What Kind Of Team Do You Want To Be?

October 4, 2024/Fred Jacobs

If you believe sports is a metaphor for life, you’re going to love today’s blog post from Paul Jacobs. In fact, let’s go a step further. If you believe, sports is a metaphor for radio, you might even want to share this one around.

Sports stories inspire us. It’s why movies like Rudy, Hoosiers, Slap Shot, Field of Dreams, and even plays like Damn Yankees are generational hits. We relate to teams and athletes who overcome long odds, who find a way to win, and whose spirit and guts overcome a deficiency in talent. They make great stories – and we enjoy telling them.

If you’ve worked in radio – even back in the industry’s heyday – you know what it’s like to be overlooked, to be in an underdog role in spite of your talent, and to be thought of a lesser medium. Since forever, radio was overshadowed by television, and that’s been even more the case since the internet began to eat the world in the ’90s.

I also believe that even if you’re not “into” sports, the analogies are everywhere. At some point, groups of employees became teams. And all the other terms and phrases follow. “We had a great team meeting.” “Someone needs to step up and play quarterback.” “It’s the ninth inning (or the fourth quarter) and we’re nowhere close to hitting goal.”

You get it. For Paul and me, it’s the Detroit Tigers. Don’t get me wrong – we love and follow all the local teams. But the passion point is baseball and the Tigers, in the best of times (which are rare) and the worst (which have been all too common most years). For the first several months, this 2024 season was playing out the way most of them do – a step forward, a step or two back. Most Detroit fans went into this year hoping for a .500 record – winning as many games as you lose.

It hasn’t worked out that way. And it’s making a great story. Here’s Paul to tell it. – FJ

“What Kind Of Team Do You Want To Be?”

By Paul Jacobs

As long as they remain alive in the playoffs, this is probably not the last post Fred and I are going to write about our amazing Detroit Tigers. For those of you who do not religiously follow the American pastime, this was a team given up for dead as recently as seven weeks ago. On August 11, their record was an anemic 55-63, eight games below .500, and way out of the playoff hunt. Betting odds showed they had less than a 1% chance of making the playoffs.

Nearly two weeks earlier, they unloaded all of their most experienced players – in what has become a sad annual tradition – at the trade deadline in exchange for prospects. At this point in the season, teams are either “buyers” – believing they have a shot at the playoffs – or “sellers,” meaning they are throwing in the towel. It certainly appeared to anyone on the outside that they’d capped another disappointing season, taking a “wait ’til next year” position.

All that was left was a team mostly comprised of rookies who were brought up from the minors to see what they could show management in the last weeks of the season. The rest was a bunch of good prospects, but almost the entire team was younger than 25 years-old.

Most organizations would have viewed this as building a foundation for the future – meaning another 2-3 years – as investments were made on developing this group of kids, many of whom are a few years removed from high school. After all, the Tigers hadn’t made the playoffs in a decade and every year seemed like “a rebuilding year,” in a pathetic “Ground Hog Day” story of frustration and sadness. It might be reminiscent of a perennially low-rated radio station, constantly looking for a silver bullet to propel them up in the ranker, but in reality, has no clue about how to get there.

But then something magical happened that no one would dream of writing a script for. Since August 11, the Tigers have been the hottest team in the major leagues, going 30-11 to finish the season, impossibly clinching a “wild card” berth in the playoffs last Friday. No one (including mega baseball fans like Fred and me) could have seen this coming.

But that wasn’t enough. This band of kids just went down to Houston and swept the mighty hometown Astros in the first round of the playoffs advancing to the division series that gets going tomorrow against rival Cleveland. The Astros, by the way, are one of the best teams in baseball, making the playoffs for the past twelve seasons, the third longest streak in major league history.

So, how is this possible? How can a team with the least playoff experience, loaded with raw youth, and whose starting lineup collectively earns about as much (around $19 million) as an average starting pitcher on any good baseball club, make this incredible turnaround and achieve this level of success? And what does any of this comeback story have to with radio?

While there are many factors at play in the Tigers’ unlikely ascent, the most significant explanation comes down to one thing: great visionary management communicated in a clear, succinct way. (Yes, that’s the radio part.)

A.J. Hinch is the Tigers’ manager (for those of you who don’t know the story, his last coaching job was in Houston when they were World Series champs – until a cheating scandal emerged and he was fired, disgraced, and suspended from baseball for a year . . . .but that’s for another blog post for another day).

Hinch is more than a good baseball man – he graduated from Stanford with a psychology degree and brings an intellectual approach to the game. He knows how to motivate players, but he is also a lifelong learner who doesn’t follow a rigid playbook like so many other people in the sport. His approach is comparable to Moneyball…on steroids.

According to a story in the Detroit Free Press, it all came down to a single team meeting Hinch convened on August 18. Team meetings in baseball are rare, so when a manager calls one, it’s usually to chew the team out. But realizing the futility in that, Hinch took a different approach – he asked his young group of players a simple question:

“What kind of team do you want to be?”

Now that’s a provocative question for any manager to ask his or her team. Usually, the organization decides what the goals are going to be. But at this futile point in another disappointing season, Hinch took a very different approach.

As Tigers reliever Beau Briske recalls, “What I remember is just to try to put everything else to the side and realize that the goal, as a group, is to try to win. And all of the numbers and all of the contract stuff, that’s also what he said. He said, ‘All of that stuff will take care of itself if you go out there and you play for one another and you go out there and win’ … I would imagine that it probably aligned with a turning point in the season. So, yeah, it was impactful for sure.”

Hinch went on to ask his team to set aside egos and stressed the need for everyone to think about their jobs through a different lens. The manager asked his starting pitchers to become relievers. He asked full-time players to prepare to come off the bench. He asked some of the best hitters on the club to be prepared to be replaced by a pinch hitter. He reallocated playing time based on specific situations.

THESE GRITTY TIGS ARE ALDS BOUND. #RepDetroit pic.twitter.com/LtMoO0n4H0

— Detroit Tigers (@tigers) October 2, 2024

Hinch did all this because he accurately assessed the strengths and weaknesses of his team, and devised a plan to take advantage of those strengths, while minimizing their weaknesses.

So what does a team short on experience and becoming sadly accustomed to losing have to do with radio?

Well, as someone who has spent his early career as a sales and station manager, and who has interacted with hundreds of them at Jacobs Media, I’ve seen more management styles than pretty much anybody in the business. Radio, not unlike the Detroit Tigers, not only has challenges, but also requires innovative approaches and clear-eyed leadership in order to succeed at a very challenging time in its history.

Similar to the Tigers, many radio stations are understaffed as RIFs and layoffs have put a tremendous amount of stress on many operations. Many employees are asked to wear many different “hats,” taking on new duties that might not be in their core skill sets. Many aren’t being paid what they’re worth. And lots of people are understandably unhappy.

The result? Many stations simply can’t pull it together to transform themselves into a successful operation, even if they were winners in the past. And in lots of these cases, a core problem is the lack of innovative, inspiring management able to overcome these serious economic and personnel challenges. Like in baseball, ownership simply may not be able to compete at a level necessary for success.

So what can radio owners, operators, and managers learn from the unlikely success of A.J. Hinch and the 2024 Detroit Tigers?

Here are some key insights:

1. Achieving success was not a demand. In fact, Hinch let his players make the call. When he asked them what type of team they wanted to be, the guys in uniform stated that making the playoffs was their goal. It wasn’t a dictate that came from corporate. Hinch wisely let it emerge from the team so they owned the goal. He didn’t have to sell them on it. As we know in radio, when it becomes the staff’s idea, it’s always better than an order from the top.

2. Get a clue. Every radio station aspires to be #1, but most don’t have any idea what it takes to get there. That’s because management hasn’t collaborated on a clear vision, or the staff doesn’t have the requisite trust and belief in its leaders. The result is frustration and disgruntlement because the staff doesn’t see the value of individual sacrifice for team success in return. In these types of aimless organizations, the staff is rarely on the same page. Ask five people at many stations to articulate the goal and you’re likely get six concepts. There is a lot to be said or having a tangible, focused, clearly communicated common goal.

3. Sacrifice. In an environment of personal goals and accomplishments, the concept of sacrifice for a common goal seems antiquated, even old school. But for the Tigers, Hinch explained it was a through-line that ran through the entire roster. Once the players decided making the playoffs would be the goal, Hinch explained they were going to have to put the team ahead of themselves in order to be successful. Given the skill and experience level of his team, he knew they couldn’t make the playoffs in a traditional way. But by communicating directly and clearly, he galvanized the team around his vision and self-sacrifice became routine.

4. Be different. I mentioned Moneyball earlier, the book (and movie) that told the story of how Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane adopted and implemented a whole new set of metrics to evaluate draft picks, his team, and the way they played the game. For Hinch, his pitching “rotation” these last six weeks has come down to one great starter – likely Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal – and what the manager calls “pitching chaos.” Several relief pitchers are intentionally used in a strategic rotation designed to match up to the opposing team’s lineup. These patchwork games where various members of the bullpen generally pitch short stints has rarely even been attempted in baseball.

But wait until next year when we’ll likely see several teams attempt variants of Hinch’s pitching architecture. Not only is the concept novel, it often keeps the Tigers’ opponents off balance. Hinch is also utilizing different patterns for pinch hitting and late inning defensive replacements, which have not only been productive but appear to keep the competition off balance.

5. Conventional weaponry may not work. In most businesses and industries, there is usually an accepted form of how you compete. Everyone learns the system about how you win baseball games or make ratings. But like so many competitive scenarios, we see the conventional wisdom breaking down, and organizations figuring out different ways in which to win. In radio a couple decades ago, stations were often able to power themselves to success by spending six figures on television ads and having mega-contests like “The Birthday Game” to generate ratings, which quickly translated to revenue success. Or they had the payroll to scoop up the best talent and create an all-star lineup.

Those days simply don’t exist anymore. Playing the game now requires a different mindset. Today, savvy radio managers think and act like A.J. Hinch. They create a vision, they communicate it clearly, and have the trust to generate buy-in for that vision so they can ask the staff to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve that goal. Implicit in this process is the promise that everyone benefits when the company achieves the goal. In that context, managers need to deliver.

Great radio managers take the time to identify the skills and interests of their staff, realizing that they don’t have the budget to have each staffer do just one job. But they create the conditions to have their employees gravitate toward what interests them, and thus making themselves more valuable to the station, and in return, achieving greater job satisfaction.

One final thought: great visionary management communicated well costs absolutely nothing. This isn’t a budget issue, it’s a leadership opportunity.

So if you want to see what winning truly looks like, enjoy this final speech from A.J. Hinch after the Tigers clinched their first spot in the playoffs in a decade.