Paul Goldschmidt, Bias, & Betting on People
Last week, Paul Goldschmidt was named National League Most Valuable Player. I was fortunate enough to have my career intersect with Paul’s over a decade ago, when I was the Assistant GM of the Diamondbacks and he was a slugging first baseman for our AA affiliate, the Mobile BayBears. Goldy was not ranked as a Top 100 Prospect at the time, an honor that had been bestowed on two of his minor league teammates, RHP Jarrod Parker and the late LHP, Tyler Skaggs. Really, he wasn’t on the industry’s radar as a legitimate prospect at all.
Despite putting up big numbers in his first two seasons of professional baseball, Paul wasn’t getting his prospect due for a few reasons:
Strike (Bias) #1: He wasn’t a darling of the prospect pundits ahead of time
Strike (Bias) #2: He wasn’t a high draft selection, didn’t receive a large signing bonus, and didn’t play at a high profile college baseball program (8th round, Texas State)
Strike (Bias) #3: He was a right-handed hitting first baseman* with some questioning his defensive ability
*Traditionally, players with that profile have very little room for error when it comes to having Major League value. Generally speaking they have to hit, and hit BIG in order to make up for their limited versatility.
Yet here we are: NL MVP (and 2x runner-up), 7x All-Star, 5x Silver Slugger, 4x Gold Glover (sorry, defensive doubters). How did all this happen? Where did the “experts” go wrong?
I remember the first time I saw Paul play in person. I went to Mobile, AL to see our AA team and arrived at the park early the first day, sitting up high in the stands to watch pre-game routines. Goldy was the first player out there, hours before the game, working on, of all things, foul pop ups. He was practicing at full game speed: sprinting toward the stands or dugout, tracking the ball, gauging how much room he had, and making the catch. Lots of guys take early BP. Plenty take extra ground balls. You don’t see a lot of guys working on that type of small detail, particularly guys that were having offensive years like the one Paul was having.
Skeptics offered plenty of criticisms of Goldy’s game in the minor leagues. He had power, but did he have enough feel to hit? His defense needed a lot of work. Was he athletic enough? While Paul didn’t come with a big pedigree, he was blessed with an uncommon combination of talent, self-awareness, humility, and work ethic. He listened to those criticisms. And instead of being offended by the slights, he simply set out to work on them.
After early work came the traditional pre-game routine. I remained in my perch atop the stands to try to observe as much as I could whilst going unnoticed. I was excited to watch this series—this Mobile team was good. Really good. As we looked back at that roster a few years later, more than a dozen players saw Big League time, several turning out to be Major League All-Stars. They scored the most runs in the league and allowed the fewest, en route to a Southern League Championship and Minor League Team of the Year honors. Despite having higher profile teammates, with bigger signing bonuses and more robust press clippings, Goldy was the unquestioned leader. I remember writing in my scouting report that “teammates followed Paul around the batting cage like baby ducklings”, doing what he did, when he did it. If some people didn’t realize that he was special yet, his teammates did. This admiration carried over into the Big Leagues, as one of his old teammates recently attested.
On August 1 of that season, we called Paul up from Double-A and slotted him into our starting lineup in Arizona. For the rest of the season, he had the opportunity to showcase his ability, work ethic, and maturity, helping us win the National League West and nearly advance to the NLCS. It wasn’t quite A Star is Born, but we were pretty sure we had found our first baseman.
Fast forward a year, leading into his second full season, our baseball operations group had decided that we were going to try to lock Paul up to a long-term contract. I spent a lot of time with his agent that spring training trying to get a deal done. It nearly didn’t happen, but as Opening Day approached, we were able to reach a deal, agreeing to a five-year contract with a club option for a sixth year. I was excited. I remember discussing with my boss, the late Kevin Towers, how good we felt about this deal. Yes, Paul was a talented player who had proven he’s a legitimate Major Leaguer. But more than that, we were buying into the person that we were hitching our wagon to. I believed in the character of the human being, and felt strongly that whatever his ceiling was as a player, Goldy was going to reach it. He was just wired the right way. I figured worst-case scenario, he was a second division starting first baseman with a few seasons better than that mixed in. Best case, he was a perennial All-Star. My best-case was light.
On the day of the press conference to announce the contract, I watched from the back of the room as Paul and KT sat on the dais discussing the contract, and what it meant for the Goldschmidt family and the Diamondbacks organization. After it was over, we walked back through the tunnels toward the clubhouse, where Paul would physically sign the contract that would change his life forever. Before we could get there, he pulled me aside. He wanted to thank me for all of the time I had spent with his agent and all of the hard work that went into getting the deal done. I was slightly caught off guard. Here was young guy who was about to sign a piece of paper that would secure his grandkids’ future, who had the wherewithal and gratitude to pull aside the Assistant GM—not even the Big Cheese—when no one else was around, to thank him for doing his job. Suffice it to say, I’ve been a Paul Goldschmidt fan ever since.
One of these guys would go on to win the MVP. Hint: he’s not wearing jeans.
All he did after signing that contract was go out and finish second in National League MVP voting, making us look much smarter than we were. Of course, once his excellent season was over, there were rumblings from the pundits about how underpaid he was, and how the Diamondbacks got a steal of a deal in Paul Goldschmidt. One person who never said a word was Paul. He and his family were grateful for the contract, and he went out and put in the work to be the best player he could be; just as he would have whether his salary was $500k or $50M.
Paul Goldschmidt is as humble and grounded a superstar as you will meet. He leads by example, with remarkable consistency. He is the baseball equivalent of a self-made, grinding entrepreneur. Showing up, day after day, getting a little bit better each time, and before you know it, you have something special.
Like the prospect gurus who discounted Paul when he was in the minor leagues, we all carry our biases around with us. They’re unavoidable, and sometimes, they prove to be right. Those early Goldschmidt doubters? They were right: being a right-handed hitting first baseman is a narrow path to follow to Major League success. You don’t really have a fallback option, and because of that the standards are higher for you. But some of them allowed this anecdote to blind them to what was happening right in front of them: Paul Goldschmidt was really good and only getting better, despite what it looked like.
Apply this to your world. Are you writing off an impressive applicant because they didn’t go to an Ivy League School? Do you have someone on your team who “wins ugly”, somehow, someway, producing big results despite unorthodox methods? Did you pass on a deal because it didn’t look the way you expected it to in your mind’s eye?
When building a team and assessing individual players on that team, the approach is nuanced, but also parallels a common business strategy. You want to maximize upside while managing risk. The secret sauce in this analysis is figuring out what makes people tick. What takes up the space between their ears and inside their chest. If you’re able to gage that, assessing for both risk and upside become much clearer. In this case, we may not have fully appreciated the upside, but the risk was well-managed because we knew the type of person we were dealing with. High caliber people do that. They may not all offer huge upside, but most will mitigate the risk for you. Talent is one thing. Experience, another. Character is the X factor. Good people, while hard to find, can go a long way toward making your job easier and making you look smart. When you’re lucky enough to have one on your team, don’t overcomplicate it. Sometimes, if it walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
And sometimes ducks win MVPs.