fans get too tied up in what works for the winning teams.

In short, fans become fixated on how their team can be the next World Series team following the last World Series team’s blueprint. That’s sort of foolish, though. Look at the two teams who just faced off in the World Series. One can easily make the case that it was the best team from either side -- you can’t submit the Cleveland Indians, and I won’t beat you up over it -- and one can also posit that neither team was necessarily better than the other, one just happened to win four of the seven games played between the two.

It was more or less a dead heat, and it was to very, very differently crafted teams. Not since the George Steinbrenner-era Yankees have teams spent like the Los Angeles Dodgers have. This year’s payroll started at $241 million and change, down from the previous two years but still about $40 million clear of the No. 2 team, the Yankees, who have cut back in recent years to not only lessen their luxury-tax threshold, but also likely amp up for a run at either Bryce Harper or maybe Manny Machado next offseason.

The Dodgers weren’t overwhelmingly good in any one area of the game, but were just flat out solid offensively and both in the rotation and bullpen. Defensive stats can be hard to decipher, but the Dodgers had a defensive efficiency of 70.3 percent. In short, the Dodgers turned that many balls in play against them into outs, and it was the No. 1 mark in MLB -- tied with the Yankees.

Where the money comes into play for the Dodgers isn’t just with guys like Clayton Kershaw, but also in terms of assets. When guys like Andre Ethier, Andrew Toles or Adrian Gonzalez go down, the Dodgers don’t fold up shop.

They have used their resources to find the next big thing -- Chris Taylor or Austin Barnes -- or they have the ability to go out and trade for a pitcher like Yu Darvish when the team gets exactly zero starters who pitch 180 innings or make 30 starts.

In a lot of ways, the Dodgers were snakebitten and still won 104 games and came within a game of winning it all.

Insanity.