I’m not a big baseball fan now, but I was years ago.
Perhaps that’s the reason why when it was time for me to select my next audiobook, I thought of Terry Francona. Of course, I didn’t think of Francona first, per se. I was in the mood to read a great comeback story (always fun) — something about a person, country, business or other entity that was up against the wall, or the precipice, or whatever you like, and came back against all the odds.
So when I started thinking along those lines, I pondered: Who in sports has come back from the greatest deficit, the greatest odds. And I harkened back to 2004, in the days when I was a baseball fan, and I thought about what the Boston Red Sox did against the New York Yankees (my team back then).
In short, they did what no other team has done before or since, they came back from a series deficit of 0-3 to win. And if you look deeper into the series, they came perilously close to losing that fourth game for an ignominious sweep.
But they didn’t — one baserunner lead to another and finally to a victory. And then that one victory led to another and another and another. And that series win led to an easy 4-0 sweep in the World Series (they won it all again in 2007). And the Boston Red Sox were champions for the first time in 86 years.
But if we go back to that fourth game, when they were primed for elimination, and we want to figure out how they did what they did, what better place to look than at the manager of the team, the one who set the tone for everything that took place, the leader. The man who created the environment where something that had never happened before could happen.
And that man was Terry Francona, and so for my next audiobook, I picked “The Rex Sox Years,” by Francona and Dan Shaughnessy.
Francona, it turns out, is a lifelong baseball guy, and was born into the game (his father was a professional player for many years). He grew up around the clubhouse and baseball culture, he lived and breathed it. Interestingly, what I learned through the book is that Francona was no master psychologist, no intentional manipulator trying to turn this knob and that to fine tune the proper approach to each player. It was, in fact, the simplicity of his philosophy that made him so successful.
And if there was one overriding concept that kept him in the game — that kept his teams in the game — it was this: don’t panic. Never panic.
This is not to say that Francona didn’t make adjustments to his approach, for he certainly did. He made changes in his lineups and took people in and out of the game, but there was always a calmness to it that kept his players calm. He repeatedly said that tough times were something “to work through.” He often told his players and bosses, “Everything is ok — we’ll get through this,” while reminding his players that they were, in fact, good enough to win.
And win he did, garnering two championships and a number of other playoff appearances. In 2011, his team hit the skids and Francona was fired after a one of the worst Septembers in baseball history that left his team out of the playoffs.
So we see, and so we learn from studying this great manager of men, that while panicking guarantees losing, not panicking does not guarantee winning — it simply (and very importantly) give us the chance to win, the chance to come back, the chance to do something great and historic.
So if you’re up against it (or rather when you are), stay calm, keep thinking and, if worse comes to worse, go down with your mind working on solutions, your eye on the ball and (most importantly), go down swinging, not panicking. The best part about this approach is, chances are, you won’t wind up going down at all.
I get excited just thinking back to that series. Maybe it’s time to me to become a baseball fan again.
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