A Project that Feels Right

Some projects transcend. They transcend money, and brand, and whatever else you could have done with your time for the hours you spent on them. You don’t mind getting up early, staying up late, or trying to fit the gear into the space behind the car seats. You do them because getting them done feels right to you.

The video embedded in this post emerged from such an endeavor. Operation Finally Home builds houses for disabled veterans and the widows of fallen soldiers. They’ve done it many times around the country and I bet days like the one we chronicled never, ever, get old for them.

We on the creative side had a minor part to play, of course. We just came to document the day and edit a package together the family could use to remember their move-in day. Many others, like Tim Jackson Custom Homes and their staff and partners, had put in massive amounts of work to build an actual house. If this day seemed awesome to me, imagine how they probably felt.

Neighbors lined the streets to welcome the new arrivals, the Jackels, to Little Elm, Texas. The flags they waved and the hands they clapped and their very presence on a Saturday morning showed how big a deal they felt this day was.

So this project felt transcendent - beyond politics, beyond a small Texas town, beyond the moment. On the other hand, however, it had at its core something much simpler.

It had the desire to make a family in a strange place feel welcomed. It had the pride I took in bringing my 12-year old niece along to learn from the occasion and then using some shots she took in the final video. It had the satisfaction those who designed the house no doubt took in the joy reflected on the family’s faces as they toured the home. It had the simple pleasure one takes in observing, and perhaps tendering, human kindness. Really, nothing feels too much better than that.

LinkedIn’s Wild Side

Last year, LinkedIn helped me do something crazy.

I up and quit a job where I’d worked for more than a dozen years . . . with a boss who liked me . . . at a Major League Baseball team. I did it to start a business, an endeavor I’d never attempted before, and I couldn’t build up much of a client base before leaving because of how interconnected the industry is. One asset I did have to help me in this nutty venture was a certain business networking site. LinkedIn = enabler.

I started planning to go all entrepreneurial on the world two years before I actually did it. The preparations I made included buying a computer and selling a house. They also included business cards. I needed to print my own, which I had to get done rapid-fire at FedEx Office when I unexpectedly found out on a Friday that I had my first client meeting on a Monday. I also decided to go through the large stack of other people’s calling cards I had accumulated over my career. Here’s where LinkedIn enters the picture.

Every person represented on one of those cards that I felt might still remember me (fondly, ideally) got searched out on LinkedIn and received an invitation to connect. After I went through the mounds of business cards, I checked old emails, media guides (I worked for a baseball team, remember), and askmen.com’s list of available heiresses (not really - I swear). Relevant folks from those sources also received invites. I got back lots of accepted invitations.

I felt it important to start connecting with folks before I needed anything from them. At that time, I was the guy who worked for the Texas Rangers, a baseball team headed for the World Series, not a struggling startup proprietor desperate for paid-by-the-word blogging scraps. LinkedIn works perfectly for such a scenario because it feels low-pressure. Accepting an invitation doesn’t obligate one to anything or grant access to political-career-destroying-photos. It just reminds one you’re a professional and cracks a door to future business interaction.

The exercise helped with some personal interaction, too. I always try to use a personalized message in my invitations to connect and that stoked further messaging, phone calls, and an occasional meet-up with people with whom I hadn’t worked in years. Those connections proved fun as well as useful in networking.

Since then, LinkedIn has helped me do more wild stuff. It occurred to me that lots of the people I might like to do business with belong to the same LinkedIn Groups I do. I became more active posting content to those groups and started a blog. That led to more contacts, including a business partnership an ocean away and regular appearances on a radio showthat originates out of Corfu, Greece (really - I couldn’t make that up).

You can learn a crazy amount of information on LinkedIn about people you don’t know but would like to. That’s a two-way street, of course. Bring it on. Research me. Let’s mess something up together.

LinkedIn doesn’t host cat videos (unless you’re a veterinarian, maybe) or vacation photos (unless you’re a travel agent, perhaps). It has a more buttoned-down feel, as it should. But that doesn’t mean it can’t contribute to some completely audacious undertakings. Party on, LinkedIn.

Rush Olson decided to write this post after receiving an invitation to publish from LinkedIn (more craziness from them). So, he figured, why not make it about LinkedIn? You know, do a little apple-polishing.

Rush has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities and much more through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

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Winning's not so bad

Many critics missed the point of the early 2000s A's "Moneyball" approach. That front office didn't intend to declare any given talent measurement technique worthless. They simply wanted to find some that others undervalued so they could exploit a market weakness. They weren't saying that scouting or baseball card statistics had zero value. Since everyone had access to those tools, however, they sought insight from alternative sources.

A revolution has resulted. The sabermetric onslaught has created jobs, websites, and, to be sure, a certain amount of smarminess toward traditionalists. Ironically, as advanced stat nerds have attempted to better analyze which numbers lead to more ballgames won, the "win" has become one of the most disparaged standard stats categories.

Now, to be clear, I bear no hostility toward advanced stats. I embrace them to the greatest extent my math skills allow, and admire those who successfully analyze them. I also grew up reading the backs of baseball cards and, while I acknowledge that Wins Above Replacement (either f or b variety) may well be a superior predictor of pitcher success, does it render the "win" worthless?

For purposes of this post, we’ll confine the discussion to wins by a game’s starting pitcher. If we look to evaluate the win, we have to ask what it tells us. Does it impart any useful information whatsoever? Or is the answer to the question "Is the 20-5 pitcher better than the 5-20 pitcher?" always "I need to check his FIP information!”? 

Well, one thing we know for sure is that a winning starter threw at least five innings. The bullpen threw at most four innings, since even if the game went extras, we can be certain the starting pitcher threw at least nine ininngs. So one contribution that emerges from a pitcher's recording a win is to give his team’s relatively rested bullpen an improved chance of helping win the next day's game, a difficult-to-measure nuance.

We can also presume the starter had sufficient fortitude to overcome adversity that may have arisen, like fielding miscues or bad calls, well enough to record at least 15 outs. If, during those innings, a couple of seeing-eye singles and a groundout put runners on second and third with a tough left-handed hitter coming up, a LOOGY didn’t bail out his ERA. Whatever the result, he fought through it himself. 

Recording 15 outs also tells us the pitcher either threw well enough to allow few baserunners or managed to get outs under pressure. It seems reasonable to suggest that he demonstrated mental toughness by getting outs with men on base or by limiting the damage after runs had scored. Even if he gave up ten runs in the fifth to cut his team’s advantage to 12-10, he somehow got his squad out of the inning.

We can also surmise the winning pitcher handled whatever climatic conditions prevailed at the ballpark that day better than at least one of the opposition's mound men. Numbers-based calculations account for the weather factor in various ways, like ballpark-adjusted stats, but it’s still hard to establish a neutral standard for a sport played indoors and outdoors from Toronto to San Diego. That is especially true in the short term. Things might equalize in the long run somewhat, but even then an N.L. Central starter’s ERA, for instance, might feel the impact of his drawing three straight starts when the wind blew out at Wrigley. Of course, he also would have gotten to play the Cubs in those games, so maybe we could choose a roof open/roof closed scenario instead. I’m allowed to make fun of the Cubs - my father grew up in Chicago. In any case, the win tells us the pitcher delivered something of value despite the wind, mist, or locusts both teams faced on a given day.

Certainly it is true that the quality of the hitters one faces and teams with affects one’s chances of getting a win. Of course, they’re all major league hitters, and sometimes will deliver a pitcher an early lead or, conversely, no runs at all. Is there a tendency to let up with an early lead? If so, the winning pitcher overcame it. Is there a tendency to get frustrated with no run support? If so, he didn’t give in to those feelings.

So what does all this tell us about a pitcher who “won” a ballgame? It tells us that he did at least a couple of things well enough to enhance his team’s chances that day. If he wins 20 games in a season, he did those things well at least 20 times. On the day of his win, the only thing a substitute starter could have done to help his team more was to perhaps throw more innings, because the team can’t record more than one W per game and the winning pitcher played his position well enough to secure it.

Does that make it better than advanced statistics at evaluating pitcher success? No way. In fact, it tells us very little about most of the pitcher’s abilities. But it doesn’t tell us nothing (double negative purposefully used for emphasis). 

No input tells the complete story when evaluating baseball players. Even the almighty WAR has competing versions. A successful franchise, whether the A’s or anyone else, tries to arrive at an optimal mix of stats, scouts' assessments, and police records to create a competitive roster. They likely don’t use the win much. But they do use some method to figure out how likely a hurler is show the mental toughness and other abilities necessary to help their team get its maximum one W on the day he pitches.

Joe Posnanski wrote a good column⁽¹⁾ a couple of years ago giving the win some love while acknowledging its weaknesses (and, incidentally, providing evidence that the answer to my 5-20 vs. 20-5 question above was “yes”). One his larger points suggested that wins still provide a useful point of discussion and therefore can be fun to have in the game. Did the pitcher truly handle bad weather well? Did he show more fortitude than the pitcher(s) alternating half-innings with him? Did he deserve his “win?” Those are worthy baseball arguments. Feel free to keep having them, no matter what your smarmy sabermetrician friends tell you.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

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Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ Joe Posnanski “In Praise Of Wins (Sort Of),” Joe Blogs.

http://joeposnanski.com/joeblogs/in-praise-of-wins-sort-of/

 (accessed June 17, 2014)