Well, if McLeod was in any way responsible for dishing out $60 million per to the trio of Heyward, Lackey, and Zobrist (which is more than half the Braves' payroll), we might want to give it a second thought. I enjoy statistical analysis and I think what some of the more stat-minded posters bring to the board is valuable, but when it comes to running a baseball team, there has to be baseball guys in the mix as well. And I'm sick of the effin' Cubs/Red Sox comparisons. Huge payroll teams. Cubs stunk it up for five or six seasons, but they drafted well and built up a solid minor league system that they leveraged into key parts for the big club. Sounds like what Cox/Snyder built for the Braves in the late-1980s to fuel our run in the 1990s. Good drafting and signing and key free agent additions that came the courtesy of having a fat wallet. Cubs and Red Sox have done it more by concentrating on hitting over pitching and that is a solid approach as the game has changed over the past two decades (as Enscheff has pointed out). Cubs' young core will all be hitting their arbitration years and Cubs will have the financial resources to keep them together.
I think the tale of Jackson Melian needs to be told to help illuminate the international market issue. Melian was a highly-sought after prospect from Latin America in the mid-1990s. Then-Braves' Latin America superscout Carlos Rios had him pretty much locked up for the Braves as a 15-year-old. No formal handshake, but Melian's father was a part-time scout for the Braves and Rios had been all over Melian for years. But (doing my best Gomer Pyle) "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!" Yankees give Rios a big raise to work for them and Melian ends up signing with the Yankees. Yankees get punished? Heck no.
The Latin American baseball market is rife with the things the Braves are being accused of doing (and have probably done). Families get all kinds of goodies. Somehow, fathers become part-time scouts (as in Melian's case). These players don't have agents, but they do have handlers and those guys' palms get greased. Like someone pointed out earlier in the thread, it's not unlike college football recruiting with the big difference being many of these kids from Latin America are coming from dirt-poor circumstances and this is their only way out.