What higher ed can learn from baseball

A lesson inspired by the Mets

I’m going with a different type of post today, as sometimes I have ideas rattling around my brain that I want to put on paper. I hope something I say resonates with you, and while I’m going to make connections mostly to higher education, I’d love to hear your thoughts related to your experiences. Here I go.

I’m a baseball fan that doesn’t just like the game, but I also find the business of baseball interesting. I’m a long-suffering Mets fan that is still adjusting to the new Steve Cohen era (for those that don’t know, Cohen bought the Mets from the Wilpons in Nov. 2020). Now, it helps that Cohen has way more money to spend than the previous owner, but he also seems to be smarter about what he does. Here is what I’ve learned and how it relates to managing a college (well, mostly from my experiences at IC) as well as, I think, other organizations.

It is better to have a search for a new hire fail than to just take the best available candidate if they don’t meet your standards. This is doubly true for higher-ups in an organization.

Steve Cohen clearly thought David Stearns was the guy to run the Mets as president of baseball operations (PBO). The problem was that he was under contract for the Milwaukee Brewers. Cohen waited for the contract to end instead of hiring someone else. So far, this move seems brilliant. In this case, it wasn’t even a failed search but a postponed search.

What I have found in higher ed is that a failed search, say for the president of the college, is considered a bad thing and to be avoided. I think this is largely due to the conservative nature (as liberal as faculty tend to be, they are rather conservative in their actions) of faculty and concern that a failed search makes the college look bad somehow. To me, this is madness. First, closing a search and starting over says you have standards; it doesn’t need to be avoided. Worse is that accepting a president that isn’t up to the task leaves you stuck with a mediocre or worse president for years and can set a college back for more years than the person was in the position. Know what you want from a president, provost, dean, or CEO and keep searching until you get it. In the long run, you are far better off. For organizations that expect to be around for a long time, you play the long game in hires, and a year of an interim is not as bad as multiple years of a bad hire.

Invest in those lower in the hierarchy of the organization

The graph in Figure 1 (you knew I had to have at least one graph) from the recent Athletic article Mets’ David Stearns leaving his mark in his second season in New York (2/13/2025) is what got me thinking about finally writing this article. WAR in baseball stands for Wins Above Replacement, which, in short, attempts to measure the extra wins a player provides above an average player.

In 2024, two players had a WAR above 10, the top 21 players were above 5, while the 113 players were above 3, for example. What Figure 1 shows is that David Stearns looks to add WAR from the 16 best players on down (the white part of the bars) and not just from the best players (darker blue bars). He did this in Milwaukee, and he did it in 2024 with the Mets, much more so than the Mets in previous years.

Figure 1. From the Athletic.

What I take from this is that organizations should invest more in lower-level managers than they likely do. Sure, you need to spend on a top-notch president and provost, but investing more in your associate deans and chairs is a way to add value to the organization. My experience is the colleges don’t see associate deans and chairs as all that important and in some cases even deans. The organization might be improved if they did. I’m not sure what the analogy here is for industry, but I’ll guess it is investing in unit leaders of some sort.

Invest in analytics

Within about a year, Cohen had tripled the size of the analytics team at the Mets. Cohen is certainly spending more money on players than under the Wilpons, but it is things like spending on analytics that fans never realized was being vastly underfunded.

Most of higher education is way behind on the use of data to improve the organization. There are a few leaders in data, which I read about in the 2020 book Big Data on Campus: Data Analytics and Decision Making in Higher Education. Those in higher ed on the forefront of the use of data are like the Billy Beane’s A’s (watch the movie Moneyball to get the idea). How much analytics in baseball has grown since then is really amazing, which now includes pitching and hitting labs to measure everything a player does in a controlled setting.

I would say we have to at least triple our analytics team, but I don’t think leadership even realizes this. In fact, I don’t think most of higher education leadership is data literate enough to recognize the need. In fact, I think this is a problem in general in that as the world has become awash in data and new technology, some of it useful and some not, there aren’t enough data-literate leaders to go around. The other problem is it isn’t immediately clear what a data team would do for a college, although the book above has plenty of ideas, but I would hire a few good quants and let them loose. I expect what we learn will grow just like it did and is doing for baseball.

One example I read about a few years ago was that one school tracked swiping into the dining halls and looked to see if students were generally entering the dining hall at about the same time as other students. The idea here was that students that weren’t might have been eating alone more and might not have been making friends. A little creepy, but a good idea.

Direct honesty really matters

There are more than a few colleges in trouble, and it is predicted that many will close over the next 5-10 years. Being honest with the campus community carries a risk, but you cannot solve a problem you are unaware of. I’ve heard more than my fair share of BS slogans over the last 10 years to the point where there is no reason to believe anything those in charge say, and this is the key problem with not being directly honest: no one trusts anything you say anymore.

With the addition of Carlos Mendoza as the Mets manager last year, it is clear there is direct and honest communication with the players. Jose Iglesias (great player, and his OMG song was a blast last year) was signed to a minor league contract before last season. He was eventually called up and had a big impact. One of the reasons for signing, he stated, is that they were honest with him. They made it clear he would be the first to be called up if they needed a 2nd baseman or shortstop. He asked about 1st or 3rd, and they said no. They could have easily hedged what they said to Jose, but they didn’t.

Similarly, this offseason the Mets signed Soto to play right field, but Marte was their right fielder under contract. Reports and quotes from Marte make it clear they were direct with him about his status while negotiating with Soto. He might get traded under the right circumstances, but if not, they communicated what his role would be. It has to hurt to lose that starting position, but pretending it wasn’t happening would make matters worse. I have found that in higher education, direct honesty is in short supply. The coin of the realm is this elite politeism as opposed to direct honesty, too many Ph.D.s that think they are more clever than they are, that erodes trust.

Don’t be afraid to cut your losses

I was told once by someone who was a manager in engineering that there is nothing better for morale than a good firing. Last season the Mets cut a number of underperforming players during the season. It wasn’t about saving money, as you still have to pay the player for the season. What it did do was send a clear message of high expectations and a strong desire to win. Yes, it helps to have the money to do this, but you also have to admit that a player you signed isn’t working out; you have to own that mistake.

Replacing a player for a better-performing one will improve the chances of winning. It also sends a clear message to everyone else. We all know who isn’t doing their job well, and keeping that person around sends the message of accepting mediocrity and erodes morale. It is even worse when a board keeps around an underperforming president or a president keeps around an underperforming provost.

Higher education is heading into, or really has already started, an era of fierce competition. The elite institution will be fine, but most everyone else is going to compete for students in ways they haven’t. The past era of an ample supply of students has created a culture of complacency as opposed to one of constant improvement. Sports teams have always lived with serious competition, and higher education has a lot they can learn from sports. Colleges that survive or even thrive will be the ones that are first to innovation as opposed to the ones that keep adopting “best practices.” They will also need to continually innovate. In sports, there were teams that adopted data sooner than others, but eventually they all did to some extent. Now it seems pitching and hitting labs are the new frontier. After that, it will be something else. This is the new reality for higher education, and we’ll see who is up for it and who isn’t.

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Please let me know if you believe I expressed something incorrectly or misinterpreted the data. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Send me article ideas, feedback, or other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.

Bio

I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks “R for College Mathematics and Statistics” and “Applied Calculus with R.” I welcome any collaborations.