The final step of the rebuilding process can be a very difficult for owners to wrap their heads around, but in almost all cases, it’s absolutely necessary. You have spent a long time cultivating the right collection of young talent, both at the major league and minor league level, but you cannot become too attached to your roster. If you rely solely on the players in your farm system to fill the holes in your roster, you’re going to be disappointed.

Everyone has at least one owner like this in their league. They have meticulously built up a really great farm system and appear ready to contend, but can’t bring themselves to let go of the talent they’ve accumulated in order to improve their team. They ask for the moon and stars when you inquire about their prospects, as they’re so in love with their own process, they can’t see the likely disappointment of these “can’t miss” prospects right in front of their face. So as the minor leaguers in their farm system start to fail, they replace them with more high-end prospects, until it becomes a never ending cycle of near-contention.

Let’s go back just five years to see this materialize. Baseball America’s top 100 prospect list in 2007 included many stars, but let’s just take a look at the top-10 – the elite of the elite. Evan Longoria (7) and Justin Upton (9) are elite fantasy players. Alex Gordon (2) and Cameron Maybin (6) have been OK, but great disappointments based on their expectations. Same with Daisuke Matzuzaka (1), Phil Hughes (4) and Homer Bailey (5) on the pitching side. The other two we haven’t covered? Brandon Wood (8) and Andrew Miller (10). Ouch. It goes on further down the list. How about Reid Brignac (17), Andy LaRoche (19), Mike Pelfrey (20), Fernando Martinez (22) or Adam Miller (23)? Those didn’t work out so well. So yes, maybe Wil Myers and Jose Fernandez do turn into superstars. But if you can get an ACTUAL superstar for the two of them, you’re putting yourself in a better long-term position.

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Before I get into my push towards contention in the 18-team league I began discussing in the previous post, I wanted to go back and discuss how I got the team ready to make the turn – as it’s now been long enough that it makes for an interesting perspective and, in most cases, for proper judgment. What I did not get into in the last piece was that the team I took over in early 2009 was the fourth place team in the league during the 2008 season, and I began my ownership trying to keep the party going. Here were all the players on that roster which were at least 50% owned in CBS leagues at the end of the 2008 season:

Brian Roberts, Jimmy Rollins, Garrett Atkins, Jason Bay, Lance Berkman, Jermaine Dye, Torii Hunter, Mark Buehrle, Johnny Cueto, John Lackey, Braden Looper, Andy Pettitte, Adrian Beltre.

Don’t laugh – how quickly we forget. Garrett Atkins was coming off a .286-21-99 age-28 season. Jermaine Dye was coming off a .292-34-96-96 season. Jason Bay was on the Red Sox and putting up studly numbers (.286-31-101-111-10 in 2008) and so was Lance Berkman with the Astros. John Lackey was still the pre-Boston John Lackey and Jimmy Rollins was one season removed from his MVP. In fact, even the two players who look the best now (Beltre and Cueto) were among the worst of this group at the time. And this was only four years ago!

Today, we’re going to go chronologically through the 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons to see how I got to the point where I was ready to move toward contention in order for the last part of the series to be as instructive as possible.

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You’ll notice that as we get further and further into this series, the time associated with each of these stages expands. The first seven parts all will happen within the first few months of owning the team. Then we discussed more nebulous concepts like how to best approach the waiting game which comes naturally after the initial flurry of activity and how to make the most out of your league’s draft. Those steps are all very important to the process, but it’s just as important not to fall in love with this part of the process. I’ll elaborate on this a little more in the next section (since it’s more relevant).

All that we’ve done so far has been an effort to put our roster in the best position to have a window of contention. We haven’t won anything. We likely haven’t even come close. That is why you throughout the entire rebuilding process, you need to constantly have one eye on the horizon – or what I like to call, the turn.

The turn is the point where the roster you currently have moves from future contender to contender. It happens at a different speed for every team and it’s not something you can force. It’s something which has to come organically from the hard work that you’ve put in over the previous seasons. Also, it may happen either before or after your initially constructed time horizon. All it takes sometimes is a couple of prospects and free agents to hit in a way which was unexpected at the time you picked them up to necessitate a shift in your time horizon. It is extremely important that you analyze this timing correctly because if you make a run for it too early, you can risk destroying the window you worked so hard to create.

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