Sitting last night on my son’s bed I saw the picture that hangs above his bed. It is a picture from about 1918 of one of the most famous people in American history. You have probably heard of him. He was the best at what he did, perhaps the best ever at what he did. So good in fact that he changed history and impacted the whole country for decades. The lesson of this man for you has everything to do with how you develop people because it will make all the difference for you and your future. Because that man was the greatest baseball player of all time, the Babe Ruth. And the story of his life in 1918-1919 changed the course of literally millions of people, all because of the way two people decided to treat him.
When you think of Babe Ruth you think of the Yankees, the greatest and most successful baseball franchise in history. The Yankees have won 27 World Series titles, more than any other team in history. Their hated rivals are the Boston Red Sox, who have only won 7 World Series titles. The fates of these two teams collided in 1919 when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold his young, up and coming talented pitcher/slugger Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000. At this point in history the Yankees had never won a World Series and the Red Sox had won 5, including the World Series the previous October in 1918. Ruth had performed amazingly that year. He won 2 games in the Series and also hit well helping propel his team to a win over the White Sox.
The story of Ruth being sold is what I want to focus on. Ruth was sold because he wanted more money and because he was seen as a distraction and disciplinary problem. The Yankees didn’t care, they wanted talent and were willing to put up with and develop a player as successful as Ruth despite the fact that he needed a little bit of extra work. The result? The Yankees won 26 World Series titles before the Red Sox could win even one more title. Eighty-six years of futility for the Red Sox, the most famous stretch in baseball history. Known as, “The Curse of the Bambino” it literally took decades for the Red Sox to recover from casting off the greatest player in baseball history.
The lesson for us: When running any type of organization, remember that everyone you work with will have flaws (Babe Ruth had LOTS of them) but you cannot simply write off or “sell off” people with talent that you may disagree with or have a hard time getting along with. That is the easy and lazy thing to do. Just write them off, just stop working with them, just let them go, but that doesn’t lead to success! Just ask the Yankees and the Red Sox. The Yankees were a financially floundering team in 1919. They bought Babe Ruth and they have never been the same! One person can make a difference and one person with talent can be very hard, if not impossible to replace. What is needed is patience, persistence, and above all, perspective.
When someone in your organization upsets you, have patience. When they cause problems, you have to have persistence to build them up rather than cast them off. The biggest blunder of the Red Sox in 1919: a lack of perspective. They could not see the big picture. They were so focused on the here and now that they couldn’t see the potential that Ruth had. They didn’t see that getting rid of their greatest talent would take them decades to recover from. You simply don’t replace a Babe Ruth. You have to work with him, develop him, put up with some his faults and quirks in an effort to help build a successful team. But the Sox couldn’t see that, so they sold him off and spent 86 years trying to recover.
The same is true for us. Find someone that has talent, that has promise. Work with that person. Build that person up. Train, develop, improve, and have patience with these people. We all need the best people we can find, and we will all have to put up with some of their problems and flaws or we will find ourselves as cursed as the Red Sox were.
