Another Baseball Lesson: The Dodgers Reclamation Project

I lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, and while I never traded my Mets allegiance for the Dodgers, I paid attention to what the "Doyers" were up to. I watched a lot of games at Chavez Ravine. Top three ballpark in the world, by the way. Even though back then the team itself was kind of meh.

Then something happened in 2014.

A new head of baseball operations named Andrew Friedman showed up straight from Tampa Bay, where he'd spent a decade fixing broken players because that's what you do when you don't have money. He landed in LA and got the deepest pockets in sports to back the same instincts. And the Dodgers turned into a competitive, winning machine.

The story everybody tells is that the Dodgers have some kind of secret sauce. A lab. A whisperer. A guy in a windowless room who looks at a spreadsheet and sees what twenty other front offices missed.

That's not really it. Here's what's actually happening.

1\ They find the one thing

The Dodgers don't take a struggling pitcher and tear his whole game down to the studs. They find the one pitch he already throws well (but doesn’t use much) and they tell him to throw it constantly. A curveball with elite spin sitting at 10% usage becomes a curveball at 40% usage.

I see this in executive coaching all the time. People show up wanting a total transformation. New skill set, new persona, new approach to their career. Ninety percent of the time, the actual answer is smaller and closer than they think.

There's a thing you already do better than almost anyone around you, buried under everything you think you're supposed to be doing instead. Stop doing the stuff you're mediocre at just because it's expected. Do the thing you're great at, louder and more often.

2\ They translate the data

Nobody hands a Dodgers pitcher a printout of spin rates and launch angles and wishes him luck. Somebody sits with him and turns all that data into one physical cue he can actually act on in a game. A new grip. A different arm slot. That's the real skill. Turning data into wisdom you can actually use.

I spend a lot of coaching sessions doing the same thing. Somebody hands me a 360 review or a performance plan written in “corporate,” and my job is finding the one sentence a person can walk out of our session with and put to work.

3\ Moneyball with money

The Dodgers can afford to sign five reclamation projects in the same offseason and eat the misses without anyone noticing. Three guys fizzle and nobody remembers their names. Two guys work out and the myth writes itself.

The Dodgers have the budget to guess wrong four times out of five. Can you afford that? That’s the actual gap between them and you. Not the talent. Not the data. The margin for error.

Which is exactly why lesson one matters more for you than it does for them. They can experiment their way to the right pitch. It behooves you to find yours.

So what’s your curveball? Or your sinker? What are you not throwing enough of now? Time to focus on that.