Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

If you’re Number One, a good way to guarantee that you won’t stay there is to continue doing exactly what you’ve been doing. Even if you do it even better than you have been, the world around you will change. That became a key philosophy of mine when I was in positions of leadership in a couple of exceptionally strong organizations. But while I was applying it to space science organizations, my favorite example comes from baseball. Specifically, it’s the story of the Louisville Slugger. Many baseball fans know some version of the link between the Pete Browning, nicknamed the Louisville Slugger, and the company in Louisville that ultimately trademarked that name for what became the dominant bat through the 20 th Century. I’ll explain why that is a perfect illustration of success in changing times, but the story is more complicated than I had known, including a classic story than may be more dramatic than what happened, a somewhat-embarrassing incident of telling a story to a stranger ...

  We’re done with the baseball of our tour, and have only one more night on the road, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. So it’s time for some lessons learned, things we did right, things we did wrong, things we learned that did (or didn’t surprise us). ·        -- We went to 15 games in a trip that will total 30 days. That’s a fairly relaxed pace, but we wanted this to be a pleasure trip, not a test of endurance. Today was actually the longest driving day we had, at just over 600 miles. It wasn’t the toughest, though, since we had two others where we went more than 500 miles, and had a stop along the way (lunch with a relative in one case, visiting the Field of Dreams in the other). ·        -- We still have five hours of driving tomorrow, but we’ve not had any terrifying driving moments. We’ve tried to keep to interstates whenever possible, for the sake of safety. The worst experiences have been trying to negotiate unfamil...

    4 th of July at the ballpark in Oklahoma City, the last game of this tour. It’s a downtown ballpark, with lots of hotels and restaurants around (although several of the restaurants weren’t open on the 4 th ). I’ve become a fan of downtown ballparks over the years. There’s what looks to be a nice pedestrian walkway along a canal a little below street level, reminiscent of San Antonio’s Riverwalk, although we aren’t in town long enough to really see what it’s like. Some ballparks have a better skyline than others. Chickasaw Bricktown is one of the others. The skyline is a parking garage and three chain hotels. The flip side of that is that I’m sure there are a lot of hotel rooms with views into the park, and the parking garage had a lot of people standing at the railing watching the game. I don’t know if that’s always true, or just when they are having fireworks and are close to sold out (9800, in a seat that the web says seats 9000, although there were a few empty se...