Stolen Bases, Qwikster, and Changing the Game
It’s Opening Day, which means it’s as good a time as ever to point out that baseball curmudgeons today bemoan the decline of the stolen base. Once one of the more exciting parts of the game with league leaders like Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman in the 1980s swiping upwards of 100 bags per season, the league leader in 2022, Jon Berti, stole just 41.
And that’s not because players are getting slower. In fact, players today are more likely than ever to steal a base when they try. The problem is that baseball teams have decided that stealing a base isn’t worth the risk. The player attempting a steal could be tagged out and saving that out is more valuable to the prospect of winning.
But count me as a curmudgeon who likes stolen bases. Where, other than in sports, can it be so much fun to take risk? So I sit around a lot and think about changes that might bring them back. Like what if baseball increased the value of stolen bases by letting teams backfill? In other words, if a player successfully steals second, the team gets to put another runner back on first. If a player steals third, they get to load the bases. And if he steals home, which for my money is one of the most exciting events in sports, it counts for four runs, the same as a grand slam.
Yes, that changes the fundamental rules of the game, but the fundamental rules of baseball were written when players weren’t quite in such good shape and did not know about optimizing for launch angles and other details that have enabled home runs to proliferate. What if the fundamentals are supposed to be that home runs are rare and stolen bases more common.
That’s tilting at windmills stuff because change is inevitable. But all of it is to say that if you want to change the trajectory of where something is heading, you may need to radically change the rules of engagement.
For example, Netflix got its start as a DVD-by-mail business. You used the internet to pick which movies you wanted to see, but then they were sent to you in red envelopes. Over time it became faster and more convenient to stream movies directly from the internet. This is a point where Netflix could have been disrupted. Rather than invest in the technology and content rights to make that possible, it could have tried to delay the inevitable and compete by paying to overnight all of its DVDs so they would get there faster or some such.
And in fact it did do something like that by splitting the company into two businesses: Netflix, which would spend on streaming, and Qwikster, which would try to preserve the legacy business. It was a "have your cake and eat it too" moment with CEO Reed Hastings writing at the time that “streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures…and we need to let each grow and operate independently.”
It didn’t work. Customers hated the idea of two subscriptions (there’s an adage in business that you should never let your customer see your business model and this was Netflix going full blown open kimono) and frankly Qwikster was a melting ice cube. Play it the other way and if Netflix had stuck to its DVD by mail guns and not changed the game, ceding streaming to Amazon and others, it probably would have disappeared within 24 to 36 months.
When presented with challenges, spend time thinking about specific solutions, but if they are just bandages or attempts to delay the inevitable, probably don’t pursue them. Instead, consider ways to change the game entirely. These ideas aren’t always practical or the most cost efficient, but sometimes they are what’s needed.
As for baseball, it’s put a lot of bandages on its business model recently, including rule changes this year that include bigger bases and a pitch clock. But its popularity continues to decline and who knows what happens next. If that can happen to America’s Pastime, is any market share safe?
– By Tim Hanson