Game of Startups: Part One

The business of baseball as analogue to the world of startups.

On a good day, baseball is my favorite sport, while every day I’m deeply immersed in the world of startups. It was only a matter of time before I started to obsess a bit about the ties that bound them. In this piece, I’m going to talk very little about startups. At least at the outset of writing this piece, I think that a pretty deep dive into baseball will explain some things about startups more effectively than if I actually draw out the parallels.

I think that there are serious lessons here as to how we should develop startups and startup talent. I’ve used many of the lessons that stem from this piece, and will speak and write more about them in the future.

Contrary to what you might think, professional baseball is actually a bottom-up structure rather than top-down. It all begins with the lowest level of professional baseball, single-A (“A”) “rookie ball.” The vast majority of players in rookie ball come directly from high school or college baseball. Let me digress for a minute to shed some light on the experience of a high school baseball player moving into the professional ranks.

Many if not most truly outstanding high school baseball players can do everything on the field. They can pitch and hit beautifully, or, if they’re not pitchers, they play their position with a precision so remarkable they get noticed. A lot. And when I say they can hit, they do so with tons of power and very, very high batting averages and on-base percentages.

The vast majority of superstar high school players fail at the entry level of professional baseball. It’s nothing more or less than a numbers game when you take all of the high school superstars and put them on the same field, playing the same game. It’s amazing how many high school phenoms, who hit with tons of power and ridiculously high averages, just can’t hit in rookie league.

But let’s say they do. Let’s say that, for whatever reason (and there are a truckload of reasons: world-class acuity, truly natural hand-eye coordination, innate rhythm and timing), a player succeeds in rookie ball. The next step might be short- or longer-season advanced A ball. There are a variety of professional leagues in the US where the player might end up. Since a Major League Baseball (“MLB”) franchise owns the player’s contract, they simply assign them (see the MLB Arizona Diamondbacks organizational image at the top of this piece) to one of their “farm teams.”

Before we talk about non-rookie A baseball, we need to discuss two critical exceptions to the rule: there are some players so talented that they skip levels. Not everyone plays rookie ball, not everyone moves from rookie ball to short- or longer-season A ball, though most do.

Exception #1: The player never progresses from rookie ball. They simply fall into that large group that never figures it out. They can’t adjust to facing great pitchers every day instead of the maybe once a week they did in high school. They never find their timing at the plate, and either stick to what made them successful before becoming a pro — more often than not, thereby continuing to flail at bat — ; or make a series of fundamental pivots as to how they see and process the ball, swing, and follow-through, which sometimes works wonders, but most often does not and ends their professional baseball career.

Exception #2: The player has demonstrated their talent and promise to such an extent in rookie ball that they not only advance, they actually skip a level. Or two. Everything that the scouts (who were their greatest supporters in counseling their MLB team to draft the player) saw in this player actually came true. They run the bases even faster as a pro than they did in high school (continued physical development + daily improvement in reading and anticipating the game around them — they get that extra quarter-step that equates to being safe at the next base rather than out). So, here, the player might move from rookie league to longer-season, advanced A ball (the South Bend Silver Hawks or the Visalia Rawhide, in the Arizona Diamondbacks example above), skipping short-season A ball. Or, in a truly exceptional circumstance, they move to AA (the Mobile Bay Bears, if the Diamondbacks own your professional rights).

But let’s say that neither of these exceptions occurs. The player in issue would probably move from their rookie league team (the Missoula Osprey) to short-season A ball (the Yakima Bears). Now it’s simply rinse and repeat. I’ve personally seen a ton of professional baseball careers expire at the A level. The odds against a player ever moving up from A are high. It becomes a very hard practical reality of not having enough spaces. Let’s say you (as I did as a kid) play Left Field. Okay, you did well enough at Missoula to earn a spot on the Yakima roster for next season. The starting Left Fielder for Yakima either left baseball, his rights were traded or assigned, or he moved up. So there’s a spot, which, by the way, you’ll be competing for every day against the other Left Fielders already on the Yakima roster. But let’s say that things actually work out and you get a fair amount of playing time in your position at Yakima.

Here’s where things get even more complicated. You’ve now been in the Diamondbacks system for a season. They have highly-trained scouts and coaches who watch and report your every move. While many think that the organization has already ranked you, the reality is that you’ve ranked yourself. It’s no longer an issue of promise and potential, it’s one of execution. And you’ve begun to show people that you’re more than likely going to “top out” at the AA level. Not only are you projected to not ever play for the Arizona Diamondbacks (or anyone else) in Major League Baseball, the Diamondbacks don’t believe that you’ll ever make an impact for the Reno Aces in AAA. They use all of their predictive tools to make a very educated guess that your career will eventually die on the vine at AA, maybe in Mobile, maybe somewhere else, because now you’re expendable. If there’s another organization that has determined that you’re more valuable than the Diamondbacks organization has determined, you’re trade bait and you may have at least temporary new life in a land where others see your trajectory more as you see it yourself.

Or do you? The vast majority of professional baseball players are actually very self-aware. They see what’s going on around them. They saw and felt what it was like to be the absolute best kid in the park in Little League and high school, then a strong player in rookie ball, still notable in A, then bone average at best in advanced A. More often than not, they get it. That doesn’t dissuade them from sticking it out for a while, taking the long bus rides to San Jose and Yuma for a few hundred bucks a week, hoping that the landscape changes from or to desert.

There’s an inherent hope in the game of baseball, which I attribute in part to its being the only professional sport that isn’t governed by time. Unlike hockey, football, basketball, even soccer, there is no time limit to a baseball game. That allows even a team losing by 10 runs in the bottom of the final inning to reinvent themselves, to rise like a phoenix (Arizona Diamondbacks pun very much intended) to victory. There is no clock in baseball.

So, in real life, there are stories of players who defy the odds and rise higher than anyone expected they would. They were undrafted or drafted by MLB teams in very low rounds. Then they find ways to excel. But it’s the structure of baseball that develops its talent. Teams use data and metrics — much has been written about this over the years, beginning with Bill James, through the entire Moneyball meme and beyond. The image of a salty MLB manager making gut decisions on players in the organization is an illusory image. Decisions are made on balancing data and intuition, with measurables more often than not winning the day.

I’m going to leave this here for now, as it’s a piece that really might never end. Again, I’m going to write and talk more about this. What I hoped to accomplish in this piece is to lay some of the foundation from which we can draw and play with some assumptions and realities of developing startups and startup talent.

• Aron Solomon (@aronsolomon)