I think you've hit on something here. The USSM guys seem to be operating with a very GM focussed paradigm. If I wanted to evalute who was the most innovative creative bad ass GM, I'd toss them 50 million dollars and see if they could win 90. What Tampa did last year, from the perspective of evaluating the virtues of a GM was far more impressive than taking a 180 million payroll team and winning the world series. However, most fans don't care about how creative, innovative, or tactically brilliant a GM is, they just want to win a world series, or make the playoffs. That said, and as I've hinted at before, I think this is just part of the story. I wonder if it's an accident that USSM seems to be driven by novel technocratic expertise of a group of specialists (read SABRmetricians) who are single-mindedly focussed on empirically demonstrable and testable results. In contrast, DOV has more respect for things like "tradition" and "gut instinct". These different attitudes seem to me, at least, to mirror different strands of political thought that are, quite frankly, not very well hidden on either site.