Spring: A Season for Hope and Strategy
April is a welcome and fertile annual breeding ground for optimism, and renewed hopefulness for a successful future. Almost 300 years ago, Alexander Pope coined the phrase “hope springs eternal,” presumably referencing the renewed energy of April and “spring.” Spring season officially comes in March, not coincidentally, as does the opening day of baseball season, but April is really when people get the fever and are inspired to dream big. There is nothing that better illustrates this annual donning of rose-colored glasses than baseball. In truth, it’s baseball’s fault. Throughout the years, the sport has given us several “worst to first” stories of dark horse teams’ dramatic achievements in stark reversals of their previous year’s bitter disappointments.
These stories are partly responsible for the mass irresponsible inspiration for a “live for today,” “carpe diem”, “the future is now,” and “there is no tomorrow,” mentality. It’s a kind of group spring fever hysteria.
Spring encourages us to rationalize recent history and ignore the portents of a distant future, giving root to wide-eyed dreams of what’s possible right now. In baseball, and maybe everywhere else, this can be a little dangerous, and that’s how, for a while here in Maryland, we lost our “Oriole Way.”
There are lots of opinions and numerous articles you can find about what it means when you say, “the Oriole Way.” Some current O’s fans are probably, understandably, unfamiliar with the expression. For many, it means doing things the right way, by a proven design with consistent and disciplined instruction to grow talent. It describes a commitment to “playing the long game” by investing in the people already on the team or in the team’s farm system and at the same time investing in growing the system with new talent. The O’s strategy was always to find and grow prospects into major league stars, a much more practical and sustainable approach to “renting” them in the spectacularly expensive free agency marketplace. This is how a small market team like Baltimore’s O’s could compete favorably year after year back in the day with big market competitors up north. But something went wrong, the team lost its way, and in a relative moment of collective regional delusion, the team abandoned its legacy and forfeited its reliable organizational success for at least a generation. The owners and the fans had become jealous, and impatient, they wanted it all, and they wanted it now, and the team spent time and money on the right now, and winning this year, like there would be no tomorrow.
This led to big trades and acquisitions, large long-term contracts, and most would say many big mistakes while searching for the magic bullets from outside the organization as opposed to investing, growing, developing, and rewarding the talent in the Orioles system. Then, because of this short-term desperate ideology of “living for today,” there were decades of tomorrows.
Because it turns out, real life is not always represented in 60’s music lyrics or movie quotes, there are consequences and repercussions and there are also dividends and rewards.
Long-term success, in sports and in business, is fueled by hope, but demands a strategy and a steadfast commitment to a strategic plan, even in the face of tantalizing risks and challenging sacrifices. Good planning requires equal parts of what you plan to do, coupled with what you decide you will not do, in pursuit of the goal, recognizing and developing the talent and assets you have as well as those you need to acquire. As movie baseball manager Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) said in A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great." He also said, “There is no crying in baseball,” so he wasn’t always right.
Spring enthusiasm should never be curbed, but celebrated, carefully cultivated, and yes, focused on the terms of the greatest immediate success, but inextricably coupled with good faith in the many seasons to come. At MarylandSaves, we are as thrilled as the rest of Major League Baseball to see the Oriole Way back in vogue at Camden Yards, developing the league’s best talent, delivering a team favored to win the division again this year, and go deep in the playoffs. Hope is not a strategy, but it is borne of a rock-solid belief in investing in the people you have today, for the success of many tomorrows.