Pitchers and catchers are starting to report for spring training this week, and I have high hopes for my hometown team, the Detroit Tigers, to find the magic to survive the summer and make it all the way to the October classic, but there is another team that I am also fond of. And that’s the Oakland A’s.
The Major League Baseball team, the Athletics are one of the American League’s eight charter franchises. That’s really just a fancy way to say the club was one of the first around… they were founded in 1901 in Philadelphia, and since the 1905 World Series, the team has had an unlikely mascot. The team, known as the Athletics or most commonly as the A’s, wears a white elephant on their sleeve.
(Now let me pretend to know for a minute what you’re thinking… a slow, lumbering elephant? How does that represent someone Athletic?)
The ironic thing is that a white elephant, according to a quick Google search, is a term used to describe something out of proportion to its usefulness or worth. They are a lost cause. The term “white elephant” was given to the A’s by the manager of the baseball New York Giants, John McGraw. The story goes, a confident McGraw told reporters before the 1905 World Series that the owner of the A’s and his team had no chance at winning the World Series because he had a “white elephant on his hands…” The Giants made good on John’s insensitive prediction, and his team then proceeded to clobber the A’s four games to one to win the 1905 World Series championship.
In a game filled with superstition, it seems a white elephant mascot is ill-fated. If something is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth, that would not be an A; that would be more like a D+ or, at best, a solid C-. Bottom line is this…would you play for a baseball team that is proud of being associated with the lost cause? Well, in this instance, I actually would. I admire the Athletics franchise for accepting its past and using it to fuel its future. They make no apologies. The front office embraced it. In fact, I enjoy that they used the white elephant as billboard material even before locker room billboards probably even existed, it was 1905 after all. The A’s made the white elephant an integral part of their brand, and they’re far from a lost cause. They’re one of Major League Baseball’s greatest success stories.
• 9 World Series Championships.
• 15 AL Pennants
• 16 Division titles
• 2 Wildcard berths
• They have a Best Picture Oscar-nominated movie, Moneyball, that highlights their innovative front office.
• And in 2017 boasted one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball: only $83 million. (While that may seem like a lot, contrast that to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who clock in at 245M)
That’s not a lost cause.
I call that solid ROI, and it’s ROI, not ROI’s.
Baseball geeks will understand what I mean.
