Prominent Guest

The guest of highest public prominence ever to come to my home as a guest might have been Chaim Bloom, the recently ousted Chief of Baseball Operations for the Boston Red Sox.  His mother and my wife have remained friends.  We have been dinner guests in their rather elegant home.  Chaim got an Ivy education, got interested in baseball, particularly the statistical basis of managerial decisions, and when offered a staff position with a Major League team, latched on.  After fifteen years in progressively responsible and visible positions with his original team, he was hired by Boston as their senior officer in 2019.

Baseball's goal is winning games, starting with each individual one.  Unlike football, there are a lot of games and a lot of contingencies, so weaker teams often have their afternoons of glory.  Success, though, is cumulative, qualifying for playoffs, becoming world champions.  Statistical data driving who to put in a line-up or when to go to a relief pitcher will change the fortunes some days but not others.  Who to have on the team and how much to spend to have their contributory talent determines seasonal outcome.  

Since Chaim's ouster, dozens of news reports have come my way, first press releases, then commentary.  These have engaged my mind considerably more than the daily American political blight, as they involve analysis rather than tribalism, though The Red Sox probably have done much to create Achdus in Boston that even their political figures cannot disrupt.  First, nobody seems to think that Chaim should have been given more time to produce a winner.  In the years prior to his arrival, the Red Sox were a more successful team at season's end than while he had control.  It's perhaps a bit like personal finance, where we know we need to allot a portion of our income when needed far into the future, but we also want to go away on vacation once this year and remodel the kitchen in two years.  Chaim inherited a pretty good now, but not a sustainable now.

To get the players that can perform to the satisfaction of the region's citizens and the current team owners, he could either generate that level of skill in a minor league structure or he could purchase people by trading his talent and money with other teams or bidding for them as free agents.  And to get the success that he had inherited, his predecessors had generated a very high payroll.  League rules, designed to keep teams in big markets from overwhelming teams from smaller markets, place a penalty on overspending.  This left Chaim at a disadvantage trying to purchase the players his team needed from other teams or perhaps even the open market.  His farm system had already been depleted, ranked near the bottom by many MLB analysts.  So his task on entry was really one of restoring future capacity by reducing payroll to enable acquisition of players by trading for them and by creating a better system to make their minor league staff sufficiently proficient to promote to their major league team.  And he did both very successfully, according to the analysts' reports of his tenure.  Payroll reductions will give his successor a place at the bidding table for top performing players and other slots on the team can be filled by lower paid players with skills enhanced by minor league experience.

No good deed goes unpunished.  To reduce payroll, he traded away top-salaried players or let them become free agents.  He did a lot better at future planning than he did at the trading market for current players.  Their highest potential star, a fellow destined for the Hall of Fame, now makes big bucks someplace else but performs appropriate to the high salary.  And what the Sox received in return pales next to what they gave away.  Chaim just had a measure of timidity, a hesitation to take a high stakes bet in a game where future performance does not always match past performance.  And over four years the access to the playoffs at season's end had been lost several times in a row.  The fans and the owners wanted a competitive team now.  They could soon have one because of what Chaim did, but people questioned whether he had the boldness and risk tolerance to follow through on the high stakes trades needed to bring that about.  They judged not.

Chaim as a teenager had been a Torah reader at my congregation, as had his younger brother, also a man of immense talent, though not a public figure.  For a while we needed readers to fill in for our Cantor when away or when we were between Cantors, something beyond the ability of our congregation's men to do with that frequency, then and now.  We had teenagers ourselves and their parents trusted our level of observance, so we picked them up at the train station Friday afternoon and returned them to the train station after Havdalah.  That was some twenty years ago.

On reflection, and maybe why the reports of Chaim's tenure capture so much of my interest, is that my congregation has a similar situation, one lingering much longer than what he both inherited and addressed while head of Baseball Operations for the Red Sox.  We effectively have the men with the skills we need right now, at least in the sanctuary, though the ability of the Governance is much more open for debate.  But we lack a farm system, both in our Sanctuary and on our Board.  We have a Dominant Influencer, much like the Sox have an owner and a hired CEO.  Somebody can execute each part of the service at the time it needs to be done.  But we don't have, maybe not even seek the promotability of a farm system.  A VP has a list of who read what Aliyah last year and recycles as needed.  The Gabbai responsible for shacharit has his pitching rotation.  The Haftarah inviter probably finds it easier to default to himself much of the time.  Two new people arrived by random circumstance, not by planned development.  And all, from the Rabbi recruitment to who might have a say in future initiatives must have the approval of the gatekeeping Dominant Influencer, which has the dual effect of  bypassing some of the best minds and generating resentment in the form of expressing their free agency by non-renewal of membership or more frequently the insidious adverse consequences never getting invited to throw their energies and abilities into the mix.  So next shabbos the parts will get chanted capably, there will be herring after the services but there will also be people who resent being kept outside the gate while programming decisions and participatory invitations that never reach them for things they can do remain out of reach.  Much like Chaim, my guest and my synagogues hired but transient extreme talent from decades ago, inherited and tried to correct.