The Number was Right. The Decision was Wrong.
What If the Number You Trust Is Two Years Late?
My first year in Atlanta, we entered the offseason season with a talented roster and a legitimate case that we could compete for a Wild Card spot the following year. On paper, we were pretty good. If things broke right, we had a shot.
A lot of organizations stop there. The number says competitive. The decision is, obviously, to compete.
We kept looking.
What we saw past that one-year window was harder to sit with. Expensive contracts on players who were already underperforming. Key contributors who would walk in free agency. A core that was aging in the wrong direction at the wrong time. And around us, clubs quietly building something we could feel before we could prove it. Young talent coming. Rosters getting cheaper and better simultaneously. The division was shifting and the scoreboard hadn't reflected it yet.
The number said one thing. The reality underneath it said something else entirely.
So we made a decision that looked, to some on the outside, like we had lost our minds.
We traded talented players. Popular players. Players the fanbase had attachment to. We packaged good contributors alongside bad contracts to clear payroll. We took on other teams' problems — absorbing contracts nobody wanted — because attached to those problems was young talent we believed in. We traded the present for the future with no guarantee the future would show up (or that we'd be there to enjoy it if it did).
The first year of it was not fun to watch. Neither was the second. The standings reflected exactly what we had done. We stepped backward, visibly and deliberately, and anyone tracking the Major League win column assumed we had made a series of mistakes.
Meanwhile, something special was building under the surface. The talent pipeline was filling up. Minor league players and teams were coalescing. There was a bright light at the end of the tunnel, even if we weren't exactly sure when we'd reach the other side.
We hadn't made mistakes. We had made a choice about what we were actually measuring.
The number you're looking at right now is a receipt. It's proof of decisions made months ago, sometimes years ago. The inputs that will determine your results six months from now are already in motion. You just can't see them in the standings yet.
That's true in baseball. It's true on your team.
The leader who hits Q3 numbers and calls it a win may be right. Or they may be cashing a check written by decisions made eighteen months ago while the decisions being made today are quietly building a problem nobody will name until Q2 of next year. The leader who misses Q3 numbers and gets replaced may have been the one person in the building actually doing the right work. The results just hadn't arrived yet.
Most organizations never sit still long enough to figure out which one is true. The scoreboard creates urgency and urgency flattens thinking. You react to what's visible and measurable because what's visible and measurable is what you'll be held accountable to. The underlying reality, the actual health of the thing you're building, requires a different kind of attention. Slower. Less comfortable. Harder to show your boss on a slide.
The Braves won the World Series in 2021. The rebuild worked. But I want to be careful about that sentence because it makes the decision sound easier than it was. It wasn't easy. In fact it was painful. It was a choice made with incomplete information, real consequences, and no guarantee that the model would hold. The only thing the organization knew for certain at the moment of decision was that the number in front of us was telling a story with a bad ending.
We chose to read the whole story instead of stopping at the page that felt good.
That's the scar tissue that builds up when you understand what performance actually costs.
Not the title. Not the ring. The willingness to look past the number everyone else is celebrating and ask what it's actually measuring.
Your team has a scoreboard. You check it regularly. You probably know, somewhere underneath the number, whether it's telling the truth.
The question worth sitting with this week: what would you do differently if the number you're tracking turned out to be a receipt from two years ago?