Management by Baseball

In Baseball (and all other endeavours), managers benefit from pattern-recognition, noting what works and what doesn't and generally avoiding repeating efforts that mimic or parallel past failures.

If you know the printer you send your four-color glossy work to and that does a great job of it is also always late with mediocre product when you send them a two-color job, it doesn't serve you well to send them your two-color work again. Though, volume discounts aside, it probably doesn't mean you should stop sending them the four-color jobs at which they excel. No big epiphany, that. We managers survive and thrive because we recognize patterns and act on 'em.

¿But what about innovation that breaks the (not unreasonable) expectations of standard operating procedure? Breaking standards is Innovation's norm (because if it was standard, it probably wouldn't be an innovation).

It's a very tough situation because if you always stick to standards, you cannot exceed standard performance except through luck, and management, as Branch Rickey once said, "Luck is the residue of design", that is, more often than not, luck seems to favor more coherent planners. And if you break standards all the time, you miss out on the highest upsides but also the worst crashes.

So it's with mixed leanings I read the New York Times' Alan Schwarz piece this morning on the AA reliever Pat Venditte, apparently pro baseball's only current switch-pitcher. Venditte labors for the Yankees' affiliate, Mike Veeck's Charleston River Dogs. And when you see that Veeck affiliation, if you haven't looked yet at Venditte's stats, you may think the 24-year-old is another brilliant but satirical Veeck promotion like Vasectomy Day or Enron Night, but you'd be off base.

Please note, against lefties he's allowing 5 baserunners in 10 innings (when allowing twice as many runners, 10, would be "very good") and striking out 19 in those 10 innings (when striking out only 10 would be "very good"). Against righties, he's allowing 18 runners in 18 innings, "very good", and striking out 19, "very good" plus a stitch. Feel free to ignore the E.R.A. ... as a reliever it's not particularly indicative. But the single home run allowed over his 28 innings is stingier than average.

He's worth paying attention to, but...

As Schwarz wrote:

The Yankees, whose bullpen is among the worst in the American League, have two arms in Class A ball leading the minor leagues in saves. The left-handed one has kept hitters to a .121 batting average; the right-handed one has not walked anyone in 20 innings. This would all be rather straightforward, except that both arms belong to the same body.

Pat Venditte, the only switch-pitcher in professional baseball, is one of the most dominant — and well-known — players in the minor leagues. National news organizations travel to Charleston, S.C., to revel in his uniqueness. Fans see his statistics and dream of matchup mayhem. But experienced talent evaluators see not just one underwhelming fastball, but two. Sorry, kid.

S.O.P. HATES PAT VENDITTE With stats like that, in an organization hungry for relief pitching, common sense tells you Pat Venditte would be getting groomed for a major league tryout, probably being advanced to AAA. Standard operating procedure, though, treasures a big fast ball, and Venditte simply doesn't have one he can produce with either arm.

As Schwarz wrote:

... other numbers loom larger: his age (he turns 24 in a few weeks, having spent four years at Creighton University) and those mediocre fastball readings. He is dominating much younger hitters with well-located stuff that probably will not survive as he moves higher.

If you have finesse but not overwhelming power , you have nothing to fall back on. You can learn finesse if your power fails, but if your finesse fails, you can't suddenly learn power (not intuitively obvious, but essentially true in the real world). So Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson can re-start a loss of power with a monster curveball or slider, respectively, when batters started being able to do a little something with any fastball they threw that wasn't their best. Jamie Moyer and Doug Davis don't have that affordance; if their control goes off a little bit, they have no alternative on which to fall back.

In general, prospects with middling fast balls crap out -- the failure proportion of finesse guys like Moyer is a lot higher than the failure proportion of power guys.

Of course, it's somewhat a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because S.O.P. says finesse guys are quicker to crash and burn if something goes wrong, the inevitable something-going-wrong activates the quicker management trigger finger that presumes the standard -- that dude has failed.

BEYOND BASEBALL This quick managerial trigger finger too often cuts short a successful experiment. Experiments are held to a much higher standard than everyday vanilla decisions are. And to a large degree, they should be.

If you make a different reasonable decision every day in response to repetitive identical issues and get comparable results, you're wasting cycles -- it's one of those events that probably doesn't offer much variance in outcomes. If you picked one approach that worked and just made it automatic, you save brain time you could apply to areas on which you could have more effect.

If you could make a decision that consistently outperformed others, even just a little, that is worth your while. But the risk in changing procedure tends to make S.O.P. lovers resist and push back when possible.

I did some pre-microcomputer era work for a retail book place that had two owners, and one just loved S.O.P. Once a year, they had to shut down on a work day during the Xmas rush to do inventory for a state inventory tax. They were just too busy and stores just a little too big to count all the stock and the value of each piece away from work hours. SInce I'd been a clerk in a pair of book stores before, I asked them to experiment beforehand with sampling shelves, picking every third row of the six-row shelves, and and changing the rows they counted each time they moved to the next shelf. We tested the sampling for six shelves against the counting-all-rows sums for each of them, and overall it was within 2%, with the worst difference for an individual shelf being 5%. If they implemented the inventory sampling, they would save about half their labor hours and cost, and be able to be open an extra day between Xmas and New Year's.

I was confident they would embrace this, and one owner did, but her partner would not. The partner had worked for a store that had gotten in trouble because they had fabricated, Bernie Madoff-style, an ersatz inventory and had been caught in an audit. Of course, the inventory tax audits were always samples themselves. But S.O.P. as defined by the tax authority dictated counting everything.

Her full-count approach was safe, but put a ceiling on their Xmas performance they wouldn't have had otherwise.

AND FURTHERMORE... Any experiment to try a sensible/possibly-rewarding innovation goes up in value as the number of competitors willing to follow you goes down (inversely proportional, as Joe Grzenda used to say). So a franchise willing to dedicate a few of their energy bars to refining the work of finesse pitchers, building up a coaching capability & technology and scout pattern recognition lessons (in differentiating the will-certainly-crap-out-at-the-next-level from the needs-only-to-learn-this-to-succeed-at-the-next-level), all optimised for that kind of talent, might find a dense nugget and a set of reproducable successes where competitors find only "a problem waiting to happen". Which y'all already know if you read Paul De Podesta. Again, if everyone sticks to standard operating procedure, you have competitive entropy, a Lucretian Dance of Random Chance, a Whole Lotta Aaron Sele Goin' On.

The chance to gain through innovation in blisteringly zero-sum arenas such as bookselling and Baseball argues the Yanks should be willing to try out Pat Venditte at AAA, and give him a chance against more selective and experienced batters to see what he can do. In my heart, I want them to; I find innovation exciting.

But still stored in my head are additional management reasons they probably shouldn't. In Part II, to follow, I'll lay out the management reasons that argue against taking the risk in Venditte's case.

From an anthropological perspective, one of the most amusing aspects of the American culture's marketing subculture is the idea that gender (in this case, male<--->female) makes for great marketing. In small, pre-industrial societies, the concept is very powerful. In large, diverse, cultures where the means of communication have been industrialized and work categories are less strictly gender-based, the differences (for marketing purposes) between males and females is blunted.

That hasn't stopped the publishing industry from pursuing the idea that almost any idea worth peddling is worth trying to squeeze into a category. Oh, yes, very few of my female friends would take a free subscription to Maxim (but not none of them); and few of my male friends would either. But both would agree Australian Handyman is the best-ever read. So books frequently get targeted by publishers for gender-specific audiences, and this trend gets enhanced by authors making pitches to publishers...because the authors realize the publishers will be more inclined to take a bite at their positioned pitch.

On the other hand, Baseball is wonderfully gender-neutral. Women constitute roughly 46% of game attendees, & that's the largest proportion of female fans for any of the big professional sports. (and for those of you who want to suggest, "well, it's still not half", I challenge you to discern the difference between 45% and 50% in eyeballing the crowd specifics at the next MLB game you attend). 

In spite of that, there are a matched set of gender-specific gender-directed Baseball books, and both are well worth reading by both women and men, if the underlying subject is of interest.

The new one is Parables from the Diamond, a devotional-without-calendar by preacher Phil Christopher & journalist Glenn Dromgoole, subtitled Meditations for Men on Baseball & Life. Each of the one-page essays has a title, a quotation, some reminder about a life issue and a thumbnail reminder. For example, "It Was 'Almost' a Home Run" or "A Broken Bat Still Has Value" reminds the reader that sometimes 'almost' is useless, and that once things pass from one state to another, they have value for different purposes.

The book is targeted to men, specifically, and Baptists in particular. Maybe the authors wanted it that way as part of their faith; maybe the publisher wanted it because they wanted the marketing boost or were ignorant about the broad span of women's interest in the sport. But almost all the insights have meditative value for women and men both, and for non-Baptists (like me) as much as anyone else. Because lessons in Baseball are so embedded in the intellectual and ethical/moral structures of most people in the baseball-mad countries of the Americas, tying back to Baseball for enlightening perspective has every bit as much value as non-faith based devotionals as tying Management lessons back to Baseball has for readers of this weblog.

I recommend the book, a gentle reminder of important life lessons I rarely write about, focusing on the Management, not Big Life Issues, insight Baseball has to offer. Of course, there are exceptions when I wax philosophic about Big Life Lessons.

Jackie Koney & Dierdre Silva finally published their mega-year, mega-publisher book, It Takes More Than Balls: The Savvy Girls' Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Baseball, designed to help other women get up to speed on the game's mechanics and history. I've met the authors at SABR meetings and ballpark events before, and their writing is engaging and smart. So why is it aimed at women, not people-in-general? Well, I suspect the gender-specifying lust of publishers is a part of it, but among men who don't know about baseball, how many of them will admit they need lessons or background? Sheet, there are male guys in SABR who need lessons but pretend they're experts.

Ergo, I heartily recommend Silva & Koney's book (or ballpark outings) for any novice you know who needs or wants to know more about the game; it's witty, informative and endorsed by Cal Ripken Jr. which is not something I can say about my own book.

Whether it takes balls or more than balls, there's always a marketing idea worth stretching. And if there's a worthwhile book or two behind it, well, that's magic. Because Baseball, Management and Life all take balls, and all take more than balls.

AND A MEMORIAL DAY THOUGHT...
...for you on this Memorial Day. A heart-rending memo (if yer in a rush, skip the prologue & scroll straight down to the memo) about the deprivations suffered by U.S. REMF troops in Iraq we all have to hope have been addressed forcefully. And it will help guide your own conduct towards the troops returning from Iraq who may be suffering from one or more of the problems delineated.

The prologue to today's horsehide struggle between the Cleveland Indians and Tampa Bay Rays, featured Rays manager Joe Maddon & his staff making a big, honking, impossible-to-hide error. Now, given that a manager in Baseball makes a couple of hundred decisions per game, it's never gonna happen that a manager will get through a whole game without making a less-than-optimal decision and beyond extraordinary when none of those decisions turn out to have been in error. Just as in your own management experience, most of these turn out to be negative but not catastophic decisions (think Pat Bööne's heavy metal album w/the leather-drenched cover of Guns 'n Roses' Paradise City).

But sometimes errors are not reversible and you have to live with them for a while. This is infuriating, especially the bureaucratic errors of protocol. So when the Rays handed the home plate umpire a line-up card for the day with both intended 3rd-baseman Ben Zöbrist designated as the 3rd baseman and Evan Longöria, the Rays' (most-days 3rd baseman but) intended DH for the day also designated as the 3rd baseman, there was a mandatory heck to pay once the first pitch of the game thrown with the error uncorrected.

The rule imposes the toll: The offending team loses its designated hitter for the day. The pitcher, Adny Sonnanstine, had to (gulp) hit for himself. The St. Petersburg Times' Marc Topkin reported it as it happened, with all the intrinsic confusion you normally get. And the blogosphere and my buddy Jon Wells (a remarkable guy...both entrepreneur/publisher/editor of Grand Salami, the independent Mariner magazine I wrote a column for & one of the unheralded rugby greats of his sub-generation) got their knickers in a twist because the managerial talent I've sometimes called a genius, Joe Maddon, had made an ugly error.

Worse, Sonnanstine had to bat third, a severe dis-optimization of a lineup. Oh, the rending of garments and hysteria...Oh, The Inhumanity.

¿So how did the Rays & Maddon proceed?

To kick axe, that's how. Because in business, as in Baseball, it doesn't pay to overblow the anxiety or fear or sadness when you've blown it.

As I write this, the game isn't over yet, but it looks like the Rays (up 7-3) have a fair chance of winning it. If they end up winning (or losing for that matter), I can bet you Joe Maddon will be self-deprecating and funny in his post-game confab gab n' chew with the press. And tomorrow will be another game, another chance to make an avoidable mistake.

And, btw, Sonnanstine, batting third, had an RBI double in the 4th inning, kinda par for the course for him, even without advance notice he was gonna hit for himself. Sonnanstine batted in two games in 2007, and in his first game, went 2-for-3 with an RBI. His first game as a batter in 2008, he went 2-for-3 with an RBI. Maybe he'll repeat today.

BEYOND BASEBALL
I do think these kinds of opportunities come up all the time in business and government. And to a significant degree, our success as managers hinges on how we handle these (inevitable) moments and how we keep the team involved & loose.

I've seen a sales team or two fold like a cheap Made in Red China By Slave Labor card table the last week of a quarter when it's been apparent they wouldn't make a quota-based bonus. Laying back a little is not always bad, if they use the time to gather up their forces to plan how they are going to succeed and get a little rest in, but in general, forging ahead and playing to win/succeed is usually least as good and frequently a lot better.

It's worth noting how often screw-ups happen even to the best managers. And it's well worth noting how some managers regularly come out of these with their cause intact, while others, perhaps equally-error avoidant, have such situations degenerate to bad final results.

Personally, I'm not sure of the reason, but I know Maddon is one of the good managers who seems to more often survive the Bartman moments. Until I'm sure, my inclination is that it's his relentless but mature attitude combined with his (and his organization's) team-building methods that accentuate how challenges are inevitable but are to be faced head on as a group. So when the management/coaching combine screwed up, the team came together to tighten the screws on what they could make a difference with, the game itself.

I believe that attitude and method would work just as well for you in your own endeavor. Put a little Maddon in your Methods.

The regularly insightful Doug Glanville usually casts new light on old subjects, and that's great. But his last op-ed for the New York Times actually uncovered a baseball technique I never ran across or read about (greater), though I've seen it a lot in business and the military. And why it seems to be overshadowed in this Moment of Manny Métier Meltdown is very illuminating about the state of our National Psyche.

But first to the practice. Glanville calls it "tipping," though it's not the pitcher inadvertently giving away what kind 'o pitch it's going to be ("tipping his pitches"), nor is it a runner on second base reading the catcher's signs and relaying them to the batter. It's related but different practice that instead of being designed to give your own team and advantage, it's a Hal Chase, designed to help someone on the opposition do better against your own team, albeit in a small way. 

Here's his explanation of the normal Baseball practice:

Tipping pitches involves watching your opponent like a well-trained code-breaker. It most often happens when there is a runner at second base, where he is in a unique position to steal any signs the catcher is relaying to the pitcher — so well positioned, in fact, that catchers and pitchers have a special set of signs for that situation. We all know the basic signs — one finger for fastball, two fingers for curve. But with a runner on second, the real sign may be the one right after an indicator: for example, it could be the first sign after the catcher puts down three fingers, or the second sign after he wiggles all of his fingers.

Apart from the pitcher and the runner on second, the two people who can see those signs best are the middle infielders — the shortstop and the second baseman. They are both busybodies, moving around, trying to pick off the runner, giving signs to each other regarding who should cover on a steal or a double play started from a ball hit back to the pitcher.

So, as he goes on to say, the infielders read the signs and subtly telegraph each other and if the batter can catch these signals, she can steal them and have a good guess of what the pitch is going to be (unless the pitcher is Edinson Vólquez, but that's a different story). But now unleash Alex Rodríguez, the $250 Million Eddie Haskell, on tipping and you get something mondo different:

...according to the latest story, Alex is connected to some pitch-tipping scheme in which he relayed signs to the opposing hitter (if he was a friend) or for someone who would return the favor when he was hitting. This was supposedly done in one-sided games where, in theory, one team had no chance of catching up. Alex was said to be in cahoots with a lot of middle infielders (my addition for clarity: on other teams). Allegedly, there was some sign he would relay to the hitter — a movement with his glove or his feet — to let the hitter know what type of pitch was coming and where.

Although I have never heard such a rumor about Alex, this may be one of the most egregious charges one can make against a player, and a rare one at that. Should a player know that someone in his own dugout is helping the opposing team, I would venture to say that all-out Armageddon would ensue. Imagine if a pitcher knew that his pitches were being given away to the opposing hitter by his own teammate no less. This spy would have to watch his back*.

* - As if he didn't have to already. 

BEYOND BASEBALL
This practice, of screwing over the employing organization for small gains is as universal as doing shopping at the PX for civilian friends or pilfering small quantities of office supplies. It happens on a larger scale, as well. 

I had a German manufacturing client a while back and HQ came to suspect that their U.S. group was fibbing about their productivity. While I hadn't done any work for them for a while, they asked me to go back East and check out the factory and the office records. Sure enough, the numbers were a bald-faced lie. Not immense, not crushing, but a scheme bigger than paperclip pilferage, designed to harvest cool, noticeable bonuses for most everyone on the floor and in the offices, and under the presumption that HQ "could afford it". And because the ownership was "foreign" the us/them effect got inflated. The U.S. management cooked it up to inflate their apparent value and the U.S. line workers were silent (if they even knew the numbers were juiced...which I think at least some did know) in exchange for a small but noticeable bonus in their pocket.

It's lazy thinking, weak ethics, but rarely reaches a level that it brings down an otherwise healthy organization. But in fact, this rarely happens in healthy organizations -- the very fact that employees are comfortable doing this either says something about them (that they're willing to undermine their meal ticket for chump change -- meaning they were bad hires, meaning it's probably an unhealthy organization), or about the organization (that it's stingy with the help out of proportion to how much it should be, meaning it's not a healthy organization).

The internal logic of this Tragedy of the Commons is the same as the alleged A-Rod practice: that it's for a friend and it almost certainly won't make any difference to his own team, but it could make a lot of difference to the co-conspirators.

RODRÍGUEZ & THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
Glanville, btw, goes on to say that when he played outfield behind Rodríguez he never noticed this happening, and doesn't assert he knows it to be anything more than an allegation made in a recent Selena Roberts book and Sports Illustrated story.

And that is where I am on the allegation: uncertain. Being the Eddie Haskell that he is, I could see him stealing paperclips without much guilt. But otoh, he's incredibly competitive, and coughing up an occasional hit when one might ultimately affect a game's outcome strikes me as not an act a competitive person at this level will commit, even to gain a friend. 

But to me, the more surprising thing about the story is not that it might be true. It's the reaction (or rather relative-lack-of-reaction) to it.

Allegation: Rodríguez cheats to help his performance and his team's and his teammates by taking banned (or not yet banned, but clearly cheesy) substances.
General Response: Gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair. Sophoclean dren.

Allegation: Rodríguez is in a scheme that aims to cheat his own team and teammates.
General Response: <one hand clapping>

I think under increasing cultural stress, as the U.S. has been for about 25 years, with broad, now recognized, corporate & governmental (and probably personal, too) lying, people have become so emotional and cynical about their interactions with institutions that they won't see what's in plain sight. The arm-waving is much more severe for the performance-enhancing drugs than for Hal Chase stuff. It seems like they expect their government & its corporate contractors to sell arms for hostages or torture and lie about it, to juice allegedly scientific reports to benefit friends or allies, but at the same time they can get upset about ugly but trivial peccadilloes, as though if they could just banish performance-enhancing substances different from those available Back In the Good Old Days, we'd all revert and the Earth would belch back all the lost home values and stock prices and cheap gasoline and an Octomom who didn't look exactly like Stephen Tyler.

It's pure Crisis Cult stuff.

Ghost Dance, anyone?

"You can have money piled to the ceiling but the size of your funeral is still going to depend on the weather."
--Chuck Tanner

Baseball attracts as many deranged and bad ideas as non-baseball business...it's just rare in baseball when one sticks. When one does, it's more often for a short-term financial benefit (for example, collusion in boycotting individual or whole cadres of talent, or having interleague games and stats count as league games and stats) than for purely emotional and fact-challenged reasons.

Which is why I'm skeptical that the proposal of a pair of distinguished, bright college professors (one of Genetics, one of Law) is going to get much support from either team owners or baseball fans. It's what I call a Caffeine Jihad, a Captain Ahab-like crusade about a side issue that arises from feelings, and gets attention out of proportion to its significance. This odd proposal appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, an op-ed page item under the title, Can pro baseball save itself? 

The title itself is laughable (I suspect the paper's copy desk, not the authors, named it), and it gets more Wackorama from there. But before I share its innovative and deranged concept with you, I need to describe what a Caffeine Jihad is.

THE ORIGINAL CAFFEINE JIHAD
I once did work for a Northern California high-tech company whose relentlessly-unimaginative Finance head-man was relentless in his pursuit of...the contents of the company's refrigerators. He was a veritable Captain Ahab on the hunt for recreational beverages. He knew the company really needed to tighten its expenses...the Diseconomies of Scale meant the trajectory of growth-rate and the ability to acquire exclusively A or  A- talent was coming to an end, and so outrageously high margins were inevitably in decline and if the everyone didn't take action before that started, it could get ugly. This was a company where people generally didn't look to waste money, but no one ever said "no" to any reasonable-looking expense.

But he became obsessed with the company's free high-end coffee policy, a major cheap perk (pun intended) that many people appreciated and took advantage of (and this is important: were made more productive by), and the rest saw as a symbolic proffering of the company's quality image. The firm was in the same home-town as Peets Coffee & Tea (if you're not familiar with Peets, it's in many ways the parent that generated Starbucks), so thinking buy-local and buy-quality, they stocked the kitchens with Peets. It was cheap relative to the company's investment in talent, and had those two benefits of the caffeine stimulating productivity and broadcasting the cachet of official generosity.

So rather than attack the habit of not ever saying "no" to any reasonable-looking expense, a serious, challenging and long-term change effort, Finance Man came to see the simpler free Peets as the issue. As his idea got no traction, it became more and more a Caffeine Jihad for him, his emotional stake more obviously out of scope. Funkily enough, his plan was to both downgrade the beans to something like Folgers, and to ask people to ante up some change for the cup (a heinous combo, because from getting good stuff for free, they weren't getting good stuff for pay or bad stuff for free, but bad stuff for pay).

He ultimately won his holy war, and with great cost to tactical morale and some strategic talent. He waited way too long to take on the major "just say yes to reasonable-sounding expenses" issue, and when he did, he'd already used up all his credibility and favours on the Caffeine Jihad. Instead of a challenging but viable transition to a new set of comfortable behaviors, the firm lurched and fought and sputtered like a damp July 4th roman candle.

THE USE OF BASEBALL IN STEROIDS
Rine & Sugarman's Chronicle op-ed proposal was so deranged because, I believe, it resulted from side-issues on which the the advocates have allowed their emotions to trump both facts and common sense. The title itself (again, I'm not at all confident the authors devised it) is a big warning sign, anchored off an idea that both defies common sense & for which they present no data to support. 

How much does the sport or the business need saving? Baseball's paid attendance last year was roughly 78 million fans, about 12% more than in 1993, before the 1994 and 1995 labor actions. The leagues expanded (a pair of teams) since then; if you remove those two franchises' attendance, it's still 6% higher. The median baseball franchise appreciated in value 2% last year, if you can believe Forbes. If the magazine is correct, that's a stunning gain in the face of North America's overall GDP sag. Beyond North America, there's somewhat more significant world-wide investment on the endeavor, most clearly discernable from the World Baseball Classic, an event that seems to have caught on & that's somewhat popular in a lot of different places that had no serious baseball culture two decades ago. Television viewership of baseball is down roughly in proportion to the decline of TV viewership in general.

Perhaps the headline is aimed at Baseball's soul being saved, a faith-based salvation. But if the proposal is aimed at the soul, it misses the mark because its methods are totally aimed at holding hostage/in trust players' pay. The author's aim, in the authors' own words:

Require all players to place a substantial share of their baseball earnings in a trust they can access at the end of their careers if they have been clean throughout.

And really, it should be rephrased "they can access at the end of their careers if they can prove they have been clean throughout". False positives (test finds substance that wasn't actually there or was something else mis-recognized) are common in testing, not to mention false negatives (test results that miss substance abusers' chemical residues). I'm guessing the authors know as well as we do the tests are imperfect, but they think their sanction is so worthwhile, that it doesn't matter.

Anabolic steroids present baseball with problems at multiple levels. The physical damage that players do to themselves may be the least of it - the just reward of those who cheat. But the damage to others is much deeper. Fans have become disgusted by performance records that owe more to organic chemistry than to talent, by psychodramas of tainted stars explaining why they are not responsible for their actions, and by the reluctance of the commissioner, owners and union to deal with this issue honestly. Most of all, we lament the message this situation sends to our youth and to unjuiced teammates competing for a place on a team.

In this part of their argument, they are talking about anabolic steroids only, ignoring the bulk of the performance-enhancing supplement use: human growth hormone (HGH) and various forms of stimulants (coffee, which no one is currently arguing should be banned, and amphetamines and related compounds, which are broadly vilified and explicitly banned). I'm a little disturbed by their suggestion that death-by-cancer or liver failure is a just reward for steroid use (I hate José Canseco & Roger Clemens, but the death penalty still seems an over the top response to me). ¿Again, though, who are these "fans" the authors cite? I'm sure there are many, but they don't constitute much of a sub-population if recent attendance or purchase of ridiculously-expensive logowear and trinkets are indicators (and they are). 

ASIDE: I'll bet a nickel that if they took a fair vote on actual fan opinion on performance-enhancing supplements, one-ticket, one-vote, among major league baseball game attendees, the winner by far would be "Uncommitted", with status quo coming in second and strong action to suppress use third (and only coming in third because there was no remainin' option to rank ahead of it.) My very informal asking-around among people who are actual fans indicates very few consider supplements a particularly- important issue and  among that minority, even fewer who want to see some Department of Homeland Purity police action to deal with it. This isn't to argue nothing should be done, just that the "fans are outraged" argument is brittle and unfounded.

We must have no shortage of sympathy for the "unjuiced teammates competing for a place on the team". That quandary is just brutal, and it's one we all face Beyond Baseball, too. From the stock analyst tempted to ignore a publicly-traded corporation's shifty accounting accounting practices to get their business (and pass the risk on to the investors to whom she "owes" the truth), to the mortgage broker who suspects the buyer he's selling to might not be able to afford the closing price but doesn't want to miss his quota (and perhaps, as a result, his job), to the University teacher looking for tenure and being lured to teach and write about topics they find marginal-but-glitzy rather than what they most care about...we all face this zero-sum game. 

Require that a substantial share of baseball salaries - say two-thirds of earnings above the league minimum guaranteed by the collective bargaining agreement - go into a trust for the duration of the player's career. The trust would pay taxes and would be managed by a professional organization of the sort that administers retirement accounts.

Great. I love to see they trust Lehman Brothers & Merrill Lynch.

Apart from any other ongoing drug-testing regimen, urine samples would be regularly collected from players and securely stored. Upon retiring from baseball, those samples would be analyzed by the most advanced methods available. These methods improve every year, and it would be a bad bet that tomorrow's technology will not detect yesterday's steroids.

If a player's stored samples are clean, he would get everything in his trust and remove any suspicion about his honesty. If the samples prove he cheated, after appropriate retesting and inevitable challenges, his share would be forfeited. Moreover, records set during a player's career would initially be "provisional" and "official" only upon successful completion of testing.

Holy Cow, as a sober Harry Caray might have said (a totally-blitzed Harry Carey might have invented this, but I doubt it). The record book (already shaky because of interleague play where you can win, for example, an American League Homer 1^st by dint of plunking more taters against National League teams, or get into the National League playoffs because you had a better record against American League teams than a National League rival who had a better record against National League teams...and yes, that's already happened) becomes a veritable Soviet Encyclopedia. All the all-time records become conditional, with differential enforcement based on BT (before testing) and DT (during testing). If, for example, Barney Rubble led the league in batting average this year, and retired in 2021, the "record book" would list a conditional leader for 12 years, one who might remain or disappear after his retirement (the way Nikita Khrushchev and his drugis made Joe Stalin's name and face and eponymous Grad disappear after the old bastard bit the big one [Volgograd, in case yer interested]). The need to chronically update all this "history" conditional on the approval of external, politicized sources, while a delight for fans with OCD or 12-year old boys with nothing better to do smacks exactly of Soviet chronic revisions.

If cheaters were discovered, forfeited assets would be distributed equitably. A fraction could be returned to team owners to recognize that their investment was damaged by cheating, to the trusts of the cheater's teammates, and to youth baseball programs in the communities where the player served. Agents not parties to the abuse would keep their fees.

Good. So an owner can benefit thrice from hiring a juicer: First, by bringing more fans to spend $$ to watch him play "better", potentially improving the team enough to play in the playoffs and sell tickets to additional events, and then finally by making back (¿with interest? Not mentioned, though since this financial-instrument thang sounds like a Roth IRA, I suspect they might want to insulate the players from hyper-inflation...though if they don't care if the juicers croak, maybe they don't care if the non-juicers take an inflation hit) a piece of their labor costs. And players' agents get to keep their take if they can maintain deniability. Owners win, agents win (if we buy into the authors' suspicion that juicers make more money, then we need to assume an agent's take of a higher-paid career brings higher fees), players, as a composite, lose. I do like the youth baseball angle. ¿How about we just require players of all pro sports to tithe or so for youth baseball? ¿Would players hold Tea Parties to protest?

CAFFEINE JIHAD DELUXE
There are so many problems with this proposal, I can't (for your benefit, I won't) add another 3,000 words to deal with it all.

But let's answer some questions.

1. Is the use of performance-enhancing supplements by baseball players a "problem" we should invest cycles in fixing?
I'm not sure supplements are even "a problem". Could they be, overall, a benefit to performance and the enjoyment many fans get from seeing their old favorites get extended careers? I'm pretty sure the guys who took the greenies would tell you they performed better, and that helped their team. I'm pretty sure it's not a one-sided argument on either side.

Let's presume it's a problem. Is it worth investing cycles in? Given the universality of this form of cheating, the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been secretly borrowed or stolen and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been liquidated in this country and shipped overseas for performance advantages that have proven to be terribly cancerous to the macro-organism we call "the economy", is sports where we want to apply this first? And if sports, why not concurrently propose this for the NFL, where supplement-based physical re-sizing is close to universal and where the union is already busted?

I think sports isn't a great place to start. If we're going to do this to Baseball players, let's do it to public officials (keep your campaign promises or forfeit your pension and a percentage of your campaign contributions?), military officers (win your campaigns or lose your PX privileges?), college profs (graduates know their subjects or lose tenure?)..

2. In Baseball, which has a more than a century of deeply-imbued tradition of cheating to increase your team's chances of winning, is this the place to draw the line?.
Everything from scouting, to heckling, to sign-stealing, to intentionally slamming into the catcher to knock the ball loose on a play at the plate, to groundskeepers tweaking the field is designed to use some kind of unfairness, in many cases outright rule-breaking to give one team an advantage. This is different, btw, from cheating to hurt one's team's chances of winning (game-fixing). Some will argue it's the opposite of that.

It's accepted in baseball that the team will cheat to benefit their chances of winning in many ways. Hmmm, I can see both sides of this one.

3. Does Economics-based thinking hold any water outside of textbooks?
No.

This op-ed is an example of the incredibly goofy lengths to which people who think like economists (a group of people self-selected to believe that everything has a monetary value, and further one that can be measured) will go to in their belief money drives behavior.

I can only think the authors forgot their own sandlot days, how much they wanted to play and do well and win if at all possible. I'm only guessing here, but I suspect that when Rine & Sugarman played sandlot or little league, if another kid had offered them money to perform less well, they would have turned it down. I'm sure most pro baseball players would, too, because the game is one of the many things that makes us do things that defy what the self-selected bias of economists imagine is an unavoidable gravitational field that pulls us towards money.

I went to Sugarman's site and scanned the papers he'd chosen to share (a lot of brain-food there). A few of his papers (they wouldn't load into my PDF reader, so I didn't have the pleasure of readin' them), look from the titles as though some of his thinking is in using money sanctions to get manufacturers and health care providers to improve product safety and performance. If so, bravo; I think that's a very good application of the kind of thinking the profs have invested in this sanction idea for Marvin Benard and his henchfolk. But as a rule, people in manufacturing and healthcare administration really care about money a lot; for the majority of baseball players, it's not the main consideration (that is, if you offered major league ballplayers a 15% raise to work in an office or as a casino greeter or own a small business, the majority would decline your offer).

And that's where, IMNSHO, I think Rine & Sugarman came way off the tracks with this proposal, that is, believing that money is a good way to manipulate ballplayers.

That belief is an emotional setting, one that I think created this demented proposal. Luckily for Economists & their acolytes, economics is not wholly accountable the way Baseball is.

Organizations, especially larger ones, have a tendency to underuse talent because of a habitual failure to do what Baseball is particularly good at: OMA (Observe, Measure, Analyse). Not that I believe Baseball is perfect at it (more on that later), but Baseball recognizes what most organizations don't: The Talent Is The Product. 

So in Baseball, the organization continually, relentlessly tests every contributor,  observes and measures the results and then analyses the outcomes to discern what each is good at and in what areas each needs improvement. Out of that comes action: And then they apply corrective suggestions, coaching and modified deployment of each individual talent. And then they repeat the practice. How does this differ Beyond Baseball?

THE QUATERMOUS PROTOCOL
One financial organization I've done a lot work for over the years is quite good at recruiting, but they habitually waste lots of the talent they bring in because they "play favorites". It's part of the organization's personality to take the careful impressions they had of the recruit's hiring interviews and resume, (and sometimes, but not always, the first couple of days of work as well) and form a concrete judgment of the newbie's skills and level of potential. Because they are way above average at acquiring talented people, this hasn't yet been fatal, but they tend not to recognize and promote their best performers or correct correctable limitations in their Golden Children.

One of the most competent managers in the organization, I'll call her Mrs. Quatermous, is one of the most egregiously lazy in the OMA practice -- and does it deliberately. Quatermous'll tell you her rationalisation: Early indicators are decent predictors, and it takes time to practice OMA, time that can more effectively be spent invested in other management activities and defending her turf in the fairly political organization (all finance-dominated organizations have high political overhead).

Overall, she's really good at her job, but she doesn't make use of all the talent at her disposal, and does only (and is qualified to do only) the most pro forma of evaluations -- which makes sense to her because her evaluation is TTOAE (think-through-once-apply-eternally). Her favored contributors get the recognition, the choice assignments, ergo the choice bonuses, ergo the promotions.

This is normal behavior in the business and academic and military worlds -- where the Talent can get Too Big For Their Britches To Fail (also known as the Peter Principle). In those endeavors where the field is very competitive or even zero-sum, The Quartermous Protocol can be fatal. In Baseball, the most competitive of endeavors (nothing less than the combination of excellence and a good deal of luck wins flags) it almost inevitably is.

THE WALK-ON FACTOR
If you know what a "walk on" is, skip to the next paragraph. A walk on is a college athlete who wasn't recruited to the school's athletic program &  isn't getting an athletic scholarship. Most programs allow for students who want to make the team to try out, walk on the field and show their stuff. And in most of the programs that allow walk ons, a few make it, sometimes only as roster-fillers, sometimes being allowed to show their stuff and earn, if they have the chops, a place as a contributor on the team. Of course, college isn't the professional world; team success and failure is relative, not absolute as it is in the Major Leagues. So college teams can, and do, waste walk-on talent without the repercussions a Major League team would suffer.

But in your own organization as well as in Baseball, it pays to pay attention to your own "walk ons", that is, the people you hire as temps or those who didn't look like Pulitzer Prize winners when you brought them on...because that walk on could turn out to be an Ozzie Smith or Ryan Howard.

The New York Times yesterday ran  Jack Curry's piece on walk on talent.

Eric Karros remembers being among the 60 or 70 prospects for one or two walk-on spots on the U.C.L.A. baseball team. Karros, a talented high school player, took batting practice alongside a few wannabes who decided blue jeans were their best choice as uniform pants that day.

Karros made the team, knocking the jeans-clad guys off the field. He was redshirted as a freshman, was a starter as a sophomore and was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1998, after his junior year. Karros began as a college walk-on and surprised himself a bit by climbing to the peak of his profession.

“It ended up turning out well for me,” Karros said. “Playing major league baseball, that just didn’t seem realistic to me.”

When Brett Gardner was named the Yankees’ center fielder this month, he was the latest example of a walk-on who could have an impact in the majors. Gardner was a walk-on at the College of Charleston in 2001. Like Karros, he eventually earned a partial scholarship and reached the majors. Karros played 14 seasons; Gardner is in his second.

It is not uncommon for a walk-on to grow into a stellar player in college, but it is unusual for a walk-on, even one who has been scouted and invited to try out, to make it to the majors. Still, the list of former walk-ons includes some splashy names.

The Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith, who may be the smoothest defensive shortstop ever, walked on at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo in 1974. Ryan Howard, who was the National League’s most valuable player three seasons ago, was an invited walk-on at Southwest Missouri State, now Missouri State. George Sisler arrived at Michigan in 1911 with no scholarship. He pitched and hit brilliantly, and developed into a Hall of Fame first baseman.

Smith said he never considered his path abnormal and called it “just the route I took.” Because Smith was barely noticed out of high school, he went to Cal Poly to get more exposure. He received a partial academic scholarship as a freshman and earned a baseball scholarship a year later. His wizardry followed soon after.

“Being a walk-on didn’t discourage me,” Smith said. “It was a challenge. It was all about getting the opportunity. The one thing you have to do, whether you’re a walk-on or not, is, once you get that opportunity, you have to go through the window.”

{SNIP}

In some instances, a player is a walk-on for a short period. Keith Guttin, the coach at Missouri State, said he ran out of scholarships before Howard’s freshman year, so he could not offer him any assistance. An N.C.A.A. Division I baseball team has a maximum of 11.7 scholarships, so players usually receive partial scholarships. {SNIP}

Read the whole piece...it's a pretty interesting presentation of a little-known sub-population of ballplayers.

But what's really enlightening to me is why there aren't, given the explanations above,  more successful walk-on candidates. I'll propose why.

SQUEEZING OUT ALL THE WIZARDRY
My godson, The Big Train", was an odd triple crown winner in high school, winning the San Francisco Unified school district's batting average, RBI and ERA leads in the same season. But San Francisco's program is not the most competitive, so while he got scouted by the Phils, they didn't draft him and he went to college on his academic, not his athletic achievements. After transferring around for a while, he had great success in a community college's baseball program and when he transferred into UC Berkeley, he tried out as a walk-on and got a slot pitching mop-up assignments. He performed well enough to have an ERA of 0.00 after a half-dozen appearances, but the athletes with  scholarships needed to get their full chances for all the usual political reasons. The Big Train got few chances, and his first sub-normal performance was his last appearance.

Management had already decided what his potential was, I believe, when they didn't offer him a scholarship, and regardless of what he had shown, he wasn't going to get recognition or coaching attention that could be applied to the talent with scholarships. Not a sinister conspiracy, a merely lazy decision based on the general tendency of those scouted as the best turn out to be the best, in general. In exchange for saving a lot of time practicing OMA, you occasionally miss out on someone's serious or major contribution (the exception, not the rule).

I believe The Quatermous Protocol that probably lowered the ceiling on what The Big Train could have achieved exists to some degree in the Majors. Some of my favorite gearheads will be quick to point out that the correlation between how early a round a player was drafted and that player's ultimate major league career is awfully good, with the earlier picks being more likely to achieve more success.

But, and I believe this is true both in Baseball and Beyond, we can't be sure which is cause and which is effect. Earlier draft picks are more likely to get coaching attention, more likely to be stuck with through bad performance or adverse medical events. Because of the Quatermous Protocol, there is more on-going investment in the individuals pre-determined to be winners.

Even the most effective recruiting shops can be undermined if they under-invest in their walk ons. There are too many Ryan Howards out there, missed not because they weren't talented enough, but because some busy supervisor decided prematurely they knew as much as they needed to know about a talent to stop paying close attention. Except for Boeing, Microsoft and the US Army, I never worked for an organization that could afford the lost opportunities the Quartermous Protocol creates.

You...odds are you can't afford to let skipping a little daily OMA time stand between you and getting the most out of your staff.

So when the 39th-most successful American League starter announces a remarkable business decision, it's not headline news. So it's with deep gratitude that I have to thank my baseball associate Jeffrey Balash for pointing out to me that Paul Byrd, a member of the rare breed of Crafty Righties announced late this month he was going to pull a "Roger Clemens" and not go to Spring Training, not accept any contract, but not retire. Instead, like Clemens before him, he was hinting that he was likely to make himself available in the stretch run for a contender looking for pitching rotation help.

As Ken Rosenthal noted:

The obvious question is whether a team would want him at mid-season; he would not be a high-impact, high-profile addition like Clemens was for the Astros in 2006 and Yankees in '07.

Byrd, however, says that two general managers asked him to consider their clubs if he decides to return, with one telling him, "We know you can roll out of bed and throw strikes." {SNIP} Byrd went 8-2 with a 3.46 ERA in 12 starts after the All-Star break for the Indians and Red Sox. For the season, he made 30 starts and pitched 180 innings. He said he is not putting his career on hold due to a lack of interest in him as a free agent.

"I got some really nice offers. That's what made it hard," Byrd said. "Nice offers from very competitive, big-time teams that just need someone to fill in at the back end of their rotation. I also got an offer or two from small-market teams that said they wanted me to come in and be their No. 1 or 2 guy.

{SNIP} His thinking is, if he starts off the season at home, his family might be more comfortable if he departs for 2-1/2 to 3 months in July or August instead of working the entire six-month regular season and possibly the postseason.

Why would Byrd make such a decision, and what can managers learn from it?

HALF A SEASON FOR HALF A PAYCHECK
Byrd is taking a chance on no-one being interested when the time comes (the stretch run in late summer or early Fall), though it's likely some team fighting for the playoffs & looking for a little extra depth would take a chance on Byrd, a starter who has contributed to several serious teams.

As Rosenthal noted, though, he's no Roger Clemens, not intimidating marquee name who looks to transform a playoff series. Last year, for example, he started 30 games with a record of 11-12 and his 4.60 ERA was about 2% worse than the league -- not bad, but not ace's numbers.

Using a measure I've written about before that more fairly assigns a rating to a pitcher based on his performance that's less dependent on how well the pitcher's offense supported the starts, he should have won 14 games and lost 16 in his 30 starts. Incidentally, Byrd's teams won 14 of his starts and lost 16 of them.

But Byrd split his season between two teams, and I think his 2008 experience triggered the creative thought. Because in August, he was traded from the struggling (surprisingly so) Cleveland Indians to the playoff-bound Boston Red Sox. He had the pleasure of moving from a disappointing team that had gone 8-14 in his starts, to a thriving one. And, as most playoff teams have better-performing offenses than disappointing ones do, and better-performing bullpens, it wasn't surprising the Red Sox were 6-2 in Byrd's starts, even though statistically, they were of closely-comparable quality. And another 2008 note for Byrd: August was his best performance month in 2008 and over his career as a whole, too.

It's possible Byrd may believe (and it may well be true) that he can pitch a little less than half a season for a little less than half the paycheck, with the close-to-guarantee that he'll be working games that matter for a team that's having fun, and that his performance will be at the top of his ability.

Unless one loves playing baseball to the exclusion of other parts of life's experience, from a quality-of-life perspective, Byrd's choice was almost irresistible. Because any team you start the season with could fall out of contention, but if you start the season at home with your family, you can wait for the teams to sort themselves out mostly into playoff-bound and probably-not piles, skip the grind of the longest pro sports season in North America, and then ante in with a sure contender. If you can find one to take you on.

Paul Byrd, as I mentioned, is not Roger Clemens, a household name. But he's not generic, either. He's been pitching for a long time, he's a "solid citizen", a known quantity with a consistent-enough track record over his eight years of full-time work that most organizations would think they could know what they're getting if they sign him for August and September.

It might not work out for him. While I suspect his consistency will get him what he's looking for, he was one of the oddly-accused-by-mention pitchers in The Mitchell Report; Mitchell's team cited a newspaper article that had accused Byrd of buying prescribed HGH from a pharmacy implicated in other players' violations. Some teams will remember and find significant the unpleasant banging-around the Tampa Bay Rays gave him in his only playoff outing last year. And except for his career-year, 2002 when he was 17-11 for a K.C. Royals team that went 45-89 in his non-decisions, he has never had an award-threatening season.

I heard Byrd's podcast interview at High & Tight. I came away with the impression that Byrd is really ready to play out the hand with grace if he gets his way or if he doesn't, which is the way we should all try to make our way (well, except for Lou Piniella).

BEYOND BASEBALL
Beyond baseball, the talent (and the organizations that hire them) almost always lean towards protocols. The available protocols don't cover a Byrd choice -- it's neither the current fave -- outsourcing, nor full-time staff. Among Beyond Baseball models, the one that comes closest to Byrd's choice a consulting engagement with a retainer agreement.

For the last 50 or so years, Baseball has been a lot smarter about acquiring and retaining skilled staff than other endeavors like business and government. This is a case where Baseball will need to learn a Government (and to a lesser degree, Business) staffing technique and see if it can be successful with it. Prospective teams have to compete on calendar time (act too early, you might not really be in contention when the time comes; act too late, you get aced out of Byrd's services) and judge his game-readiness in late Summer for later-Summer appearances.

Does your organization use some Paul Byrds, reasonably-skilled talent to fill in sporadic gaps? When they do, do they do it well?

Innovation in Baseball and Beyond are constrained by the same gravitational fields. Two are particularly important.

#1 - GRAB FROM ANOTHER DISCIPLINE
As anthropologist H.G. Barnett documented, most successful innovations that have significant impact takes methods from one endeavor and apply them to another field. So, for example, new ways of strengthening Indian baskets were borrowed by potters to strengthen pots; internal combustion, developed for decorative fountain applications, was borrowed by automobile manufacturers as a basis for a vehicle engine.

If you want to come up with a functional innovation, borrow something from another field. (This is not, btw, the most common form of innovation. The most common form is one of the weakest -- intensification, or doing what you did before but harder). Note, though, I didn't use the word "clone" or "copy" in the section header -- you grab it, and in almost every case, you need to mutate the process or practice to make it fit your new application for it.

#2 - THE FARTHER FROM THE NORM, THE HIGHER OF BOTH THE RISK OF STRIKING OUT  & THE OPPORTUNITY TO HIT A HOMER
Here's what I mean: If you're selling liquid dish soap and have a 20% market share in an arena where the big competitors have 20-30%, adding a new variety with a different commonly-used scent could earn you a 23-24% share, but isn't likely to change the playing field. A scent like Roasted Garlic or New Car or "Acqua Di Gio By Giorgio Armani," combined with a 64 oz. dispenser that works like a fire extinguisher might earn you a vast uptick that could change your entire competitive position because you're remaking the consumer sense of what dish soap is all about, or it might leave you the Laughing Stock-Master of Infinite Edselism (even if you can sign up Austin Kearns as your celebrity soapsperson).

SO IT'S WITH GREAT INTEREST...
that we'll get to see how the San Francisco Giants' ticket scheme of the year plays out. According to a recent story in the San Jose Mercury News:

The basic model is common among commercial airlines. Relative prices might be very cheap or expensive four months in advance based on what the seller projects demand to be, but over time, the price might sag if fewer-than-expected buyers have taken the plunge relative to expectations for that many days ahead of the flight. In the handful of days remaining before the flight, the price for remaining tickets can be volatile (though usually expensive).

I don't know if this can be made to work or not. If it's just a way to squeeze marginal fans for a few extra bucks for some marginal tickets (the seats involved are among the least passionately-chased already), it'll probably work out decently and acquire the team some extra revenue, but probably enough to pay a rookie utility infielder major league minimum pay, if even that. 

If they use it to fill seats with discounted (even only slightly, even if only by low-ballers who would respond to $2 or $3 off) prices it should work better, because it's likely they'll come out ahead on concessions (which usually mean more than the $2 or $3 net).

Still, they're starting with a smallish pilot effort, a better idea that either rejecting the concept out of hand or committing a lot of credibility and resources to it.

My gut tells me that this is being driven, though, more by the technology than the concept -- what I call Tellerism that if you have a technology, you have to use it for something and ignore whether that something is worthwhile or positive. That is, if the program exists, you might as well use it.

And the Giants' ticket services vee-pee notes the program's suggestions won't really be implemented -- because, unlike airline tickets, there are season-ticket and group-purchase customers who would be offended if they saw some small fry walk up on the day of game and get better prices than what they (higher value to the team through certainty and bulk) paid.

MY TWENTY CENTS
It's a great idea on the surface, but needs to be bent and tweaked enough for the Baseball context that it probably won't work to change things very much. I suspect that premium-pricing itself will take most franchises a few years to "sell", that is, for average buyers to see without feeling gouged a little. A broad swath of teams are deploying premium pricing for special days of the week and particular opponents. When they keep it very simple, and for special occasions, I think it's a reasonable idea for up to maybe two games a month. Beyond that, I think it creates more confusion than revenue, and confusion can diminish good will, which is the true stock-in-trade of a major league baseball franchise.

And good will is the idea behind a modest proposal I'm about to make for all the teams that have numbers of unused or unsold tickets they find disturbing. After the first inning, give a few thousand less-desirable seats and a simple kids scorecard away to any child between 7 and 14 who brings a paying adult. The parent gets a two-for-one deal, the team gets concession revenue, the team gets more noise and fewer empty seats, and, best for them, a long-term affiliation like the St. Louis teams used to get from their Knothole Gang ticket giveaways.

That's another kind of innovation I hadn't discussed - re-applying in a modified way a process that worked perfectly well but was discarded for reasons other than function.

It's a standard of good coaching in and Beyond Baseball that to be a good teacher, you have to be equally open to being a student to your students. Angus' Twelfth Law: "Everyone knows some things you don't. Inevitably, a few of those things will be both worth knowing and applicable later". If you apply that in your management practice, you use almost every coaching/training/mentoring act to try to pick up actionable tools from your student/protege/team member.

I've written about that a bunch in the past, most pointedly back in July of 2005 when I first spoke with Rick Peterson and he shared how he used his early opportunities as the New York Mets' pitching coach to work with Pedro Martínez. Essentially: To be a successful teacher, you have to be an attentive student.

But the Oakland Athletics' young starter Sean Gallagher (not this one; this one) has turned Peterson's process on it's head. To be a successful student, it helps to be an attentive teacher.

According to Susan Slusser's story for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Normally, I wouldn’t use the predictable ruse of a World Series trophy to send accolades at one of Baseball’s giants – I like being out of step too much.

But this year’s World Series Champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, had at their helm one of the game’s great management figures, the repeatedly successful (and humble) Pat Gillick, as general manager, and Gillick has five great lessons for managers in fields Beyond Baseball, lessons that are too critical to ignore.

“The Philadelphia Phillies' front office sat for three hours Wednesday poring over player reports and discussing potential trades and acquisitions. Team president Dave Montgomery poked his head into the room, and according to big-league scouting director Gordon Lakey, couldn't believe what he was seeing. "We're playing Game 5 of the World Series tonight, aren't we?" Montgomery said. The Phillies were just hours away from winning the World Series vs. the Tampa Bay Rays, but general manager Pat Gillick already was trying to duplicate a championship before winning the first.”

More unusually (well, outside Baseball, anyway), he’s not resting on his laurels. On a work day preceding a World Series game-let, he’s not in a luxury box rubbing shoulders with season ticket holders so he can listen to them fawn over him. He’s huddled with his team working to improve potential for the inevitable, next struggle. There’s ALWAYS some useful work to be done, and whatever you’re taking care of now is something you don’t have to waste cycles on when the important+urgent issues come up later, leaving you more energy and focus to concentrate on the actions that matter most.

"We're in the middle of the World Series," says Lakey, who has worked 19 years for Gillick, "and Pat's planning for next year. You would never know he was going to retire."

Gillick, 71, had his last day on the job Thursday; he'll be replaced by Ruben Amaro Jr. today. Had Gillick sat back last winter and savored the Phillies' first postseason in 14 years, they wouldn't be riding in Friday's victory parade.

Pat Gillick knows that (outside of the military) there’s no excuse to act like a short-timer, even if you are. Last impressions are a lot like first impressions; disproportionately remembered. That can be useful on your next gig (or not). And while Gillick is retiring, it doesn’t hurt to be classy. Which brings me to…

"He put together a lot of this team. Three-quarters of our infield, Cole Hamels, Pat Burrell," Gillick said after his team won the National League Championship Series in Los Angeles a week ago. "I kind of filled in around what Ed had in place. A lot of credit should go to Ed Wade and his group because they did a tremendous job getting the nucleus here in Philadelphia."

Saying that, of course, didn’t bring Gillick more wins. That attitude, though, the ability to recognize others’ contributions and transcend one’s own views and immediate self-interest, enhances (significantly) one’s ability to recognize important point of view, and builds one’s ability (immensely) to lead the kinds of groups that come together in competitive organizations.

“Gillick, 71, had his last day on the job Thursday; he'll be replaced by Ruben Amaro Jr. today. Had Gillick sat back last winter and savored the Phillies' first postseason in 14 years, they wouldn't be riding in Friday's victory parade. They were the first to act last winter when they traded for closer Brad Lidge at the general managers meetings. Lidge saved 48 consecutive games, and the refurbished bullpen went 90-0 with ninth-inning leads. Geoff Jenkins and Pedro Feliz, free agents signed last winter, produced the biggest hits in the Phillies' World Series clincher. Gillick accepted the World Series trophy Wednesday, but didn't take the accolades. He stepped quietly off stage. "Pat says to us, 'Let's do it again next year,' " says Phillies special assistant Charlie Kerfeld, "and we never saw him again the rest of the night."