I can practically promise you that no GM in baseball, given the option, would choose to run his team on a small budget, because is exceedingly hard to find and maintain a well-paying, high-profile job like Major League general manager if you are a crazy person.

Though spending tons of money on payroll and free-agent acquisitions may not always be the wisest way to build a winning baseball team, it is undoubtedly easier to construct a strong roster with the flexibility provided by a massive budget.

This offseason, like last offseason, Sandy Alderson will have to spend the limited resources he has at his disposal in the most efficient way he can figure. That has been the GM’s job since way before Moneyball — the book, the movie, or the events that inspired it.

That book tells an interesting story about the particular way that one particular general manager found to maximize his limited budget. Yes, Billy Beane sought players with high on-base percentages, but not because of the blinders-on SABR-worship people seem to believe he embodies. Beane wanted guys with high on-base percentages because that stat, he found, was at the time generally under-compensated relative to the extent to which it contributed to winning baseball.

That’s it. It’s not emblematic of “SABR <3 OBP” or anything like that. I’m sure if given the opportunity, Beane would have loved to sign players who also boasted high batting averages, played great defense and hit tons of home runs — any GM would. But he lacked the money with which to do so, so he identified an important component of winning that he could afford and pursued it.

Oh, whatever. I didn’t start writing this to summarize (and oversimplify) Moneyball. All I mean to say is this:

Common sense is not a dogma. Attempting to employ the best and most efficient practices to operate your baseball team means only that you’re a reasonable businessman, not any sort of zealot or brainwashed disciple of anyone or anything.

Stats and scouting are both just tools used by Major League front offices to evaluate baseball players. All teams use tools. All teams try to use the best tools at their disposal to identify players they believe will succeed. All teams have budgets.

No amount of finger-pointing and name-calling and talking-point regurgitating will make any of that untrue, and for every one or two or three examples of some specific way to build a successful baseball team there are as many counter-examples of successful baseball teams built some other way. The only indubitably true principle uniting the way all great teams are constructed is so obvious it’s laughable:

You want good players.

Preferably you want good, inexpensive players, so you can afford as many good players as possible. And you and I and Sandy Alderson might all have different ways to define what determines a good player, but the basic underlying truth is that you want players who will help you consistently score more runs than your opponent in some way or another. It’s really not rocket science.