As winter traditions go, it was as regular as the rest. Christmas cards. An overhyped Super Bowl. And the Angels' farm system getting ranked as one of the worst in baseball.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Angels' demise, thanks to this weak player-development operation: One, they reached the World Series -- trouncing the ever-beloved Yankees and Twins to get there -- and two, they did it with substantially homegrown players, products of a farm system that should get some retroactive respect.

	Garret Anderson was drafted by the Angels in the fourth round of the 1990 draft.

It's amazing to note that not one Angel on the postseason roster was signed as a conventional major league free agent. (Scott Spiezio was cut loose early by Oakland by not being offered a contract.) Almost every player was either drafted high, signed out of the Caribbean or acquired by the organization through trades or waivers. While the Twins were built primarily through low draft picks, the A's by first-rounders and fill-in trades, and the Yankees by spending big on the free-agent and international markets, the Angels did it mostly through an oft-maligned player-development operation that is getting the last laugh.

The heart of the batting order (Darin Erstad, Tim Salmon, Garret Anderson, Troy Glaus) all was originally drafted and developed by the organization. So too were three of their four top starters (Jarrod Washburn, Ramon Ortiz, John Lackey), closer (Troy Percival) and two key set-up men (Francisco Rodriguez, Scott Schoeneweis). Shortstop David Eckstein, as well as reliever Brendan Donnelly and DH Shawn Wooten, were tossed aside by other organizations and apprenticed in the Anaheim minor-league system before moving up to the big-league club.

Catcher Bengie Molina came through the organization as well, and both second baseman Adam Kennedy and DH Brad Fullmer were first-generation trades -- they were acquired for original Angels products, Jim Edmonds and Brian Cooper, respectively.

Edmonds, along with Anderson, was a frequent face on Top 10 Prospects lists that got few positive reviews in the early 1990s. I actually compiled one of them for Baseball America, before the 1994 season, and while Anderson (No. 2) and Edmonds (No. 9) both were featured -- Brian Anderson was No. 1 -- the overall assessment of the organization, as rated by most objective player-development onlookers, was quite negative. And to be fair, the Angels' trail to the World Series is strewn with an alarming number of DeShawn Warrens, McKay Christensens and Andrew Lorraines, prospects who flamed out horribly; the system has rarely been particularly deep.

But in the end the Angels have developed more than their share of frontline players. One way to measure this improvement is to look at just how many Win Shares -- Bill James' rating system that boils down players' hitting, pitching and fielding contributions into one number -- the organization has produced compared to other clubs.

Before this season began, the Angels stood 12th among the 30 teams by producing 1,668 career Win Shares. While many of these belong to a few notables now with other organizations (Chuck Finley, Edmonds), Anaheim still deserves credit for having developed them.

But most belong to the engine of their current club. And they're not aging veterans at the end of the line, but players either in their prime (Anderson, Percival) or on the ascent (Washburn, Lackey, Rodriguez). Their values were so high this season, and should be high enough in the next several years, to soon push the Angels into the top 10 in terms of having produced big-league talent. This surely brings a big, I-told-you-so smile to the face of Bob Fontaine Jr., now director of player development for the White Sox, who signed almost all of these players while serving as the Angels' scouting director from 1986-99.

The Angels have been pretty good recently at knowing more than people think. Remember, this is a club that after three weeks this season stood 6-14, in part due to injuries. But rather than make a bunch of moves -- which is what GM Billy Beane chose to do, successfully, up in Oakland -- they maintained confidence in the roster they had built. The Angels went 19-7 in May and finished with a 36-20 flourish as the Mariners collapsed, earning the wild card with a franchise-record 99 victories.

"We talked about it a little bit," general manager Bill Stoneman said of tinkering with the roster early on, "but what we said is the bottom line is that we have good players getting off to a flat start. Common sense says this stuff is going to correct out." Added manager Mike Scioscia, "It was very explainable."

Now that the doomsayers have been proven wrong, this team's success has become explainable, too. And the best explanation is that the Angels, no matter what people have said for more than 10 years, have developed some of the best talent in the big leagues. Whether we noticed or not.

Alan Schwarz is the Senior Writer of Baseball America magazine and a regular contributor to ESPN.com.