It doesn’t matter where in the country you live: If you drive at all, you know this spot. Somewhere along the highway system in your state, there is a section of road that is always under construction. All year long, year after year, the orange signs are out and some guy in a hard hat is jackhammering away on the asphalt. Maybe it’s a make-work project, or an unsubtle form of graft. It might be that whatever the town is trying to fix can never be found, or breaks again as soon as it is fixed. The only sure thing is that the rebuilding never ends. The Baltimore Orioles, who are playing the Yankees again this week, are like this.

Sometimes changing a team’s fortunes is a question of mind over matter, such as deciding to cut out pasta and jelly doughnuts to drop a few pounds before beach season. For years, the Yankees and the Orioles have had in common strong and involved owners with a fetish for expensive veterans (although the Yankees have done a better job of picking which expensive veterans to sign). More recently, after 30 years of “No Youngsters Need Apply,” the Yankees seemed to have come to a realization of sorts: With the pool of free agent pitching being perennially small, you have a very good chance of playing the slot machine and having Carl Pavano fall out. When a strategy of team building can not only cost you millions but also wreck your season and cost you millions more, there is no benefit.

The Yankees had treated the draft like an afterthought for decades. During the Steinbrenner era, they’ve given away far more first-round draft picks in the form of free agent compensation than they’ve kept. When they did keep them and made a pick, it is no exaggeration to say that the Yankees were the worst drafting team in baseball. Each year, there is a small pool of top talents in the draft. Even picking within that group, the Yankees almost always missed. Picks from the last 10 years included outfielder Andy Brown, pitcher David Walling, catcher David Parrish, and third baseman Eric Duncan. Today they are unknown Yankees, their names known only to their moms.

Since the 2004 draft, though, the Yankees have had a reversal of fortune. Perhaps struggling through a season with a rotation of Javier Vazquez, Jon Lieber, Kevin Brown, Jose Contreras, and an ineffective Mike Mussina drilled the lesson home even before Pavano. For the first time, the Yankees began using their financial superiority and greater tolerance for risk in the draft. But they also showed a greater ability to recognize just which players should be the recipients of Yankees largesse. The same increased acuity also manifested itself in their Latin American efforts.

This change of focus has resulted in the greatest surfeit of young pitching the Yankees have had in decades. Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain just scratch the surface of a rich system that also includes Ian Kennedy, Tyler Clippard, Alan Horne, and many more. The Yankees now have the option of staying away from the Carl Pavanos of the world, simultaneously freeing resources that will allow them to address their next great problem: an aging core of position players.

The Orioles have yet to have the same meeting with reality. In the years since 1997, when the team, under Davey Johnson, actually won the American League East, Orioles ownership has shown no ability to cope with the demands of rebuilding. Notice the keyword: ownership. Since Pat Gillick left after the 1998 season, the Orioles have changed general managers several times, leaving the owner, Peter Angelos, as the consistent factor in the team’s brain trust. Most recently, Andy MacPhail has been hired as president of baseball operations, a position that puts him in charge of incumbent front office head Mike Flanagan. Flanagan himself represents the remaining viable portion of the failed Flanagan-Jim Beattie duumvirate that ran the team from between 2003 and 2005.

Whatever the names attached to Angelos’s latest collection of empty suits, 2007 will almost certainly represent the team’s 10th straight losing season. But the solutions are not complicated. They’re the same as those embraced by the Yankees. The Orioles are an ancient team, with just a handful of homegrown players. They have proved that you cannot build a team with imported parts, yet their farm system remains one of the worst in baseball, with few up-and-coming stars. They consistently refuse to trade off aging veterans for prospects. Kevin Millar, Melvin Mora, and Jay Payton will not be part of the next great Orioles team, but they will die on the Inner Harbor.

The Orioles will spend the next couple of days enabling the Yankees’ pursuit of the Boston Red Sox, but if 10 years hasn’t dropped the scales from their eyes, it’s impossible to say what will. The Yankees had their Pavano moment of realization, but the Orioles have had dozens of them, from Kris Benson to Javy Lopez to Sammy Sosa. Attendance has plummeted. It might take 110 losses and being outdrawn by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for the Orioles to finally break their stubborn pursuit of mediocrity.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.