When I encountered a fellow I know the other day, a baseball fan, I expected him to begin complaining about the Chicago Cubs, the team with which he grew up as a Chicago native. He has since moved elsewhere, out of the country, in fact, but he has taken his roots with him.

His love for baseball, that is, not for the Cubs. I quickly learned that he has forsaken the Cubs and now roots for the Cleveland Indians, the team from his wife’s home town.

“What happened to the Cubs?” I asked him.

“They don’t want to win,” he responded. “They don’t spend any money.”

The Cubs have finished in fifth place this season for the fifth consecutive season, averaging 69 wins and 93 losses per year.

My friend was right. The Cubs have stopped spending money. Their payroll this season was $89 million, their lowest since 2005, four years before the Ricketts family bought the Cubs from the Tribune Company.

The Ricketts eagerly and expensively recruited Theo Epstein to run their baseball operation at the end of the 2011 season, and three years later they continue to wait for results.

Having no interest in defending the Cubs and Epstein, I nevertheless understand their reluctance to add millions to a payroll that still couldn’t produce a winner. The Cubs figure that they will spend money when their good young prospects are ready for the majors.

Cubs’ fans, however, have reason to be skeptical of that strategy. Those plans fail at least as often as they succeed.

By slashing their payrolls from the $140 million level they had reached 2009-11, the Cubs avoid the wasteful spending other last-place teams experienced this season. It’s pretty remarkable how much teams can spend on players who are no better collectively than a last-place team.

Usually we look at the payroll standings to see how well low-paying teams fared, and we will do that. But first the last-place teams, the ones that spent so much to gain so little:

The New York Yankees, with their season-opening $204 million payroll, second highest in the majors, didn’t qualify for that group because they’re not finishing last, but they have the biggest payroll among the teams that failed to get to October baseball. In two successive seasons, the Yankees have spent $441 million with no post-season games to show for it.

How is that possible? Are the Yankees’ players so bad that they can’t win 85 games a year, or are the people picking the players so bad that they can’t find players who can win 85 games a year? A two-year total of $441 million?

Yet Hal Steinbrenner sticks to his anti-George position of not firing anyone, presumably determined to show he is not his father’s son. Hal, however, is too young to remember the start of the Yankees’ extended demise in 1965 (think of Horace Clarke, Jerry Kenney and Rich McKinney), and the Yankees could be facing a repeat of that period.

They certainly seem to be closer to that kind of period than they are to using their hefty payroll to return to October.

Of the 10 teams beginning the playoffs this week, five are among the top payrolls, three rank between 10 and 20 and two are in the bottom 10:

GIVE THAT MAN HIS BONUS

If the Minnesota Twins do not give Phil Hughes the $500,000 bonus he passed up by not pitching in the makeup of a rained out game he was supposed to start last week, they will not be the Twins I have come to know and admire.

In passing up the opportunity to pitch – he needed only a third of an inning to secure the bonus – Hughes was following the class act named Terry Ryan, the team’s general manager, who is recovering from squamous cell carcinoma.

In 2002, when Major League Baseball was discussing the possible contraction of the Twins and the Montreal Expos, Ryan, the Twins’ general manager, was invited to interview for the same job with other teams. He declined the offers, saying he owed it to his Minnesota employees to stay, in effect, with the ship until it went down if it was going to go down.

The Twins survived because, as it turned out, the threat of contraction was only a Bud Selig ploy in labor negotiations with the players. Nevertheless, Ryan didn’t know it was a ploy and genuinely opted to stay with his aides rather than jump ship for his own selfish purposes, probably the classiest act I have ever seen by a baseball executive.

That brings me back to Hughes, the Twins’ pitcher, who has restored his career after befouling it in seven seasons with the Yankees,

Hughes, who has a 16-10 record and a 3.52 earned run average, had already earned a pair of $250,000 bonuses on top of his $8 million base salary for pitching 180 and 195 innings. Another third of an inning to get to 210 would have meant an additional $500,000 bonus.

Hughes, however, encountered a rain delay and left one out short of his bonus. Manager Ron Gardenhire offered him another start, which he declined.

“I just didn’t think it was right,” Hughes told reporters. “If I were fighting for a playoff spot, I’d 100 percent be available. But given the circumstances, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.

“I owe too much to this organization for the next two years to risk getting hurt for an incentive. For whatever reason it wasn’t meant to be. There’s a lot bigger problems out there. I’m proud of my season.”

In his 209 2/3 innings, the 28-year-old right-hander struck out 186 and walked 16, a remarkable strikeout-to-walk-ratio of 11.6 to 1.

The Twins don’t readily toss money around, but if they keep in character I feel they will give Hughes the bonus.

DAVE STEWART IT IS IN ARIZONA

In a move that was clearly visible on the horizon to anyone who was paying attention, the Arizona Diamondbacks have named Dave Stewart their new general manager.

Former player, coach, executive and player agent, Stewart finally has the job he wanted when the Toronto Blue Jays snubbed him in 2001 and sent him into the agent business.

He was the Blue Jays’ assistant general manager at the time so he knows his way around a baseball front office, but I wonder if his new front office will become a little crowded.

Tony La Russa, the Hall of Fame manager, is there as chief of baseball operations and was primarily responsible for the hiring of his four-time 20-game winner.

With Stewart, La Russa hired De Jon Watson, who was the Los Angeles Dodgers’ vice president of player development. With the Diamondbacks, he will be senior vice president of baseball operations. Singlehandedly, La Russa gave baseball’s lagging minority hiring practices a double jolt.

Not to be overlooked is Kevin Towers, whom La Russa fired as Arizona general manager but offered to retain him in the organization. Stewart, who worked under Towers in San Diego, said Towers has earned the right to be as involved as much or as little as he wants to be. Towers has not clearly indicated what that would be.

Given the Diamondbacks’ disastrous season – they had the majors’ worst record with the only winning percentage under .400 – they could use a lot of help, but when is a lot of help too much help?

They might need road signs in the Phoenix office to keep everyone from running into each other, beginning with their hiring of a new manager in the next few weeks.

FOOLISHLY FIXING FELIX’S E.R.A.

Major League Baseball officials just can’t keep their big noses out of events that occur on the field. Commissioner Bud Selig is obsessed with his legacy, and he apparently thinks that everything he does contributes to that legacy. There is such a thing, however, as going too far.

I recently wrote here that too much that affects games happens off the field, where fans don’t have visual access. The most obvious development there is instant replay. Hundreds of plays have been reviewed in a Manhattan office, far away from the sites where the plays occurred, and many have been reversed – safe to out, out to safe, double to home run, home run to double.

Those plays, however, are not the only ones reviewed. Umpires review those calls. Joe Torre, the executive vice president of baseball operations, reviews officials’ calls.

Torre may do a great job at his task. However, fans and reporters have no way of knowing. He does his job in secret, and his decisions are seldom disclosed. They are kept secret.

Don’t ask me why. I don’t know, and no one has been willing to tell me. If members of the Baseball Writers Association were still serving as official scorers, as they did for many, many years, this ridiculous system would not be in effect.

Newspapers, though, ordered their reporters to cease scoring because it was a conflict of interest. It only took editors decades to figure that out (MLB was paying the reporters who covered it to be scorers), which gives you some understanding why newspapers are dying.

Now MLB recruits anyone who knows balls from strikes to serve as scorers, and their decisions are subject to review by Torre upon request from clubs or player agent via the union.

Official scoring calls do not determine the outcome of games so they don’t have the effect of umpires’ rulings on replays. However, they do have an effect on players. If Torre changes a call from an error to a hit or a hit to an error, it affects the pitcher’s earned run average or the batter’s batting average, maybe his runs batted in, too.

Here’s a recent example, which has triggered this rage. The headline told the story:

Scoring change gives Hernandez shot at ERA title

Upon request from the Seattle Mariners’ public relations department, Torre changed a hit to an error against Felix Hernandez, the team’s ace pitcher, and the change resulted in four earned runs that had been charged to Hernandez becoming unearned.

Now do you think the Mariners’ public relations department had a vested interest in getting Hernandez’s earned run average lowered? With Torre’s ruling, it dropped from 2.34 to 2.18, a smidge behind 2.17 for Chris Sale of the Chicago White Sox for the American League e.r.a. title. Sale was finished for the season while Hernandez was scheduled to start on the last day of the season.

Lloyd McClendon, the Mariners’ manager, who supported Torre’s decision – there’s another surprise – now had it within his grasp to get Hernandez the e.r.a. title. If the pitcher got five outs without giving up an earned run, McClendon could remove him from the game.

Hernandez would have a 2.169 e.r.a., Sale 2.172.

But not so fast. There was a major hitch in that plan. The Mariners needed to beat the Angels to have a chance for the A.L. wild card over Oakland, and the Mariners’ game was scheduled to start an hour after the A’s game at Texas. In other words, Hernandez was on his own, and his manager was looking for him to shut out the Angels anyway just in case Oakland lost.

Meanwhile, back on the scoring subject, if MLB feels a need to have a capacity to review scorers’ decision, name a committee of three veteran scorers or retired writers who had served as scorers and let them view the replays of the plays in question.

That might not be ideal, but it would keep the decisions in the hands of scorers and not MLB officials, especially former players, who might view plays differently from scorers.

When the Atlanta Braves fired Frank Wren as their general manager Monday, John Schuerholz invoked the term “the Braves’ way.” In 14 years of writing about the Braves’ unprecedented run of consecutive division championships, with Schuerholz as general manager and Bobby Cox as manager, I never heard about “the Braves’ way.”

Whether or not the term was used, though, there was at least an unspoken or unwritten Braves way of constructing and maintaining a championship-caliber team. No one can produce an unparalleled perennial winner without having a system.

The New York Yankees have a system. It is signified not by words but by a symbol: $

Add another $ and then another $ and a few more $$$$$, and there you have the Yankees’ way of planning for the post-season. Sometimes it works, most seasons it doesn’t.

As I write this, the Yankees are on the verge of missing the playoffs for the second straight season, the first time for back-to-back misses since 1992-93.

Unlike the Braves, however, the Yankees don’t appear to be prepared to do anything about their failures. Mark Newman, who has run the team’s mostly unproductive farm system for a quarter of a century, has disclosed his plans to retire, but his departure is long overdue.

General manager Brian Cashman has ignored Newman’s poor draft selections and player development. For that oversight alone, Cashman should be excused from further duty as the Yankees’ general manager, but he will almost certainly be offered a new contract shortly after the season.

Unlike his father, who fired two managers before their seasons were 20 games old, Hal Steinbrenner, George’s successor as managing partner, seems to have little desire to fire people. He has a much greater tolerance for losing than his father did.

With his relative inexperience in baseball, Hal might want to study the history of John Schuerholz. Given that the Braves began winning division titles the year Schuerholz became their general manager and stopped winning them a couple of years after he was elevated to club president, maybe the term “the Braves’ way” should more aptly be the Schuerholz way.

Schuerholz rejected that suggestion, but with the Braves winning only one division title in Wren’s seven years as general manager, there might be something to that idea.

Schuerholz had a knack for shuffling the Braves’ roster each winter, adding and subtracting a player or two, and turning the new players over to Cox, who worked them seamlessly into the clubhouse.

Wren’s additions didn’t work out as well as his predecessor’s did:

• He signed Derek Lowe in January 2009 to a four-year, $60 million contract.

• He acquired second baseman Dan Uggla from the Marlins in November 2010 and signed him two months later to a 5-year, $62 million contract extension.

• He signed free agent outfielder B.J. Upton in November 2012 for 5 years and $75.25 million.

Lowe gained 31 victories in his first two seasons with the Braves but had a 9-17 record his third season and was traded to the Cleveland Indians, who released him before the end of the next season.

Uggla didn’t complete four seasons of his five-year contract, batting .209 for the Braves, only .161 before they released him July 20. He subsequently played four games for San Francisco, failing to get a hit in 11 at-bats before the Giants released him.

Upton remains with the Braves, earning his average salary of $15 million a season while hitting .184 last season and .207 this.

Has the Braves’ way slipped the last few years, Cox was asked at the Braves’ news conference Monday?

“Yeah, a little bit,” said the Hall of Fame manager, who was the team’s general manager when the Braves adopted their way in the late 1980s.

“I wouldn’t say it’s missing,” Schuerholz said. “I’d say it has to be reinvigorated. That’s what we intend to do.

“Bobby Cox and I lived the Braves’ way for 17 years,” he added.

“It is our emphasis to find the Braves’ way again.”

The next day, in a telephone conversation, Schuerholz explained the Braves’ way.

“It’s not all new,” he said when I asked if it was new because I hadn’t heard the term previously. “The Braves’ way started prior to my arriving in Atlanta, when Bobby was general manager. They committed to scouting and player development and they were very successful in drafting.

“I came here having had the Orioles’ way, which Lou Gorman and I took to Kansas City. When I got hired it was easy to marry myself into the Braves’ way because it was what I started with in Baltimore. In fact, it was like home to me. It’s an overall notion that covers the whole baseball prism.”

The Braves and the Orioles are not the only teams that employ standard instructional methods throughout their organizations. Not all teams employ the practice, though it makes sense for all of them to do it.

“It’s all the things you feel you need to have winning players,” said Schuerholz, the club president the past seven years. “Put them in the hands of people who can create players whom you know well and you are confident have the character and you can rely on to have your organization grow better.”

Wren worked in the Braves’ organization for 15 years so it wasn’t a matter of his not knowing the system.

“I don’t think we had gotten away from it,” Schuerholz said, “but I felt it wasn’t operating the way it was constructed to operate to develop home-grown players. The best thing is to have your own pipeline of players. Each organization has an idea of what they want to do to develop players. I wanted it refocused on that and we intend to do that.”

The Yankees, of course, don’t have a pipeline of players. Their pipeline is clogged with dollar bills. It has been empty of players since Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter came gushing out in the first half of the 1990s.

The Yankees don’t use the words scouting and player development. Their vocabulary begins and ends with the words free agents.

“My desire is to see to it that that aspect of our organization is as strong as it could be,” Schuerholz said. “That helped me to make my decision. We feel like we’re doing the right thing here. That’s our plan. Part of my decision-making was to heighten, enliven and recapture in the best possible way the Braves’ way. Scouting and player development is the lifeblood of any major league organization.”

The Baltimore Orioles are American League East champions for the first time since 1997, and that’s not all they have accomplished under Dan Duquette, their chief baseball executive.

In his three years in that position – don’t dare call him general manager because the team’s principal owner, Peter Angelos detests that title and becomes irate if anyone uses it in relation to the Orioles but more about that later – Duquette has headed the once glorious but fallen Orioles back toward their many years of glory.

The Orioles have attained winning records in each of Duquette’s three seasons. The franchise had gone through eight – excuse the expression – general managers since the last time it had three full seasons with more wins than losses. The Orioles didn’t even achieve a three-year winning streak in the three-year term of Hall of Famer Pat Gillick.

Angelos, who won the Orioles in a 1993 bankruptcy auction, has gone through nine general manager types, one before Gillick and six more between Gillick and Duquette.

The last general manager to oversee three consecutive winning 162-game seasons was Hank Peters, who attained that distinction in the first half of the ‘80s. Roland Hemond, Gillick, Frank Wren, Syd Thrift, Jim Beattie, Mike Flanagan, Jim Duquette (Dan’s cousin) and Andy MacPhail had their chances and failed.

Dan Duquette, known in baseball circles as Duke, has achieved another Angelos-era distinction – peaceful co-existence with the owner. For example, even though the Orioles won a division title under Gillick in 1997, he left after he completed his contract a year later, having had his fill of Angelos interference.

MacPhail served as president of baseball operations with an advantage over his predecessors, Having held a similar position with the Chicago Cubs, MacPhail had served with Angelos on management’s labor committee for the 2006 collective bargaining agreement negotiations.

As friendly as their relationship might have become, MacPhail left the Orioles after the 2011 season when his contract expired. A month later Duquette was hired, ending his involuntary 11-year hiatus from Major League Baseball.

“From ‘66 to ‘83 the Orioles were the winningest organization in the majors,” Duquette said, responding to my comment about the Orioles once having the best organization. “We’ve been able to reclaim our place with the old Orioles teams. The resilience of the players and their attitude to do what it takes to win games are responsible.”

So are manager Buck Showalter and Duquette.

“We figured you need 92 wins to make the playoffs; we were fortunate to accomplish that,” Duquette said last week after the Orioles eliminated the Yankees and the Blue Jays, then proceeded to gain victory No. 92 and raise their total to 93 at week’s end. One more victory will top the Orioles’ total of 93 wins in Duquette’s first year.

Not that Duquette felt he had to prove anything to anybody or that he would admit if he did, his success with the Orioles has to be seriously rewarding, given the treatment he received in his 11 years out of the majors. The only professional baseball job he had in that time was as player development director of the fledging Israel Baseball League, which lasted a single year.

Before his extended vacation while he was in his 40s, Duquette was an accomplished general manager with Montreal and Boston. In his three years with the Expos, they had a .584 winning percentage, which translates to 94 victories in a season.

When the John Henry-led ownership dismissed him in late 2001, he left the Red Sox with a well-stocked team that had won three division titles and would win the 2004 World Series.

With three World Series titles in the last decade, the Red Sox can’t be faulted for firing Duquette, but where were other teams looking when they sought new general managers? If Duquette harbors any ill feeling about being shunned for more than a decade, he keeps them to himself and lets the Orioles’ success speak for him.

“People said we didn’t have enough pitching, but it’s the best since 1979,” Duquette said. “Our starting pitching has been doing well since June 1.”

Elias Sports Bureau found that Duquette knew his stuff:

• Pre-June 1  Starting Pitchers:  18-20, 4.49 e.r.a.     Team: 27-27, 3^rd place, 4 ½ games behind
• Post-June 1  Starting Pitchers:  47-21, 3.15 e.r.a.     Team: 66-34, 1^st place, 14 games ahead

For the season, the starters have these records (through Saturday):

• Wei-Yin Chen             16-4     3.58 era
• Bud Norris                  14-8     3.62 era
• Chris Tillman               13-5     3.26 era
• Miguel Gonzalez           9-8     3.28 era
• Kevin Gausman            7-7     3.57 era

The Orioles have more than pitching.

“We’ve played pretty good defense the last few years,” Duquette said. This season, he added, “We had some players step up and do good things for the team when they had the opportunity.”

Players have had opportunities because the Orioles have had three starting players suffer serious setbacks. Catcher Matt Wieters went out May 11 with an elbow injury that required a ligament transplant, third baseman Manny Machado has been on the disabled list three times and Chris Davis, first baseman, one of the team’s premier sluggers, was suspended Sept. 12 for use of a banned substance, forcing him to miss the last 17 games of the season and the first eight games of the playoffs.

The primary replacements have been Steve Pearce at first base for Davis and Caleb Joseph, promoted from the minors, and Nick Hundley, acquired from San Diego, for Wieters.

Nelson Cruz wasn’t a replacement this season but a Duquette addition and what an addition he has been. The Orioles signed Cruz, as a free agent at the start of spring training when other clubs were reluctant to offer an expensive contract to a player who was suspended for the last 50 games of last season for a performance-enhancing drug violation.

The Texas Rangers, for whom Cruz had played for six and a half years, made a $14.1 million qualifying offer to him, but he rejected it, most likely thinking he could get a multi-year contract. But it wasn’t offered, and he signed a one-year contract with the Orioles Feb. 22 for $8 million.

Cruz, who turned 34 in July, has proved he didn’t need steroids to hit home runs and drive in runs. He has rewarded Duquette’s willingness to gamble millions by slugging a league-leading 39 home runs and driving in a second-best 105 runs.

Cruz has teamed with Adam Jones (27 homers and 91 r.b.i.) and Davis (26, 72) in giving the Orioles a potent trio of sluggers even though Davis’ strikeout total (173) was almost as high as his batting average (.196). Only three strikeouts behind the Angels’ Mike Trout, Davis would have the strikeout title clinched were it not for his suspension.)

Jones, meanwhile, has added an intangible element to his contribution to the Orioles’ march to the World Series.

“Jones has taken a leadership role,” Duquette said of the 29-year-old center fielder.

As good, though, as Jones and Cruz and some of the other Orioles have been in returning the Orioles to championship status, Duquette’s current collection has some considerable playing distance to travel before moving into the territory populated by the Robinsons, Frank and Brooks; Boog Powell, Mark Belanger, Paul Blair, Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar and others.

Those guys could always be counted on to guarantee an annual October visit to the Herb Armstrong room at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium for pre-postseason game desserts.

MARRIED TO GEORGIA, LIKENED TO GEORGE

I’m certain Georgia Angelos could provide a more comprehensive list of things her husband, Peter, the principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, doesn’t like, but I offer here the start of a list. If Mrs. Angelos would care to add to it, I would be happy to do just that.

I’ll start with the simplest. Angelos has never liked being likened to George Steinbrenner. Now that the late owner of the New York Yankees is no longer with us, I’m sure Angelos would like it even less.

But when Steinbrenner was chipper and running the Yankees and I or anyone made the comparison, which was so obvious it couldn’t be ignored, Angelos would bristle or do worse.

One way in which they were not alike was their view of the title general manager. Angelos didn’t like it, hated it, in fact. Steinbrenner had no problem with it. How could he? He was always talking about “firing my general manager.”

I don’t recall Angelos explaining his disdain for the title. It’s possible that he merely felt it was outmoded, but his reaction was too strong when anyone used the term for the explanation to be that simple.

I recall once when he was looking for a new … and the reporter used the term, he became outraged. At least he doesn’t have to look for one now. He should be pleased that he has a good one and resolve to keep Dan Duquette for a long time.

One final thing I know Angelos doesn’t like. He doesn’t like his general managers, or whatever they are, signing players without having them take comprehensive physicals. It is routine now for players to have to pass physicals before signings are official.

Angelos once fired a general manager for not making sure a pitcher was free of injury before signing him. The Orioles’ doctor said the pitcher had a shoulder problem, and Angelos cancelled the contract and fired the general manager.

In that instance, Angelos was saluted by his colleagues for taking responsible action.