Issue No. 390 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a colorful baseball book (with management insights) by Dan Busby, a self-described “ticketologist.” You can’t put it down! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and check out the links on these pages for more summer reading list nominees.
Management Through the Lens of Baseball
Hey, baseball fans! The 2018 World Series begins on Oct. 23. Will your favorite team be there? (Go Cubs!)
Today, the New York Yankees are 11 games out of first place in the AL East, but it hasn’t always been this way. The Yankees have won 27 World Series championships—an MLB record. But their most recent Commissioner’s Trophy has been collecting dust since 2009.
So…what’s up with these fascinating factoids? And why should you care?
Hot-off-the-press is Dan Busby’s amazing book, Before and After Babe Ruth: A Story of the New York Yankees Told Through the Lens of Tickets and Passes. Even if you’re a Chicago Cubs fan like me (I survived 21 winters in Chicago), you can’t put this book down. It’s absolutely fascinating—and there’s something in this book for everyone: fans, CEOs, marketing/branding teams, church leaders, parents, fundraisers, and team builders! Enjoy these eight water cooler conversation starters:
1) HEADLINE SAVVY. The Yankees were once called the “Highlanders,” but that 11-letter moniker crowded newspaper headlines, while “Yanks” and “Yankees” were a better fit. The name, “Knickerbockers”—a plug for a popular beer from Owner Jacob Ruppert’s brewery—was also rejected due to length.
That reminded me of Charles Handy’s autobiography that notes Management Guru Peter Drucker “once quipped that journalists only came up with the word [guru] because ‘charlatan’ was too long for a headline.”
2) FUNDRAISING SAVVY. During World War I, “...in an attempt to positively influence public opinion about professional baseball…the Ball and Bat Fund was established to provide baseball equipment to soldiers serving overseas.” Across America, every baseball fan was asked to donate “25 cents for the purchase of equipment and to forward a copy of the appeal to four other fans.” (When’s the last time you asked your most loyal donors to recruit other donors?)
3) PR SPIN. Quoting Peter Morris on the Yankees at Hilltop Park for their 1903 to 1912 seasons: “The best player may have been throwing games, their chief scout was a bigamist, the owners skirted the law, and maybe the best thing you could say about the ballpark was that it never burned down.”
So…why a book about baseball through the lens of baseball tickets? My friend, Dan Busby (we co-authored a governance book last year), has a very serious day job as president of ECFA (Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability). In off-hours though, he describes himself as a “ticketologist.”
In the 1950s, Busby began collecting World Series programs (the mail order company attached actual World Series tickets!). Inspired, Dan upped his game and in 1962 began collecting opening day tickets from every major league baseball team. This ticketologist now consults with the National Baseball Hall of Fame concerning memorabilia acquisitions. I tell friends, “Dan is in a league of his own—he’s a walking Wikipedia!”
This gorgeous coffee table book features baseball tickets and season passes on every page—and the remarkable colors, shapes, sizes, fonts, and advertising (yes—advertising was alive and well in the early 1900s) are outdone only by the page-turning narrative on owners, managers, players—Babe Ruth, of course—and Yankee and MLB history, in all its virtues and vices. You can’t put it down!
More fascinating factoids:
4) 1 COOKIE OR 2? I was reminded of the “One cookie or two cookies?” marketing lesson I gave my son Jason (at age four)—when I read Busby’s account of Babe Ruth’s salary negotiating skills when the Sultan of Swat was still with the Boston Red Sox:
“Before the 1919 season began, Ruth gave [Owner Harry] Frazee a choice of two proposals:
--one year at $15,000
--or three years at $10,000 each.
Frazee reluctantly accepted the latter.”
Parents: Inspire your kids to play baseball. In 2014, L.A. Angels center fielder Mike Trout signed a six-year contract extension for $144.5 million. Yikes. Compare his 2018 salary of $33.25 million to The Great Bambino’s 1919 salary of $10,000 per year. Yikes, again.
5) SUNDAY BASEBALL. According to Busby, “At the start of the twentieth century, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati were the only major league towns that allowed Sunday baseball.” It’s interesting that today, MLB doesn’t complain when churches conduct services on Saturday.
6) FLOP WARNINGS! Busby describes Boston Red Sox Owner Harry Frazee as a “clever theatrical promoter” (his day job) and his biggest hit, No, No, Nanette, ran for 321 shows on Broadway. Riding that wave, Frazee produced Yes, Yes, Yvette—which flopped after just 40 shows. (Memo to Marketing: conduct flop analysis on all products, programs, and services—especially when the CEO thinks he or she has a home run idea.)
7) NFL: BLAME BARROW. Baseball Hall of Famer Ed Barrow (1868-1953), the “de facto general manager” of the Yankees for many years “was the first executive to put numbers on player uniforms.” He retired the first player’s uniform numbers (Lou Gehrig’s), and was the first executive “to allow fans to keep foul balls that entered the stadium.”
And NFL execs may want to note this: Barrow “was the first to require the playing of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ the United States’ national anthem, before every game, instead of only on holidays.”
I gotta stop…but how about just one more!
8) HOT DOGS ON THE FIELD? What’s more American than hot dogs and baseball? But in the 1921 World Series between the Yankees and the Giants (nine games at the Polo Grounds), concessionaire Harry Stevens “was selling 21,000 hot dogs and 3,000 bags of peanuts per game”—but—“he complained that the drama of the games was hurting his sales, because the fans were so focused on the action that they were not eating enough food. (Memo to Management: identify your measurable goals first—then play ball!)
This beautiful book is a treasure. It’s the perfect gift book for baseball fans and your organization’s front lobby. Nicely done, Dan!
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Before and After Babe Ruth: A Story of the New York Yankees Told Through the Lens of Tickets and Passes, by Dan Busby.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) “For the next four weeks, I’m asking four people to borrow this Yankees book for a week and present one fascinating factoid and one management insight at our next four staff meetings. The first taker earns a Starbucks card!”
2) The announced opening day attendance at the new Yankee Stadium on April 18, 1923 (the “Souvenir Programme” cost 15 cents) was 74,217. One problem: seating capacity “was really around 62,000.” How accurate are our stories and statistics—and what drives our need to exaggerate?
P.S. GO CUBS! And read my other two favorite baseball books, The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse, by Tom Verducci (2017), and A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (2014), by George F. Will.
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Major League Branding
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook (2nd Edition with 17% Fewer Typos!)
The Printing Bucket chapter in Mastering the Management Buckets notes Fred Smith’s pithy book, Breakfast With Fred—and this wisdom, “I learned to write to burn the fuzz off my thinking.”
If it’s time for you to burn the fuzz off your branding, click here for a free 57-page eBook on ministry branding, by Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media.
For more on branding your programs, products, and services, order the the hot-off-the-press second edition workbook, Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips From John Pearson. Order here on Amazon.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Looking for new ways to communicate your mission—with messages that won’t be lost in the sea of kitten videos and fake news? Check out the innovative work from Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video). Click here.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, frequent flyer miles, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As a board member and raving fan of Christian Community Credit Union (a non-profit), we proudly list the credit union as our top pick for serving your financial services needs.
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