Management and Culture: A David Ortiz Lesson

If you have been any kind of baseball fan over the past 20 years, you’ve at least heard the name David Ortiz, affectionately known as ‘Big Papi’. He was the larger than life 1st baseman for the Boston Red Sox team that won the World Series and broke ‘the Curse of the Bambino’ in 2004. Then they won the World Series again in 2007, and again in 2013. He was a perennial all-star and HR derby participant with the Red Sox and his persona within the game made him a fan favorite.

Some (maybe most?) people don’t remember that he came up to the Majors with another team. Not only that, he played six seasons for that other team before being outright released by them. That other team was my beloved Minnesota Twins and many of us Twins fans have spent the last 18 years wondering what could have been. But that’s not the point of my post today – the point of my post is that David Ortiz had always had the potential of being a perennial all-star and prolific homerun hitter…but the Twins front-office and on-field management either couldn’t see it, wanted him to be someone who he wasn’t, or couldn’t figure out a way to coax it out of him.

To tell the story of the early-2000s Minnesota Twins, one could simply use the phrase, “small ball” which was an organizational hitting philosophy that valued base-runners over power. That philosophy, and its execution in the early-2000s earned them the nickname “The Piranhas” from White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. Guillen said of them at the time, “all those piranhas – blooper here, blooper there, beat out a groundball, hit a home run, they’re up by four…” The team and the organization was full of guys who could get on base but who didn’t possess much power-hitting capability. Along comes David Ortiz in the 1998-1999 and he’s a guy who doesn’t fit the organization mold. In order to be ‘the piranhas’ – Twins coaches were constantly telling hitters to “slap” the ball – which meant shorter swings, in order to intentionally put the ball into play in spots where the defense was vulnerable. That type of a strategy often leads to lots of base-runners which, so the theory goes, was to make for a more consistent offense. The problem with David Ortiz, however, was that that approach just didn't fit very well with how he had learned to hit growing up. Here’s a quote from David Ortiz, talking about the management of the Minnesota Twins organization during his time there:

“The way they did me over there I never understood what was going on. It seemed like they didn’t know what to do with me. In 2002, when they let me go, I hit 20 homeruns and had 75 RBI and I barely played. I got [412] at-bats. So they made the poor decision of releasing me. They didn’t even trade me. They didn’t even let me be a free agent after the season.”

After being released by the Twins in 2002, Ortiz was immediately picked up by the Red Sox and that very next season, he hit 31 homeruns (21 in the second-half of that year) and from then on, was a key player on a Red Sox squad that won the World Series three times in 10 seasons. All told, Ortiz ended up with 541 homeruns in his career, making him a shoo-in Hall of Famer. The difference was in the approach – the Red Sox let him swing the way he wanted to swing – even though it didn’t fit some sort of ‘organizational approach’, it was effective for making David Ortiz a great power hitter.

My point with all of this is to highlight how much of an affect management can have on an organization. In the early 2000s, the Minnesota Twins were a team on the rise. They had a good group of young players and won their division 6 out of 9 seasons from 2002-2010…but they didn’t break through to win it all – they didn’t even make it to the World Series once during that stretch. They released a player who went on to have a hall of fame career for another team, who surely could have bolstered and benefited an organization that was a player or two from breaking through.

It may seem like an obvious thing to talk about the impact of management on company culture – but what I’m trying to highlight here is that for the Twins, it was middle-management that was the issue. Tom Kelly, the twins field manager at the time, was the person primarily responsible for Ortiz’s departure. Ortiz still holds a grudge years later. He came out with a book in 2017 that had a whole chapter dedicated to his frustrations with Tom Kelly. A SI article published that same year read, “Ortiz blames Kelly also for his light-hitting early seasons, saying that the manager favored slap hitters because of the Metrodome’s turf. “So I kissed his a## for a couple of years and became the biggest slap hitter you’ll ever see,” writes the 6′ 3″, 230-pound Ortiz.” I see this same phenomenon with some of the chemical manufacturers I work with. They may have excellent executive management – no doubt most of them do – but one bad hire in the middle management ranks, at the production supervisor, production manager or plant manager level, and you end up seeing a situation where there is constant under-performance and/or high turnover.

If you are in executive management, and you see a site that is constantly having issues, or that is seeing an undue amount of turnover, it would be wise to take a look at the person you have who in charge of managing those people. At the companies where the right people are in positions of management, their turnover is generally low and their performance is high. Getting production results is not all there is – put a drill sergeant in a production manager role and they will get people to move and perform, but those people will be resentful. Resentful people leave – mistreated people leave, and they find a situation where they will be coached and mentored. Meanwhile, word gets around and eventually, it becomes more and more difficult to find good people who don’t know the reputation of that manager. The quality of new-hires goes down, and there ends up being a constant revolving door. I’ve seen this plenty of times in the 14 years that I’ve been in this business – so while the things I’m talking about here may seem obvious to some, they aren’t obvious to all. A skilled executive will spend time digging and talking to people at all levels, to figure out where the true problems exist. Fixing those problems will improve the overall health of the organization and improve the culture. Instead of losing a mistreated future hall-of-famer, who knows…maybe that person stays with the team and ends up being a key contributor to years of success.