If other teams get the breaks of being healthy, no major players underperforming, they get hot at just the right time…..in other words all the stars align right for them while the Yankees have a train wreck of injuries, several underperformers, get cold at an inopportune time. It takes luck for a team to beat the Yankees and bad luck for the Yankess to lose.

And all that Yankee luxury tax money going to Minnesota, Tampa, and Kansas City…….the owners pocket that money for themselves with no mandate to spending it to improve their teams.

As an avid sports fan I only watch baseball if it appears the Yankees are going to lose. Otherwise, why bother wasting me time watching David annually trying to defeat Goliath? I’d rather watch football and basketball.

Bill

My response was too John Sullivan’s list.

And my comment about them not playing in October was that they don’t do enough of the right things to get winning teams OTHER than try to BUY the best. I also stated how this strategy has NOT worked all that well. One world series win in 9 years – not many companies can wait that long.

I also agree with Patti and that they may be a better analogy of how those without deep pockets can still put together a winning team.

That said, when you look at John’s 16 lessons, many could really be applied in the corporate world and with substantial benefit. 1st though, a Corporation must realize what Steinbrenner did which is that human talent is an organizations most important asset. Until then, talent acquisition (by “agent” or otherwise) will still largely be relegated to the minor leagues.

IMHO, we recruiters DO NOT need to do this- we DO need to find or (for the lucky ones) hold on to work that will enable us to maintain a fairly middle-class standard of living for ourselves and our families in the face of 17.5% un/underemployment, with a substantial recovery likely to be some years away, if only because we have “fallen so far so fast”. Consequently, I do not find articles relating to very rich and specialized organizations or exhortations on how to be a “budget supplicant” in a large, bureaucratic, and reactionary-sounding corporate environment particularly relevant to my (and most of my recruiting colleagues’) current and near-future situation(s).

Thank You,

Keith Halperin keithsrj@sbcglobal.net

My point is absent a hard Baseball salary cap the Yankees are expected to win every year based on payroll. They field an average of an $8-9 million dollar player at every position. The reason they don’t win every year is ‘shit happens,’ not because they didn’t spend enough.

Bill

Bill’s comment:
“They routinely have the highest player salary expense of any MLB team.”

Jim S Response:
“And without that one thing they would not be playing in October.”

I respectfully disagree. If you look at the numbers, the Los Angeles Dodgers payroll is well below the Yankees (only 60% of the Yankees payroll over the past 15 years), and yet they have the second highest wins per season average over the past 50 years (85 wins per season average). Clearly the Dodgers and the Yankees represent two very different talent acquisition methodologies. As you have pointed out, the Yankees buy what they want and pay top price. They are in a market that allows them more revenue than many other teams (major market), and so they can afford more expenses because they have more revenue available. The Dodgers represent the polar opposite in terms of development versus purchase of talent and the value of loyalty (BTW, I believe you create a false dichotomy when you position it as “loyalty versus performance” – look at the pre-McCourt Dodgers). The Dodge5rs historically have been known as pioneers in international outreach (Latin America, Japan and Korea), and their farm system was (again, pre-McCourt) legendary (the Dodgers have accumulated a full 25% of national league Rookie of the Year awards, and have almost doubled the Yankees numbers).

Although I respect the Yankees approach, their success comes at a cost (higher volatility of success), and they are tied terminally to buying because they have no internal mechanism to develop talent. And, as Bill J pointed out, not every team (or firm) can pay the price to compete with the Yankees.

Rather than a model to be followed by by all firms generally as your article suggests, I think your points apply to a very niche market of firms that have plenty of money and aren’t trying to develop or protect a corporate culture.

If it were actually true and you can buy a championship, those teams without the money need to figure a way to refinance, leverage or whatever it took to get the money to compete. (Over charging the fans is a good place to start.) Remember that these are not so much baseball teams as businesses and under capitalized ventures tend to fail more often than adequately capitalized ventures.

But when you recruit way up at the level where only the devil may care, mistakes are understood, expected, and felt with relatively less pain. The consequences of poor hiring decisions are shared by hundreds of very wealthy folks and the poor productivity of the errant hire is publicly documented by thousands of statisticians and reporters.

Throw into the mix the legal monopoly that is professional sports, the salary caps, the TV markets (aka, locations), the law firms (affectionately called “Agents”), and the sub-businesses (aka, players unions) and you have a surreal soup not seen in any other enterprise. And did I mention the performance bonuses, options, free-agency, marketing deals, and promotional events? This mess makes GE look like a lemonade stand.

While I appreciate the aggressive nature of the approach, the swagger in the execution, and the responsibility for the outcomes, somehow the analogy to the real world doesn’t translate well for me.

And without that one thing they would not be playing in October. All your points are well taken but if the Yankees didn’t have the deep pockets to overpay and outbid everyone else they would still come up empty. And this wealth of talent hadn’t won a WS for 9 years (since their last run of 4 in the late 90′s and 2000) and it was 20 years prior to that (1978). Hardly the kind of consistent performance a company wants.

All of the other points are valid but if you can’t “buy the talent” by outbiding everyone else (see bullet #2 and #6), you have to get the best “available” talent that is in your range. Also,high pay does not necessarily mean top performance (look at the million dollar execs running failing banks).

How many sports owners, corporation, or recruiters have deep enough pockets to hire people/place people while operating at a net loss?

Certainly the Steinbrenners can, and George often said over the years he’d do so in order to try to win a championship every single year.

Titles are great, however, how long can most stay in business losing money?

Just my two cents.

Bill