Baseball Business October

The baseball regular season is over. The playoffs are the big stage where every player, every executive, basically everybody related to baseball wants to be.
These early October headlines go to the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals losing the Wild Card Game, however, other teams, like Padres, Mariners, Phillies and Athletics, that appeared to be a sure bet for the postseason were left behind in the long road to October.
You hear fans and experts from all those teams expressing their opinions on what made their teams fail; was it the offense? the bullpen? There are a number of reasons why some teams get to the postseason and why others don’t.
What needs to be understood is that baseball is also a business, so it has strategies that vary from team to team and the ones with the best overall business strategy are the ones that succeed and therefore reach October play.
The big and most noticeable example of success this year is the Tampa Bay Rays. How is it possible to do so much with such a limited budget? With a scarce home attendance? Why can´t other teams do the same? Why the Giants came up with a record 107 win season when nobody looked at them in the spring?
The name of the game is Business Strategy.
As in any business you need to succeed both in the product or service you deliver and also financially, otherwise, you aren’t achieving your goals. That´s exactly what the Tampa Bay Rays do. Put the best possible team on the field with the limited resources they have. That includes an endless pipeline of major league-ready players from their farm system.
Among the major disappointments, this season is the New York Yankees. There are all sorts of theories on why Yankees failed, being the most popular: The manager? some players? and now the General Manager/Head of Baseball Operations? and the analytics team? The truth is that Yankees went through a roller-coaster season with a number of variables that strategy did not provide for, so management and players were caught off guard and the reactions to remediate arising situations usually fell short, resulting in a major disappointment for fans, ownership, players, media, etc… While other teams move to excel in all areas of baseball, the Yankees appear to be caught in what was a successful strategy many moons ago. There has to be a balance in all aspects of the game. In the end, games are played and decided on the field with players that, as humans, aren´t perfect. That is also part of the equation.
Technology has taken the game by storm, getting and analyzing data is now a way of life in baseball, all teams have access to a myriad of information that combined can significantly help create a world champion. No longer is solely spending lots of money to have a powerful lineup or pitching staff that wins championships. It is now the combination of many factors that build a World Series caliber team. Now teams must ensure the best data analysis is available, but also that analysis has to be closely monitored for results. Is the team winning games? Are corrective actions ready?
There are too many examples of businesses that refused to change with times and lost their position in the market. In the particular case of the New York Yankees, it is now time to do things differently and give the fans of the most storied franchise in baseball a much-needed relief.

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