Building a Team Versus Firing the Coach

I am a moderate sports fan. Meaning, I enjoy sports, but don’t really order my life around them or let them dictate my mood. 

 

This year was a great year for my beloved Dodgers. I grew up in Los Angeles, and have rooted for the Dodgers since I was a kid. I remember watching Gibson hit it out on television in 1988, as any kid fan of my age probably can. 

 

In thinking about this last election, I was reminded of a phenomenon in sports that I think is applicable here, and mentioned it on a friend’s post. He is a thoughtful guy, and when he agreed that it worked as an analogy, I decided to think a bit more and maybe write about it. 

 

 

Any casual sports fan knows that, while there is only one champion each year, there are other teams that we call “contenders.” They may not have won this year, but they could have, given a bit better execution, a few fewer mistakes, or even (and this is more common than we admit) a few bounces of the ball. 

 

To put it clearly, winning a championship usually requires a bit of luck. But having a chance at a championship is anything but a matter of luck. Thus, the goal of a team should be to put itself in position to win, and then hope for that bit of luck to be the best. 

 

That said, there are teams - like the Dodgers - who are in that position to win every year. And there are teams that….are not. And many of these teams seem to perpetually lose, year in and year out, and no matter what they do, they continue to lose. 

 

Why is that? 

 

It isn’t merely a matter of money - although money certainly helps. It is easier to build a good team if you can pay good players to play for you, but you need more than that. 

 

As an example, the Rangers and the Blue Jays missed the playoffs despite having the 6th and 7th highest payrolls, respectively. The Orioles and the Brewers made the playoffs comfortably despite having the 4th and 8th lowest payrolls, respectively. 

 

Meanwhile, with a mid-level payroll, the White Sox were historically terrible and have been flat-out unwatchable for years. 

 

If you want to switch sports to football, take a look at a team like the Browns, who throw money around wantonly, make bold trades, have high draft picks (because of their terribleness) and yet seem to suck year after year after year. 

 

So why is that? 

 

And, switching to politics: why does the United States currently struggle (and fail) to build a true first-world society? During the New Deal era, through the early 1970s, the United States was a world leader in building a better society, so we have been able to do this in the past. Why can’t we do that now?

 

I believe the same phenomenon is at play in both sports and politics.

 

In order to build a successful team in sports - and a successful society - you have to use long-term thinking. This is what successful teams do, and unsuccessful teams do not do. And this likewise is what successful societies do (and we Americans actually have done in the past), and what failing societies fail to do. 

 

The reason the Dodgers have had long-term success is that they look at the big picture and the long term - and then invest in building the organization.

 

Ever since the days of the O’Malley family ownership, and Branch Rickey, the Dodgers have a tradition and culture of investing in player development combined with looking outside of traditional markets. [Ignore for now the Fox and McCourt eras, when the Dodgers lost their way.] 

 

It is no accident that it was the Dodgers who broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is no accident that Fernando Valenzuela, Chan Ho Park, and Hideo Nomo all signed with the Dodgers. 

 

It is no accident that the Dodgers seem to develop prospect after prospect. 

 

All of this takes a commitment to long-term and big-picture thinking. You have to invest in scouting. You have to invest in minor-league coaching, in medical staff (Again, no accident that it is the Dodgers’ team physicians that pioneered and continue to perform surgeries on players from every team), in analytics, in marketing, and every other facet of the team. The Dodgers do that. 

 

Teams that fail tend to fall back on short-sighted solutions. If you are the Browns, this means throwing millions of guaranteed money at a quarterback with a buttload of sexual assault accusations and a bad attitude. And panic-trade good players. And draft poorly. In a 25 year period, the Browns went through 38 quarterbacks. THIRTY-EIGHT!!!

 

And a lot of coaches too. 

 

If I were to reduce this to a soundbite, here it is:

 

Good organizations build teams. Bad organizations fire the coach.

 

Your team sucks? Just fire the coach. Surely that will turn things around. 

 

There is a tendency to think this way among Americans. I remember after each season where the Dodgers lost in the playoffs, there were calls to fire Dave Roberts. Never mind his successes. Never mind that his players love and respect him. Never mind that the Dodger coaching staff seems to be able to get more out of less with players over and over. 

 

I mean, Roberts looks like a sure-fire hall of famer, and in the conversation for the best coach of the 21st Century so far. 

 

But fire the coach, right?

 

Well, the Dodgers don’t appear to be in a hurry to fire the coach, and even some inveterate media critics had to admit that winning the world series with only three starting pitchers was quite a feat of coaching. 

 

What has also come out is that the scouting did a great job of finding weaknesses to exploit, and the Dodgers were better prepared than their opponents. 

 

See, good organization. 

 

***

 

Coming back (at long last) to this election, some things really stood out to me. 

 

There is a theory that presidential elections in the United States aren’t really about issues. At least for the middle 20% that we call “swing voters.” 

 

Rather, presidential elections are a referendum on how swing voters feel about the economy. 

 

There was a Democrat in the White House, inflation happened and people didn’t like that, so….

 

Fire the coach!

 

This was supported by some real evidence, by the way. A significant number of voters, for example, voted for both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Il Toupee. What? Well, she did some asking, and found that these voters viewed both her and Il Toupee as outsiders looking out for the good of the working class. 

 

Hmm. Well, I’ll save the question of perception versus reality for a future post - nothing the GOP intends to do would help inflation or lower prices - but this sounds very much like a “fire the coach” situation. 

 

Things got more expensive, and I felt poorer, so let’s fire the coach. 

 

Just like in sports, firing the coach may sometimes be the correct decision - some coaches aren’t very good, for example. (Mike Singletary comes to mind…) But firing the coach because the team sucks isn’t going to change the fact that….the team sucks.

 

America’s economic issues aren’t the result of recent decisions so much as decades of bad policy.

 

Our current inequality stems from decisions made when I was a child (mostly by Reagan): tax cuts for the wealthy, union-busting, stagnant minimum wage, free trade without a plan to ease the hardships on workers, lack of universal health care, and so on. 

 

Our more recent inflation was caused by factors that were never in the control of the president. Covid, followed by supply shortages. If anything, the US weathered these better than other countries. 

 

But fire the coach. 

 

This is the result of short-term thinking. This idea that if we just put in a new coach, all of the sucky things about our economic system would solve themselves. Of course they won’t. It took decades to build in the problems, and it will take hard work - and the investment of tax dollars - to build a more equitable system. 

 

You can apply this to literally every significant social problem in our country or any country. If there were a magic fix, well, someone would have already tried it and the problem would have been solved. 

 

Rather, difficult problems require hard work, investment, and patience to wait for the harvest. If one thinks of it like farming, an economy isn’t like an annual row crop - it is like an orchard that takes years to bear fruit. You have to think long term, and invest now for the future. 

 

Just like we did during the New Deal. 

 

You can’t just fire the coach. You need to build the team. 

 

Obviously, this isn’t the only issue at stake in the election. I have written extensively about the roles that racism, sexism, and xenophobia play in our politics. The opposition to social programs mostly is driven by white people who don’t want black people to have the same access they have. The fear of change in general drives a lot of voters. 

 

But there does seem to be a certain segment for whom issues of policy do not seem to really matter. For those, the mantra holds: Fire the coach.

 

As we are about to find out, firing the coach and hiring back the guy who fucked things up last time isn’t going to magically make everything better.