To the list:
The punished-by-rewards thread has been very valuable to me, to the point
of motivating one of my recent WSJ columns. I hate to tie up bandwidth
posting an 800-word article, but if Rick doesn't object I felt I had to
share this piece when I read the following comment posted by Doc Holloway:
>can you imagine a professional athlete giving up 10 or 12 million dollars
>-- choosing to stay with his current team as an affordable free agent,
>rather than moving to the higher paying team?
So, in answer to Dr. Holloway's question...
THE FRONT LINES:
Show Him the Money?
Al Martin Wants Much
More From Baseball
By THOMAS PETZINGER JR.
The Wall Street Journal.
July 17, 1997
WHICH IS MORE motivating to a high-performance employee, the biggest
possible paycheck or the greatest personal fulfillment? The answer is not
always the money -- not even in major league baseball.
Last week Al Martin, a 29-year-old power hitter for the Pittsburgh
Pirates, extended his contract to 2000 for about $3 million a year. That's
no trifling sum, but it's millions less than he could get as a free agent.
Why stay in Pittsburgh for less money? "I'm comfortable enough with what I
make now," he says. "My happiness is more important than a few more
million." This summer, the Pirates are giving Mr. Martin a pleasure no
fortune could buy: the rediscovery of why he loves his living.
Full disclosure: I live in Pittsburgh. And although I've never much
followed baseball, no one here can escape the Cinderella story of the '97
Pirates. One statistic says it best: The Pirates pay their entire roster
less money -- under $10 million -- than the White Sox pay a single player,
Albert Belle. Yet despite universal predictions of a season in the cellar,
the cash-strapped Pirates are leading their National League division,
becoming, as Sports Illustrated put it, "the most unlikely Number One team
since Milli Vanilli."
On many levels, no one is making a bigger difference than Mr. Martin, the
most senior member of the team and its unofficial leader. He learned about
teamwork watching the adults in his old neighborhood near Los Angeles
always rescuing each other -- fixing cars, lending money, watching other
kids. "Most people would say we didn't have enough to share, but we did,"
he says.
HE WATCHED an uncle build a rewarding football career with the Oakland
Raiders, then watched an older brother wind up with much less after
hopping between football teams all over North America. When Al Martin left
USC in Los Angeles for baseball, he resolved to start and end his career
in one city, wherever he was accepted into the majors. After seven years
and 963 games in the minors, it was here that he reached the big leagues,
in 1992. His performance rose, and so did his pay -- to more than $2
million a year.
Pittsburgh, alas, has demanding and moody fans, never more so than after
the national players' strike of 1994. Attendance at the monstrous Three
Rivers Stadium, never a sellout to begin with, plunged further. Mr. Martin
feared the Pirates would quit his adopted home town.
Then, last year, new owners cut loose the high-priced talent and replaced
it with "promising," dirt-cheap newbies, slashing the payroll by half.
Coming off his hottest year ever, Mr. Martin was given the chance to
escape his contract for more money elsewhere. He declined, aware that the
upside on his income in Pittsburgh was almost nil.
When he arrived at this season's spring training, he found himself
surrounded by minor leaguers from as far down as single-A, many making the
major league minimum of $150,000. The competition laughed, the fans rolled
their eyes and the pundits predicted 100 losses for the season; but Mr.
Martin resolved to build a culture of hard work.
"This is the way our team is structured," he told players. "This is how we
will do business." He was the first to break a sweat every morning, well
into batting practice while others were still eating Egg McMuffins. "He
leads by example," says infielder Kevin Young. "It's something the younger
players feed off."
To everyone's astonishment the season began with the Pirates winning
ballgames -- only about half of them, to be sure, but enough to maintain a
narrow lead. No single player dominated. In fact, their individual
statistics were rather mediocre. They stood out only in the categories
that reflected sheer hustle: stolen bases and triples.
MR. MARTIN was beside himself with pride, always the first to leap from
the bench to congratulate a scoring player. Because no one in the city
knew his no-name teammates, he hauled them to the stadium gates one day to
shake the hands of incoming fans. Though the fans were shocked at the
gallantry, "our players got more out of it than they did," Mr. Martin
says.
Then struck disaster. In the space of a week, injuries felled the team's
top run producer, its best defensive player, the clutch reliever -- and
its top hitter, Al Martin, who was temporarily idled with a hand injury.
In came more bottom-scale minor leaguers. Yet the team roared on, the
culture of hustle surviving the people who had created it. "If I'm not
doing the job, we're going to make sure someone else does," Mr. Martin
says. (The team was tied for first place going into Thursday night's
game.)
Can the loyalty of a single player save a struggling franchise? Attendance
is up about 15%, putting the team safely in the black. Last Saturday, the
Pirates sold out Three Rivers for the first time in 20 years (not counting
opening days). The state legislature recently approved putting a sales-tax
increase before citizens to pay for a new stadium.
For his part, Mr. Martin says that after a certain point money becomes
meaningless, but the game does not. "What am I going to do?" he asks. "Buy
a million-dollar car?"
By contrast, the sheer childlike joy that first drew Mr. Martin to
baseball has no limits in a season such as this. It hit him recently, he
says, while watching his son's blissful play in Little League. "For the
first time in my life as a professional, I realized I'm having as much fun
as he is."
Copyright ) 1997 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Cheers,
Tom Petzinger
Thomas Petzinger Jr.
tompetz@msn.com
"The Front Lines"--Every Friday in The Wall Street Journal
"The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are, the
better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members." --Vladimir
Nabokov
--"thomas petzinger" <tompetz@msn.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>