Successful Team

I just so happened to be watching the Cubs while reading the prompt for this week’s discussion. While I have been part of many teams in my life, none seem to be nearly as successful as this year’s Cubs team. While they have only been the best team in the MLB all year and have clinched the NL Central, they haven’t yet had a playoff game, so I am being hopeful of continued success. As I’m sure most people are aware, the Cubs franchise owns one of the longest championship droughts in all of professional sports. They haven’t won a World Series in over one hundred years. As an avid Cubs fan and someone who follows the game closely from a statistical level, I believe this Cubs team to be an example of a next to perfect team. Hopefully one that will finally break the curse and win the World Series.

Going along with the Cubs as an example of a successful team, there are many factors one could point out that are the cause to the success. As with most baseball teams, the organization is set up with a few executives at top and a whole team of coaches that help lead the team of players on a daily basis. In the case of the Cubs, I think they owe a lot of their success to the owners going out and hiring arguably the best General Manager in the league, Theo Epstein. Theo is a proven leader in the baseball world having previously turned the Boston Red Sox organization around. I believe having a proven team leader is the ultimate key for a successful team. In this unique example, Theo has the responsibilities to not only hire new members of the team, but also make sure they can all work together in a meaningful manor. Under Theo, the owners of the team went and hired Joe Maddon, who is arguably one of the best baseball managers in the league. These two managers together give the team the adequate leadership they need in order to be successful.

Using a baseball team as an example, I understand that there are a lot of different factors that can lead to the success of a team. There are the quality of the leadership and players themselves all the way to unfortunate injuries and players not playing up to their expectations. Already laying out the management of the team, a large part of the success is the players and the way they have played this season. The management of the Cubs has done a phenomenal job at building a team of players that play well together as well as put up statistically favorable numbers. In baseball teams are built from within as well as by signing free agents. This starts with building a farm system of talented young players and training them to get the most out of their potential. However, no matter how talented a player can be, he can always have character or other issues that cause him to not fulfill his projected potential. There is a little bit of luck associated with this. In the case of the Cubs, I believe their management has done a great job at drafting/signing players with the athletic talent as well as character make up in order to create one of the best all around teams in baseball our era might ever see. In the case of using a sports team as an example for this assignment, the case of “being a good teammate” is a large part of the success of the team. The management and other leaders on the team can only do so much to get the players prepared on a daily basis. The team members cannot act selfishly and must act by putting the team first. I believe this year’s current Cubs team is one of the best examples of all of these aspects of a team coming together. Hopefully the success of this team will continue over the next couple of weeks throughout the playoffs.