Who Could've Predicted?

The 2 Biggest Baseball Predictions in History – One never happened and the other may come true!

Sport events lead conversations in every aspect of our lives … they bring us together. This World Series has provided the very best in sportsmanship, a love of the game, and the class of the athletes has mostly shone through. The game has had its moments of tension over the decades. Let’s take a look at a prediction from the mid-90s.

Baseball is going to DIE! This mid-90s prediction came out of a proposed salary cap from club owners to their players while owners raked in profits. This all led to the failed antitrust legislation in June of 94 which left players little choice but to strike. The Many sports casters, pundits, and fans forecasted that baseball would never recover from the 1994-95 Major League Baseball strike. I’d say that today we can, without a doubt, that was completely wrong!

The second prediction came out 2 years ago when Ben Reiter, a Sports Illustrated writer, decided to check out things first-hand and see exactly what was happening with the laughing stock team in baseball, the Houston Astros – commonly referred lovingly to as the LAstros by some fare-weather fans. Reiter decided after witnessing some things that were happening in the front office and things were changing. Fast.

The team was being restructured. Shingle by shingle. Brick by brick. And then, mortared in. Management had hedged with younger players and had a long-term plan that played out rather quickly considering where the team is today.

What we can take away from this is that planning is most definitely the key to success. How can you use the Astros model to build a championship team? Should you rid yourself completely of the veterans and swap them out for more youthful up and comers? Do you keep the veterans and train the up and comers? Do you do the same thing you did last year?

What may work best in the corporate setting is a combination of these efforts. In corporate settings, rely on your veterans while you enhance your foundation with the appropriate up and comers, don’t walk all of that intellectual property out your front door. Otherwise, you may experience utter chaos. The best thing to do is ensure you are keeping the top contributors while adding and upgrading your talent and let go those that may not add intrinsic or measurable value.

When you are building your team, you need to go by the reality of the current team professional stats as well as your own gut feeling about the individual in consideration, and how the skills will fit within the existing team. This will be your pattern to follow going forward. This is not easy. This requires taking a hard look at yourself as well as your current team members to make the necessary assessments in order to have that winning team. Understanding what fits into your organization is one of the hardest things to do when you are recruiting talent, find the right skills that show up on the resume is easy, recruiting for what fits on your team is much harder and requires recruiting skills and talent as displayed by the Astro scouting and recruiting team.

So often we need to look outside our areas of existence to see what we may be missing. With that may come the need for a 3^rd party that lives outside your organization but within the specter of what you need to do to drive success and when that time comes, you can count on Brookwoods Group to assist with pinch hitting, relievers, position players, or any other position you need covered. We’re on the field!

For fare-weather baseball fans, you may find this site to be educational and fun: http://www.ducksters.com/sports/baseballglossary.php

This site focuses on the Game 5 highlights and bear in mind, Game 5 will go down in history as the most entertaining baseball game as well as providing us with record-breaking stats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZdlcTp56Hk

Go ASTROS!