In Major League Baseball, as in other sports, unsuccessful teams like to copy successful teams, thinking if they do it the way of winners, they, too could become winners.

The Kansas City Royals have played in the last two World Series, winning one of them. Is any team prepared to copy the Royals? There are 29 teams that could do worse. Two of them are the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Although the Dodgers have won three consecutive division titles, they have not sniffed the World Series. The Yankees have reached the post-season only once in the last three years and then spent only one game there.

Both teams could benefit from a change in strategy. They have squandered a lot of money and fan loyalty in their impotent efforts.

While the Dodgers were spending $508 million and the Yankees $423 million on player payrolls the past two years, the Royals were paying their players $206 million.

To copy the Royals, the Dodgers and the Yankees would have to strip their payrolls and start over. The Yankees would also have to jettison their vastly overrated general manager, Brian Cashman, and find a general manager more adept at putting a roster together and not do it by throwing the Yankees’ millions at free agents.

Gene Michael, a former Yankees’ general manager, would be a good candidate for that job, which he has already done twice, but he is far too wise and too comfortable in his present scouting position to step into that quagmire.

Michael was the general manager when the Yankees had a productive minor league system. Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams are names you recognize from the Michael era.

The Cashman era, 18 years in duration, is noted only for farm system failure.

The Dodgers would have no need to bring in a new general manager; they did that a year ago, hiring Andrew Friedman at a ridiculously high price – $37.5 million for five years – and he has experience with low payrolls, having constructed a World Series team in Tampa Bay.

In his first year, Friedman did not strip the payroll to reduce it to a level with which he was more familiar. In fact, he increased his payroll from $235 million to $273 million, and the Dodgers did the same thing they did the previous year: win the division title and drop out of the post-season in the first round.

Unlike Cashman and his 18 years of practice, Friedman hasn’t had a whole lot of time to cast the Dodgers in his Tampa Bay image. No matter how much time he has, though, he is not about to become the Rays. Or the Royals, for that matter.

Cashman isn’t about to copy Dayton Moore either. The excuse Cashman, Friedman and other losing general managers would give is their teams would have to be as bad as the Royals were in the years leading up to Moore’s appointment as general manager.

Including the season Moore got the job – he was named May 30, 2006 – and his first full six seasons, the Royals slogged through 17 of 18 losing seasons. He didn’t execute the makeover overnight, but make over the Royals Moore did.

The losing general managers would tell you that Moore benefited from those bad teams because they enabled the Royals to pick early in the June draft and grab the best amateur players available. That excuse, however, is only partly valid. Moore and his staff have done a great job identifying inexpensive free agents worth signing and players worth trading for.

Three members of the Royals’ foundation were early picks, but left fielder Alex Gordon was an Allard Baird pick a year before Moore replaced Baird as general manager. In the 2007 and ’08 drafts, Moore selected third baseman Mike Moustakas and first baseman Eric Hosmer.

Having Gordon, Moustakas and Hosmer is a solid start, but those three players alone did not produce a World Series champion or runner-up. Taking this year alone, Moore did something that Cashman opted not to do. In the days before the non-waiver trading deadline, Moore acquired Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist. Cashman got Dustin Ackley.

Cueto, Cashman might have noticed, pitched a complete-game two-hitter in Game 2 of the World Series. Cashman refrained from making any deadline deals because he supposedly didn’t want to relinquish any of the Yankees’ top minor league prospects.

For years the words “top” and “prospects” didn’t go together where the Yankees were concerned. Perhaps it had been so long since the Yankees had any that Cashman didn’t know the smart thing to do with them and just decided not to do anything.

The Yankees could have used a pitcher or two for the final two months of the season, and some pretty good ones were available. The Yankees, though, passed. The Royals paid for Cueto, giving Cincinnati three young left-handed pitchers – Brandon Finnegan, Cody Reed and John Lamb.

One, two or all three may develop into winning major league pitchers, but the Royals don’t have to wait to find out. They have their World Series championship.

It would only be natural for Moore occasionally to check to see how Finnegan, Reed and Lamb are doing, but he’s not going to stay up nights worrying that they might be doing well and making the trade look bad. Nothing they do will make the trade look bad. Cueto pitched a complete- game two-hitter and the Royals won the World Series.

The Royals’ other starting pitchers in the World Series games were signed as free agents, none of the CC Sabathia contract variety.

Edinson Volquez, an eight-year major leaguer who signed last December, started Games 1 and 5 of the World Series. Yordano Ventura, signed as a non-drafted free agent in 2008, and Chris Young, signed last March as a free agent, each started one game.

The combined 2015 salaries of the four starters was $19,125,000. Sabathia’s salary this year was $23 million.

Salvador Perez, the Royals’ catcher, who was the World Series most valuable player, signed out of Venezuela in 2006 four months after Moore became general manager. Right fielder Alex Rios signed as a free agent last December.

Moore traded for shortstop Alcides Escobar and center fielder Lorenzo Cain in 2010, closer Wade Davis in 2012 and Cueto and second baseman Zobrist last July.

The Royals’ roster of acquisitions clearly reflects Moore’s talent for recruiting talented players at relatively low cost who can contribute to a championship team. They are not a championship team simply because they had losing teams and benefited with premium draft picks.

On the other hand, they seem to have fooled some people who profess to have expertise in the pre-season projection of how teams will fare.

In 2014, when the Royals won the American League wild card, they had an 89-73 record. Before this season PECOTA, a projection formula concocted by noted political statistical analyst Nate Silver and now owned by Baseball Prospectus, projected a 72-90 record. The Royals finished the season with a 95-67 record, the American League’s best.

The odds makers didn’t think much of Kansas City’s chances either. Before the season, Bovada of Las Vegas set the odds for Kansas City to win the World Series at 33-1. At those odds, the Royals were placed among several teams, including the Yankees and the Mets.