Business Insight Zone

Please bear with a slightly self-indulgent post as I gaze longingly at the Labor Day weekend. Good?

It may have become clear to you that I’m a big baseball fan. For my money, Joe Posnanski is the best baseball writer working, so I’m an avid reader of his blog. He had a great post this week in which he contrasted the stunning — indeed, previously unimaginable — breakthroughs of Einstein to the often hidebound approach of the management of Major League Baseball franchises.

The crux of his argument: perennially bad teams like the Pirates or the Reds or Posnanski’s own hometown Royals would be better off taking radically different approaches to the way baseball is played. We’re not talking about letting a player swing the bat on a 3-0 count — we’re talking about using four outfielders at a time, or having only 10 pitchers (instead of 12 or 13) on a roster.

The example he develops, borrowed from his friend, the great baseball thinker Bill James, is that a team like the Pirates might cease scouting or drafting any pitchers who throw harder than, say, 90 miles per hour. If you’re a baseball nut, by all means give the extended discussion a read. If you’re not, just understand that following this approach would potentially make the Pirates a laughingstock in the Major Leagues, since it goes against the fundamental principle of finding young pitchers who can throw hard — or even better, who can throw HARD.

But it might just work. Here’s Posnanski:

But my feeling is that if you have decided to just stop looking at the 95 mph guys and focused ALL YOUR ENERGIES on these slow-throwing guys, well, I think the chances are pretty good that you would get some, most or even all of those [pitchers you want]. Why? Because, generally speaking, other teams are not investing much effort in scouting people who top out at 83. They are not scouting those players, they are not making much effort sign those players, they’re not spending draft picks on those players. They simply do not VALUE those players. if you focus all of your effort on it — and you believe in what you’re doing — you will probably figure out which of those slow-throwers has the command, quirkiness, control or movement necessary to get big leaguers out. And if you choose to value command and quirkiness and control and utterly devalue the radar gun, you should be able to corner that market.

That’s business differentiation in a nutshell. Southwest Airlines did it many years ago when it decided, once and for all, that it would not:

• Serve meals.
• Run ANY unprofitable routes.

It’s served them well because they’ve had the discipline to stick with it, and we could think of other examples (please lob them into the comments) of companies that have taken stands on similarly counterintuitive / risky / non-conventional-wisdom / “crazy” approaches.

Maybe you could use an hour or two of this long weekend to think about what YOUR business could do radically differently to corner a market of its own. Figuratively, somewhere the next Hall of Fame-caliber 83-m.p.h. pitcher is waiting for you to discover him.

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Photo by Chris Acuna.