One good thing about the end of Oakland's winning streak -- the Athletics can finally wash all those lucky socks, T-shirts and jockstraps they've been wearing since the streak began Aug. 13, more than three long weeks ago.

What an amazing, wonderful thing Oakland's 20-game winning streak was. And what remarkable timing. While the owners and players still were arguing over a labor contract, while Bud Selig and the owners maintained that baseball needed a sweeping new economic system to improve competitive balance, one of those poor, beleaguered low-revenue teams soared into first place with the second-longest winning streak in modern history.

	Oakland's success is also further proof that it makes far more sense to invest your money in an entire team than to tie it all up in one player.

That's right, the second-longest winning streak. The record is 21 games, set by the 1935 Chicago Cubs, not 26 games by the 1916 Giants. The Giants did not win 26 games in a row. They won 12 games, tied a game, then won 14 more. No matter what Elias says, that's not a 26-game winning streak, that's a 27-game non-losing streak. As long as the statistics from that tie game counted -- and they did -- there is no way you can consider it anything but an interruption to the winning streak. I'm guessing that the only reason the 26-game mark stood unchallenged as the record was because no team had ever come close enough to make it an issue.

But Oakland did, and by doing so the Athletics not only brought the 1916 mark into question, they offered an almost complete repudiation to the frequent claim that low-revenue teams don't have a chance to compete in this day and age.

The A's again have one of the lowest payrolls in the majors, but their success is no aberration, no matter what the commissioner claims. Oakland has contended four consecutive seasons, will reach the playoffs three consecutive seasons and has a chance to win 100 games in two consecutive seasons. When the Yankees and Braves do that, everyone whines that the richest teams are simply buying themselves pennants. So why is it an aberration when the A's do it?

Or, for that matter, when the Twins do it? Bud and the owners tried to bury the Twins alive last winter but they are the only team that's been able to beat Oakland in almost a month and they are moving ever closer to the AL Central title.

If you're scoring at home, that's two of baseball's bottom feeders, both mentioned often during that contraction nonsense, currently representing one-third of the game's first-place teams. And yet you still hear people moan that low-revenue teams enter each season without any hope whatsoever. (Oddly, these often are the same people who say baseball needs to be more like the NBA, where the Lakers and Bulls have dominated the game for more than a decade at the expense of everyone else.)

Oakland's success is also further proof that it makes far more sense to invest your money in an entire team than to tie it all up in one player. The Mariners let Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez go in consecutive years and reached the postseason each season while the teams that acquired those players (and their suffocating contracts) did not. Meanwhile, the Athletics said farewell to Jason Giambi, one of the game's best hitters, and haven't missed a beat this season. That isn't an aberration, either. That's evidence that despite $252 million contracts, baseball still is a game of nine players in the lineup (10 if you include the DH) and 25 players on a roster.

That sort of management success should be celebrated, not written off as an aberration. And now that the owners finally have a new contract with the players in place, we can only hope that they stop running down baseball long enough to embrace teams like Oakland and Minnesota, who provide not just hope, but important lessons, for everyone else.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at cuffscaple@hotmail.com.