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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Working from First Base to the Boardroom

I have often thought that when Pulitzer Prize winning sports writer Red Smith typed the words “Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection,” he was speaking for me. As a kid, I loved nothing more than playing first base. What revved my engine? Being in the middle of the action, having to constantly anticipate what to do with the ball wherever it was hit and making sure all the infielders did, too. These skills have served me well my entire life, and even show up in my newest book, “Truth, Trust + Tenacity: How Ordinary People Become Extraordinary Leaders.” There are many parallels between sports and the business world. Both are competitive and goal-driven, and to succeed require sustained performance at the highest level. Collaboration and teamwork are imperative. I now realize that many of the same qualities that lead to success in baseball also lead to success in business. On the field and in the boardroom, these skills will help you hit a home run: • Tenacity • Perseverance • The willingness to work hard • The ability to listen and learn to lead others • Dedication to practice and execution • The need to be prepared when taking on your competitors • Finding ways to compensate for those deficits you can’t control I began playing catch with my dad around age 4. And, like many left-handed kids at that age, I would often throw erratically before I mastered control and learned how to throw properly. I played Little League and made the All-Star team at age 12, then played baseball at night after work in the peach orchards every summer and for a year in high school before switching to tennis. But baseball remained my passion. In my youth, I was 5 feet 9 ½ inches tall, certainly not the ideal height for a first baseman. My dad told me that if I was going to play first base regularly, I needed to master several fundamentals of playing the No. 3 infield position to compensate for my lack of height. He stressed the need to always concentrate on what was occurring around me, to become proficient in digging balls out of the dirt and getting to the bag quickly, and to dive to stop balls seemingly out of my reach. I learned that perfecting my skills could compensate for other deficits. When I was a kid, the Dodgers and the Giants were still in Brooklyn and upper Manhattan at Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, respectively, and wouldn’t move their franchises to the West Coast until the 1958 season. The nearest professional team we could watch was the Sacramento Solons in the old Pacific Coast League. I will never forget watching the Solons play the Hollywood Stars and the Los Angeles Angels and wondering where they played their home games. (I had never been south of San Francisco until I was in college.) I learned later that several Hollywood box office favorites and studio executives of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s invested in the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League, including Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Gene Autry, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Bing Crosby and others. Actors and producers who frequented these games often owned ranches here in the San Fernando Valley. The San Fernando Valley and the city of Los Angeles have made invaluable contributions to baseball in many other ways, with Chavez Ravine being home to the iconic Dodger Stadium, and the Valley being home to many highly accomplished baseball players, including former standouts Gary Matthews of the Phillies, Doug De Cinces of the Orioles and Dwight Evans of the Red Sox. Actor Chuck Connors of “The Rifleman” fame who played in the NBA and MLB lived in the Valley, too. My childhood hero, Jackie Robinson, grew up in nearby Pasadena, where his family moved when Jackie was a year old, and he went to UCLA. Interestingly, John C. Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles has produced more major league baseball players than any other single high school in the United States. For me, playing first base was great fun, an experience I will always treasure. Ernie Harwell, the great play-by-play voice of the Detroit Tigers for 44 years wrote, “Baseball? It’s just a game – simple as a ball and a bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It’s a sport, business – and sometimes even religion.” But the last word belongs to Vin Scully who said, “The charm about baseball is that everyone has played it in some form. Everybody relates to it.” Just ask your boss! Ritch K. Eich, a former public relations executive, has published three books and more than 100 articles about leadership. He is a captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve (ret.) who received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He lives in Thousand Oaks.

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