It's all tied together though. To quote an idiot, baseball is hard. Punting the future to open up a 3-year window is a bad strategy because things tend not to go as planned. Make your goal perpetual contention, and eventually things will go right. Reyes, Dickey, and Buehrle have performed as expected and earned their contracts, but you can't give up a significant amount of assets just to land expensive veterans who will merely be worth their contracts. That's bad business long term. and if things don't break just right in the 1-2 year window you open up, it's catastrophic.