Of baseball and business (diversity edition)

Baseball Hall-of-Famer Monte Irvin just died. Never heard of him? He not only helped the New York Giants get to two World Series, he also mentored one of their up-and-coming players, an outfielder you may have heard of named Willie Mays. But Mr. Irvin played for nearly a dozen years before joining the Giants. Before that, he had been relegated to the "Negro Leagues."

A couple of decades ago, I had a client named Irvin. He happened to be an African American and I knew he'd been raised in the same town as Monte Irvin, so I asked if they were related. Yes, indeed—he was surprised I recognized the name, but I'm a baseball fan. So the elder Mr. Irvin made a guest appearance in a speech I wrote for his nephew. Here's an excerpt; you can read more of it on my website: 

Cultures change slowly. Let me remind you that nearly 50 years after Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, there's still not a single African American running a baseball team. And African American executives have been in the financial industry a lot shorter time than that.

My uncle was a major league baseball player—he played in the old Negro Leagues and later for the New York Giants. He could tell you that lots of African American players got hit by pitches—“accidentally,” of course—after the leagues were integrated. But it happened a lot less when a team had an African American pitcher on the mound.

It works the same way in the business world. The progress we make against racism in the workplace has a direct relationship to the positions that African Americans play on the team. As more African Americans take leadership positions and sit on Boards of Directors, more companies will stop throwing pitches at their African American employees.

Yes, it's an old speech: the corporate world doesn't throw pitches at its diverse employees anymore, not so blatantly. And it recognizes many forms of diversity, including LGBT people. But when it comes to leadership roles, are diverse professional relegated to the "farm team" longer than the majority folks in the pipeline? For some organizations, in some industries, the answer may still be yes.

Major League Baseball signed Mr. Irvin at the ripe old age of 30; the man considered perhaps the greatest pitcher in the Negro Leagues, Satchel Paige, was 42 when he joined the majors. Paige pitched for nearly a dozen more years, but his best games were behind him. So much talent, consigned to relative obscurity. And how many more potential baseball stars aged out of the game before the Major Leagues opened their doors to players of color?

There's a lesson there, and not just for baseball fans. Talent deserves to shine. And it's not an unlimited resource—businesses can't afford to waste the talents of their people, no matter who they are. We've made progress since I wrote that speech. But I can't help wondering how many Monte Irvins and Satchel Paiges the business world has lost: how many talented women and people of color never got the opportunities they deserved, the opportunities to shine—and to lead.

Words of Thanks

Words shape my life—whether I'm writing them or reading them. So in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thought I'd offer a list of some of the writers I'm grateful for this year.

Roger Angell: If you're a baseball fan you probably already know he's one of the most colorful and insightful chroniclers of the sport there is. And if you're not a baseball fan, his essays will turn you into one—or at least teach you how the game works. Although my Mets lost the World Series this year, I'm grateful that The New Yorker gave Angell some of its digital real estate to write about it.

MB Caschetta: I spend most of my recreational reading time in periodicals (The New Yorker, Vanity Fair) or nonfiction. But when I had a few days to myself this summer, I plopped myself in a comfy corner and read Caschetta's multiple award-winning first novel, Miracle Girls. Funny, evocative, and moving.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I saw Hamilton at the Public Theater in February, having bought the last two tickets to that performance about four months earlier. Here's a link to the video that convinced me I had to see it, Lin-Manuel Miranda performing the opening number solo at the White House. Amazing, right? But the fully staged production blew me away. At the end of the performance I attended—three days before the reviews came out—the entire audience leapt to its feet simultaneously. This was not one of those typical New Yorker "let me be the first to get to a taxi" standing O's. It was not a "the people in front of me stood up and now I can't see anything unless I stand too" ovation. It was—for me at least—an acknowledgement that everyone from the writer (Miranda, now a MacArthur-certified "genius") to the performers (Miranda again, alongside a diverse cast of first-rate actor/singer/dancers) had conjured brilliance on that stage. And I would never be able to look at a musical the same way again.

Ron Chernow: I read his House of Morgan decades ago, so already I knew about his amazing power to bring the past to life. But after I saw Hamilton the musical, I had to read the book that started it all.

Lisa Kron: She's made me laugh since I first saw her maybe 30 years ago in her one-woman show 101 Most Humiliating Stories. She's made me cry plenty, too. And laugh-cry at the same time. What would that be, craugh? As hard and as lonely as it is to be a writer sometimes, Kron has kept telling her stories and this year her story-telling won her two Tony Awards—one for writing the book of the remarkable, ground-breaking musical Fun Home and the other for the score, for which she wrote the lyrics with Jeanine Tesori supplying the music. If you were one of the dozen people watching the Tony telecast, you didn't see these awards—they were presented during the commercials. So here's a video of her first acceptance speech. Press on past the obligatory thank-yous to the "I have had a dream" section.

If I may put on my speechwriter hat for a moment, that's how you write an acceptance speech: tell a story, make a point. Change the world. Words can do that. It's one reason I love them—and Kron—so much.

Whose work are you thankful for? Hit up the comment section below.