The Los Angeles Dodgers spend a lot of money and the accusation has been flung around that they want to just buy a World Series title. But no sense going through life with one hand tied behind your back: the Dodgers are serious about building from within too. To wit: Keith Law of ESPN is reporting that they just hired Roy Clark away from the Washington Nationals.

Clark has been a Nationals assistant GM and v.p. of player personnel for the past four years. Before that he was the Braves longtime scouting director. He joined the Braves when they were a laughingstock in the late 80s and helped build arguably the best pipeline of talent in all of baseball over the course of 20 years. When he joined the Nationals at the end of the 2009 season they were thought of as a laughingstock too. They are no longer.

It’s hard to tell from afar how much input any one person has on the player development process, but Clark has been at the scene of a couple of pretty great turnarounds, and his eye for talent is considered among the best in the game. The Dodgers just hired themselves a good one.