The Process (Or: Moneyball 2.0)

“Rooting for the Royals has always been a battle between wanting them to win and wanting to be right.”

Everybody knows about Moneyball and how the first guy through the wall always gets bloody. Billy Beane exists as a folk hero in my imagination, and I have often drifted off to sleep these past ten years to dreams that he would plop himself down in Kansas City and work for my Royals some of the movie-worthy magic he’s worked for the Oakland A’s.

In my hand as I’ve floated on these dreams has been an iPad lit up with some baseball blog excoriating the Royals for their stubborn refusal to embrace Beane’s Moneyball reason and their stupid loyalty to baseball conventions like “intangibles” and “grit.” For seven seasons now Royals fans have been treated to a vision of General Manager Dayton Moore’s “Process” and promised that patience would be rewarded with a winning franchise. “The Process,” among Royals fans, has been a squat thumb in the eye.

Only now they’ve posted consecutive winning seasons, each one better than the one before. Now they’ve made the postseason. Now they’ve won the American League Wild Card. Now they’ve beaten the Oakland A’s in the playoffs, but not just in the playoffs–six of the last eight times they’ve played. The Process has defeated Moneyball.

Not really. I still fantasize about Billy Beane running my team. He’s crazy smart, and he’s always going to be thinking one step ahead of the industry. The team the Royals just beat is a team full of players that had failed everywhere else they’d played. But they won in Oakland. Moneyball magic.

The Process seems to me a slight variation on Moneyball’s genius. Moneyball is known for its advanced metrics, for On Base Percentage and platoon splits, and The Process has no apparent interest in any of those things. But, at bottom, Moneyball is about exploiting market inefficiencies. It’s a way of seeing the world and your competition in it. Some things are not highly valued by your opponents and are therefore readily available to you. Collect enough of the same kind of devalued commodity and you’ve got something valuable. For the A’s of 2004 it was OBP. For the Royals of today it’s contact, even weak worm-burner contact.

The Royals strike out less than any other team. They also walk less than any other team and hit fewer home runs than any other team. They strike out so infrequently because they swing at lots of bad pitches and make lots of weak contact, which is also why they hit so few home runs.

That’s a recipe for futility. Only that team just beat the team with the most walks in baseball. And they did it with a hailstorm of weak ground balls. This is the Royals formula: chopper on the infield for a hit. Bunt the runner to second. Steal third. Score on another chopper on the infield. This team won a game last month by scoring two runs in the bottom of the ninth without hitting a ball out of the infield.

Are weak contact and stolen bases the new market inefficiencies in baseball? Is Dayton Moore the new Billy Beane? He seems to have built a successful organization around the kinds of commodities Moneyball loyalists disdain. It’s not the death of Moneyball, though. It’s the next chapter.

Communion Is A Mess

Communion is not the same thing as harmony. This is helpful to recall during the week that leads to World Communion Sunday.

Yesterday I spent 90 minutes planning World Communion Sunday worship with the Pastor of the Spanish speaking congregation that worships on our campus and an Elder from the Indonesian speaking church that also worships on our campus. Three churches. Three languages. Organized by three people. This thing’s going to be a mess.

But it will still be communion. Christ will still be present.

One of the worst executed communion services I ever experienced was at the close of our youth work camp last summer, where there was one crusty loaf and one chalice for over 100 worshipers. It took nearly 20 minutes. Adding a second station would have cut the time in half. It was still communion.

The institution of the communion meal was no smooth production either. One guy got up and left. People were confused. Jesus was distraught. There was no moving mood music or penetrating looks from an officiant earnestly pronouncing your name as she placed a bite-sized morsel into your trembling hand.

Still: Christ. Present. Communion.

Am I Off Here?

“Who do you want your customers to become?” asks Michael Schrage in his new book, The Innovator’s Hypothesis.

Here comes that move where a churchy blogger swaps out the word “customer” in a business book for “person” in a church context.

My first thought is that the mainline expression of Christianity in North
America doesn’t have a vision for what it wants people to become. What it wants the world to become? Sure. People, though? Not so much.

Am I off here?

Carrion for Cultural Vultures

The Voice is back on, and I’m struck watching it by the choice we get to make between quality and spectacle. The Voice is about quality: celebrity coaches vying for the best singers; singers seeking coaches to make them better.

Voice producers omit the bad auditions–in fact, the show watches as if only good-to-great performers even get in front of the judges.The train wreck audition footage–a staple of American Idol–has no place, because that’s a cheap way to build an audience and contributes nothing to peoples’ lives.

I first noticed the choice being made between quality and spectacle while watching episodes of Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen. The former is all about good chefs straining to be the best, while the latter is about a bunch of cooks being humiliated by a maniacal chef. Watching one of those shows amounts to an investment in a story about quality and the struggle to improve. Guess which one.

No matter our medium, the stories we tell can either connect people who are driven by quality and improvement, or they can provide carrion for the cultural vultures who feed on humiliation and mockery. Also, we get to choose which stories we want to consume.

Un-Just

I just want to be friends.

I just want to be consulted.

I just want to play meaningful games in September.

No you don’t. No you don’t. No you don’t.

If you have to qualify a desire with “just,” you’re kidding yourself. Because once you have the thing you “just” wanted, once the sparse conditions of your desire have been met, you want more. Meaningful September baseball games are hollow if you lose them, and being consulted is worthless if your ideas aren’t implemented.

Let’s be clear about what we want and aim–as far as it’s in our power–for that thing.

For the record, I want the Royals to win their division, win the American League, and then win the World Series. Anything less will be disappointing.

Out of Energy

For the past four years I’ve run an after school group for junior high students. Junior high is 7th and 8th grade, so, at most, a student will participate for two years before they’re off to high school. Essentially two groups of students have cycled through for two years each. Both groups had at their core a student from the church whom I invited to bring some friends.

School started a month ago, and there are no junior high students coming after school anymore. One came the first week, zero the two following weeks. The conditions that enabled the group the past four years aren’t there this year, namely a student whom I know and who wants to hang out after school with their friends.

Going where the energy is means letting silence have its say. There’s no energy for this among the people it’s for. So I just freed up 90 minutes once a week.

Still kind of feels like a failure, though.

Get in Front of The Ball!

When I was in Little League I was scared of the ball hit or thrown into the dirt. If I was playing on the infield and a ground ball was hit to me I would freeze–try to play it from the side–don’t get in front of it. Coach after coach would yell at me, would demonstrate the proper technique. I never mastered it. Not in Little League, not in high school, not even in two years of collegiate baseball. My instinct was always fear, and my instinct almost always won out over what my brain and my will were trying to force me to do.

Can you learn new instincts? Can you replace fear with confidence? Churches have instincts: take care of the members, protect the property, sympathize with the suffering. If we learn that an instinct that worked in another era holds us back now, can we change it? How? Motivation? Coaching? Repetition?

I play softball once a week now, and I still freeze when ground balls come my way. They deflect off my wrist and glance off my leg, and I despair that I’m too old now to overcome the instinct that has controlled that activity my entire life.

Who Will You Email Today?

Four years ago a colleague in the presbytery sent an email to a bunch of folks suggesting a collaborative junior high mission project. I was the only one who bit, and our two youth groups did four half days of service projects. It was fun.

A couple of weeks later I sent out my own email to this colleague and a bunch more: wanna do a confirmation retreat together? Five of us put together a weekend program of talks, worship, and small groups that went well enough for us to want to do it again.

We’ve now done that junior high week four times and the retreat three times. This summer we did a high school mission trip together. We’ve got a name and a swanky logo, and we’re not stopping any time soon.

This is the most energizing thing in my ministry right now. Everything Tapestry does is fun and enriching. I’m working with seasoned youth workers and interns, men and women who love working with students and who teach me valuable stuff all the time, including how to laugh.

It all started with one email. Who will you email today?

I Just Need Someone To Talk To

Somebody called the church office yesterday just to talk. I didn’t know them, and they had never been to our church. This person found the number for a church somehow and cold called us. To talk.

I kept waiting for the plea for money but it never came. Instead there was a brief story breathlessly told several times over about abuse and rejection from family, about unemployment, about a breakup, and the absolute lack of anyone to talk to. “I just need someone to talk to. I just need someone to talk to. Every day.”

I listened for over 30 minutes. I offered to pray that God would provide someone to talk to every day. We prayed. The conversation was over.

I don’t know where that person was calling from. I don’t know if they will call the church again today (or ever). I don’t know what else the church can do to minister to that person. I don’t know if listening on the phone and then offering a prayer did any good.

So much of ministry is things you don’t know.

Stop Trying To Build Community

Community is a bad goal. If you’re trying to “build community,” you won’t upset anyone, but you won’t change anyone either. You might actually do some harm.

Our church is always trying to build community among the families in our preschool. We invite them to church (of course), we rent a bounce house of the kids, we offered a weekly parents; playdate. Their reaction to these things is a pleasant “Oh that’s so nice!” as they head straight for their cars.

I’ve heard time and again from people in this group that something is missing from their lives, and there is a perceptible longing to connect to something bigger than their busy family calendar. Yet when we offer connection and community nobody comes. Why?

My friend’s answer is that community is a byproduct of other things and that the most meaningful way to create community is to provide something that helps people connect to each other without trying to, well, connect to each other. “What if it was about food?” my friend asked. What if building community were a secondary outcome to the primary purpose of focusing these families on food–child nutrition, family meal strategies, gardening, and so on. Maybe a menu (ahem) of resources about food will serve as a community building tool for those who value it.

Building community for community’s sake doesn’t really work. Communities bond over shared interests and–even better–shared purpose. What are we producing that people in our neighborhoods can use to connect to each other?