The Show | CorporateIntel

I get choked up when a baseball player makes his first official appearance in an MLB game. When I say choked up, I mean I viscerally feel what is taking place on the field. I was in Dodger Stadium when Dustin May first pitched. I recently watched Gavin Stone and Bobby Miller do the same on television with no less emotion running through me.

Those first starts are the culmination of endless sacrifice, physical preparation, and mental resets. There are so few positions available in professional sports it is almost ludicrous to bet one’s future on it. When I see young ballplayers walking onto an MLB field for the first time, usually with their families in the stands on very short notice, I feel a sense of awe and trepidation. A lifetime of dreams can continue for years after that debut, or possibly end right there on an underwhelming performance and a flight back to a playing field a tenth in size.

The power of hope and the threat of failure are all at once alive in a single and unrepeatable moment. I struggle to find the words to convey the meaning of that spotlight and the unknown future it presents as a test, but seeing that ballplayer suited up for the first time and given a spot on the roster by a manager is always in my eyes volcanic.

Then there are the veterans who perform even better late in their careers than they did when they first came up. Clayton Kershaw won his 200th game this season, becoming only the third Dodger to achieve that milestone, reaching an achievement shared with just 96 players in MLB history. I’d like to tell you Kershaw’s debut clearly foreshadowed the legendary career ahead of him, but five weeks after his first MLB game, he was sent back to the minors for fine-tuning. That’s when he recommitted to getting back in The Show and proving he belonged on a big league roster. Nothing could stop him from realizing his potential. He has worked hard every day of his career.

Why does talent reaching the launching point of potential bring me to stunned silence?

The why is as simple as I can say it: I revere talent.

You might have guessed, this isn’t just about baseball. All talent climbing to the apex of a focal point is forever for me an uncanny unveiling. A launch in the majors is not the real start of a career, that happened back in grade school, then again in high school, then again in the draft, and any number of games won or lost along the way in each leg of a player’s journey. Walking onto a big league stadium field for the first time in uniform and on the official roster is a moment of recognition, an entry in a time capsule that isolates a key reward point. It is real to the individual and a metaphor to all who are watching it in real time.

When talent sees the spotlight, when one person’s dream becomes reality, we all can look inside ourselves and see the shape of our dreams.

Talent is such an overused, even abused term. Talent is precious. It’s part nature and part nurture. When it reveals itself, the world breathes differently. At least I do.

There are all kinds of talent: sports talent, artistic talent, design talent, scientific talent, leadership talent, mentoring talent, teaching talent, parenting talent — you name something difficult to do, and if you see someone doing it better than a lot of others, it likely involves talent.

Some start with more natural ability than others but when we see talent at work it is seldom a lightning strike or an accident. Behind the realization of talent is a regimen of development that calls upon all the same forms of dedication and commitment evidenced in the training of athletes. I don’t believe it’s different for doctors, dancers, or poets, perhaps just less visible to the unsuspecting.

I often hear business people talk about the war for talent. That phrase troubles me. Filling jobs is not a war for talent. Creating an opportunity that attracts talent to unlock its potential is not a war at all. If your company is doing work of significance and someone with talent becomes aware of that opportunity, the fit will become natural. That is precisely the scenario where one plus one equals three, five, or ten.

Plug real talent into an ordinary opportunity and little exciting is likely to happen. Attempt the impossible with ordinary applicants and equally little is likely to happen. Marry real talent to real opportunity and the sky is the limit. That to me is the power of talent. That is why I revere talent.

I have been blessed over the past four decades to work beside a number of individuals who quietly changed the world through their talent. Some were gifted beyond imagination. Some just worked harder than all those who thought they wanted to compete with them. Most of their names you will never know, but they were game-changers in my life and the many seemingly impossible hurdles we crossed together. They weren’t just good. They were as good at what they do as Clayton Kershaw is at what he does.

When you are in the company of talent, almost nothing seems impossible.

Bobby Miller won his first three games and then encountered reality and lost a huge one. Gavin Stone at the moment is back in the minors. Their talent remains unquestionable, but how it will reveal itself fully won’t be known for a long time, Neither will debut again, but those debut dates will be memorialized on the scoreboard every time they appear in their active careers.

You had a debut and so did I, maybe not tied to a specific date, but close enough to remember the circumstances. We will watch others do the same. The inspiration of seeing talent emerge is unlimited in scope. When you see the next young ballplayer walk onto the field in that brilliant moment of emergence, remember the applause you offer is your own moment of celebration.

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Photo: The Author at Dodger Stadium, Miller’s Home Debut

Psst, pass it on: After a 32-year intermission, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series! After winning the National League West the previous seven years—this year will be the team’s eighth consecutive division title—and exiting the playoffs without the Commissioner’s Trophy, the 2020 postseason finally brought a championship banner back to Chavez Ravine.

The Tampa Bay Rays played with heart through the entire postseason. It takes untold athletic ability, strategy, and grit for any team to make it to the World Series, and while this year’s final prize went to the Dodgers, there is little question we will see the Rays again soon in October baseball. Both teams filled Globe Life Field with players of unquestionable excellence, and the six-game series came with all the unpredictability that makes baseball relentlessly nail-biting no matter your expectations.

The Dodgers simply had to get this done.

After so many failed attempts to full triumph over more than three decades, losing becomes an all-too-familiar feeling. It’s astonishing how quickly that feeling can be replaced by sheer glee. At this moment, I am experiencing glee. Devoted Dodger fans everywhere are experiencing glee. I’m finding it a different form of glee than it might have been any other year. This particular form of glee is a much-needed gulp of surely lasting but highly compartmentalized glee.

Let me try to share that qualified celebration, limited in practical application, boundless in idealistic resurgence.

So much that matters is going on in our world. We are approaching the end of one of the most difficult and painful years in our nation’s history. The year ahead of us is filled with anxiety and uncertainty no matter who is elected to lead the nation. It is only reasonable to ask ourselves why something as inconsequential as professional sports matters.

If you’re not on the team, employed by the team, or an owner of the team, does it really matter who wins the MLB World Series?

Does being a fan of any team matter?

I think it does, but only in a well-rounded, emotional context where we hold our priorities in balance.

Is the drama and endurance of a championship delivered by your home team a matter of life and death? No, in any mentally balanced sense, certainly not.

Is it a joyful diversion that can ease the burden of otherwise overwhelming demands on our time and attention? Yes, I think for many the game is just that. It has been for me.

I needed baseball this past summer. It was only a sixty-game season, but I needed all sixty of them. Even if I didn’t have time to watch them all, I needed to read about them the next day, to look at the box scores, to see who was healthy and getting the job done despite harrowing circumstances.

I needed the break from the political headlines, from the horrors of coronavirus, from the social injustices inflicted on those deserving better, from the inescapable racial bias tearing apart people’s lives, from the wildfires that came much too close to home while savaging the homes of others, and from the daily navigation of my own leadership responsibilities.

We all need things that are fun and fulfilling. Call them luxuries in perspective, but without something to capture the imagination in a time where so much focus is devoured by the absurd, our equilibrium can hang in the balance.

The Dodgers have given that to me when times were less stressful. They win, they lose, they lose when it matters most, but like every team, they reemerge every summer. This summer they mattered more.

It was more than a diversion. It was more than entertainment. It was psychological relief. It was a place I could go that really didn’t matter in the big picture of getting through 2020, but mattered enough to deflect a few minutes of serial stress each day.

I love baseball because my father loves baseball. It’s a way we discovered to connect. My dad was a talented ballplayer in high school and college. He loves to tell me if only he could have mastered hitting the curveball, he might have made a run at The Show. My brother is also an amazing ballplayer, a power hitter and respected star in high school and college. I never had the gift. I just couldn’t put the physical together with the mental. It wasn’t my thing, but it was a great way to talk to my dad.

I have no memory better than going with my dad to see the Detroit Tigers play downtown at the old Tiger Stadium. The Tigers were my first team. I collected all the baseball cards season after season. When the Tigers won the World Series in 1968, I was a little kid. I listened each night to Ernie Harwell call the game on an AM transistor radio under my pillow, with one of those really uncomfortable earplugs muffling the broadcast. To this day I can name the Tigers starting lineup in those days from memory.

There was an even more important bond I shared with my father as a child. We couldn’t afford to go to major league baseball games all the time, but he played softball every week and I loved to cheer on his team. I kept the scorebook in longhand, old school. After each game, I would calculate the updated batting average of every player on the team in longhand, old school.

I’d tag along for pizza with the softball team after their games and make the rounds telling everyone how they hit versus last week and last month. Some of them noted I was pretty good at math for a kid my age and thought I might be a decent student. I guess that was a learning moment for me. We can’t be good at everything, but maybe I’d be good at something.

Those are perennially restorative thoughts encoded in protective mode on my aging biological hard-drive. When I moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, I knew I was going to be here for a while, so it was time to adopt a new team. That was the team of Jackie Robinson. That was the team of Sandy Koufax. That was the right team for me.

In 1988 I had so little money the idea of going to a World Series game wasn’t a remote fantasy. When former Tiger Kirk Gibson helped the Dodgers win that series with that legendary walk-off swing in Game 1, I thought to myself the World Series would come again to Los Angeles, and then perhaps I’d have the money to see them win it all in person.

It’s been a bit of a wait.

And I still didn’t get to see it in person! With so many complications this year, traveling to Arlington, Texas, just wasn’t a viable option.

Dad and I were supposed to go to the All-Star Game this year at Dodger Stadium. Covid-19 also nixed that. We texted with ardor all through the postseason. Hey, it’s the 21st century. No more old school.

A diversion is not the same as a distraction. A distraction can be an annoyance, shifting our attention from determined contemplation. A diversion can be a gift, briefly capturing us with a complementary story thread that sheds light on our more serious obsessions.

When I am seriously focused on work or the ills of the world, I may think I want neither distraction nor diversion. The child in me may say otherwise, that I lose when I am too serious. You may not love baseball, but the child in you wants the same escape. I found mine this summer. I will again next summer.

It’s often said in various ways that baseball is a child’s game played by adults. Bart Giamatti also warned us that it will break your heart. In Field of Dreams, a father and a son mystically share a catch that was always meant to be. Not every diversion can open your mind and your heart. I was talking to a rabbi recently who assured me that anything that can open our hearts is essential to our well-being. He used the metaphor of baseball in his Yom Kippur sermon. Coincidence? Maybe.

Our trip around the baseball diamond begins and ends in childhood, where simple stories can last a lifetime. The Little Prince reminds us of the difference between childish and childlike. One undermines our maturity, the other ensures its sensible evolution. I hope your diversion may be as inspiring, uplifting, and rejuvenating as mine.

And psst, pass it on. For once after 32 seasons, our Blue Crew doesn’t have to repeat those mightily dispiriting words: Wait ‘til next year.

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Photo: MLB