My take is that a team has a certain amount of money it's going to spend on baseball players. A GM that believes in the farm system will fight for the money to do it right, even if it means taking a few million off the big club's payroll. I never heard that Bowden did that; he wanted every dollar he could get for the big club and more besides. That doesn't make him a bad GM, necessarily, it was just one more indicator of an organization-wide lack of understanding of how to win as a lower-revenue team.