{"id":352508,"date":"2025-11-03T11:44:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T11:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/352508\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T11:44:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T11:44:10","slug":"i-worked-with-the-dodgers-andrew-friedman-for-years-these-two-leadership-traits-stood-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/352508\/","title":{"rendered":"I worked with the Dodgers\u2019 Andrew Friedman for years. These two leadership traits stood out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0<\/strong>This story is part of Peak,\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s desk covering leadership, personal development and performance through the lens of sports. Follow Peak\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Former MLB manager Joe Maddon worked with Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers\u2019 president of baseball operations, for nine seasons with the Tampa Bay Rays. Friedman and the Dodgers just won their second consecutive World Series and third in six years.<\/p>\n

My favorite story about Andrew Friedman has nothing and everything to do with our relationship.<\/p>\n

When Andrew and the Tampa Bay Rays hired me to be the team\u2019s manager for the 2006 season, he and I went out a lot. Hell, we\u2019d go out at night during spring training. We\u2019d laugh, we\u2019d giggle, we\u2019d talk baseball. It was wonderful.<\/p>\n

Then we went to Boston, and he found this really intimate, trendy sushi joint that I would have never known about. It was one of those places where you sit down and they just start serving you. We sat there, just him and I in this little place. I have a great photograph somewhere of us together at the bar. That night is one I\u2019ll always remember because we really bonded.<\/p>\n

From a distance, Andrew might seem a little reserved or a little robotic. He is really sharp; I think that\u2019s obvious. He worked at Bear Stearns and in private equity before he joined the Rays. But Andrew can really straddle the analytics and human side of baseball, and there were two leadership traits I appreciated about him during our nine years together:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. He intentionally challenged people\u2019s ideas to create a conversation.<\/li>\n
  2. He was a great listener.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I had my first interview with Tampa Bay during the 2005 World Series in Houston. Andrew was in a little hotel conference room, and the whole time, he looked right at me. I could tell he was in every word and really listening.<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s not only a great leadership quality, it\u2019s a great human quality. Trust me, he listens to everything you say. Not that he\u2019s going to agree \u2013 a lot of times he would disagree \u2013 but that\u2019s not what mattered. When you speak with somebody in a leadership position and you believe that they\u2019re giving you their unfiltered and undivided attention, that\u2019s what matters.<\/p>\n

    If you want to extrapolate the best out of somebody who works for you, become a good listener. Nothing will impress them more.<\/p>\n

    When I got to Tampa Bay, I brought with me a card system. It was a card of information \u2013 my version of analytics as it existed at the time. I did all the work myself. I\u2019d look up stats and put on my card whatever information I thought was important before a game or series.<\/p>\n

    Andrew would come into my office and watch me go through this process all the time. He wouldn\u2019t say anything; he\u2019d just watch. And then finally he came up to me and said: \u201cListen, you\u2019re wasting a lot of time with that, and you can spend that time doing something else. We can do that for you. Show me what you need and want, and we\u2019ll get that done for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

    I didn\u2019t ask him or mention it to him; it was just something he watched me do.<\/p>\n

    Before the 2008 season, I came up with an esoteric idea for our team: 9 = 8. It meant: 9 players playing 9 innings hard can make us one of the 8 teams in the playoffs.<\/p>\n

    The year before, we had won just 66 games. I needed to find a way to sell to our players that we could be a playoff team in 2008. I was riding my bike in California one day, and I remembered something I had read about players writing their intentions for the day on an index card when they walked in a room. Esoteric, I thought. So I\u2019m riding my bike, and I don\u2019t know why but I started thinking: 9 players, 9 innings, 8 teams in the playoffs. And then all of a sudden I just thought: 9 = 8. I started to extrapolate that. I wanted 9 more wins out of the offense, 9 more wins out of the defense, 9 more wins out of the pitching staff. I didn\u2019t even know how that would work, but I thought it sounded good.<\/p>\n

    I got back from my bike ride, and I was so jacked up that I called Andrew. I said, \u201cAndrew, what do you think about this as a way to motivate the group and give us direction?\u201d I told him the whole thing. And his comment to me was, \u201cI love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Imagine the confidence I had to follow up on that. Andrew loved it. That created all the momentum for me. He liked new things, new thoughts and ideas, and he understood, beyond his ability with data and analytics, the human side of things.<\/p>\n

    He would also challenge people. Sometimes he would intentionally take the other side of an argument to see if you were really convicted in what you were saying, or if you were easily swayed.<\/p>\n

    We\u2019d talk about lineup construction. He may have agreed with me completely, but he\u2019d say, \u201cWhat do you think about hitting this guy second and this guy fourth? Don\u2019t you think that\u2019s a better idea?\u201d He would just test me to see how convicted I was.<\/p>\n

    During my first couple of years in Tampa, I wasn\u2019t so concerned with bullpen matchups because we didn\u2019t have very good bullpen arms. I thought it was almost useless to match pitchers up; I was just trying to go with the best pitcher. But he argued against that. Eventually, I started to move in that direction because he told me it was done for a reason and they believed in it. Andrew taught me a lot about how analytics works and how I could use it to make better decisions in the game.<\/p>\n

    One year, we acquired an infielder named Logan Forsythe. Andrew told me the thing that really attracted them to Logan was his exit velocity. His numbers were not good, but they found out he hit the ball really hard. He was just kind of unlucky.<\/p>\n

    A reporter asked me about Logan, and I brought up exit velocity, which was not a popular stat at the time. Andrew caught wind of that and, man, he got on me real fast to not spread proprietary information. I didn\u2019t even know it was. I just thought it was interesting. He jumped my ship, and I told him, \u201cYou\u2019re right. I\u2019ll be more careful.\u201d<\/p>\n

    And guess what? He was right about Logan Forsythe.<\/p>\n

    Maybe once or twice we got heated, but for the most part, our conversations were adversarial in the most civil sense. I\u2019ve met Andrew\u2019s mom, Barbara. She is such a warm, positive person. She is all spirit and soul. You don\u2019t get raised by a woman like that and not have a real soul about you \u2014 and Andrew does.<\/p>\n

    He was always open-minded. He never thought he was always right. He seemed to know that he didn\u2019t know everything, and that\u2019s a really important part of growth.<\/p>\n

    His approach permeated the culture. I\u2019m not surprised he\u2019s done the same with the Dodgers.<\/p>\n

    \u2014 As told to Jayson Jenks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0This story is part of Peak,\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s desk covering leadership, personal development and performance through the lens…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":352509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2502,1266,2503,62,222,1289,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-352508","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-los-angeles-dodgers","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-peak","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-sports-business","13":"tag-tampa-bay-rays","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115485597111770727","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}