When You Reach a Fork in the Road, Listen to Yogi
I just finished lunch with two recent high school graduates who both played on the high school team where I’ve been an assistant coach the last three seasons. We caught up on their summer while watching the World Cup playing in the background. I asked when they both had to be on campus to start their freshman year of college — one at a four year college and the other at a junior college. And we talked a bit about how they would be managing their class schedule around their baseball training and practice blocks each day starting this fall.
It’s great to chat with young people as they are about to take big steps in their lives. I vaguely remember that summer between high school and heading off to college. I take for granted now what a leap it was, that drive with my parents from my rural Oregon hometown to Pullman, WA, where I began college as an unrecruited, unknown walk-on at Washington State University. A nobody who ended up red-shirting that first year at WSU, and then briefly deciding to give up baseball, before re-routing to play at the level I should have started at all along at Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR. Whoa! That was a while ago.
During my lunch with my two former players, I imagined the journey ahead for them. For some reason the classic Yogi Berra quote popped into my head:
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
For sure, these two young men will encounter several forks in their respective roads over the years to come. We all do. There’s one fork in the road I recall very clearly, one that probably had the biggest impact on how my life has unfolded over the ensuing decades.
The Fork
I’m committed to keeping this story concise, so I’ll skip the prelude and much of the run up to the ultimate fork in the road. By early 1994 I had come to the conclusion that I needed to pursue an MBA in order to get to where I wanted to be career-wise. Yes, a second graduate degree following an MA in Economics that I had finished in 1991 the year after completing my Bachelor’s degree at Pacific.
Feeling as though I was pigeon-holed into “economics” related jobs, I looked at the MBA as my opportunity to pivot. A way to rebrand myself as something more than an economist. So I set my sights on prepping to apply to business school and start on this two-year journey in the fall of 1995. However, beginning also in 1994, I had signed on as a part-time scout for the Chicago White Sox, roaming the greater bay area and evaluating high school and college players for the MLB amateur draft.
As 1994 played out, the fork was slowly forming. One branch was the MBA path. Evaluating programs, studying for the GMAT, and then ultimately completing just a few applications to schools, all in California. (East coast schools were disqualified after spending an early December week freezing my butt off in New York and Connecticut).
The other branch was the path to a potential full-time scouting role and the journey from there to front office job with an MLB team. This included spending time with the full-time area scout I worked with, and also getting to meet the guys who held the big decision making jobs like national crosschecker and director of scouting.
By the time spring of 1995 rolled around, the fork that Yogi would have me “take” was pretty fully formed, though some uncertainty remained:
Fork 1: I had been accepted into the full-time MBA program at UCLA’s Anderson School starting in September
Fork 2: I had interviewed with an MLB team for two different full-time area scout roles, one covering multiple states in the south and the other covering multiple states in the midwest
The Decision
This is where the details and my memory get a little fuzzy, especially when it comes to exact dates. But sometime in later spring of 1995, say mid to late June after the MLB amateur draft, I needed to make a decision. I had already accepted my spot at UCLA and paid the deposit, but I had recently completed the MLB team interview with a senior-level scout who would oversee both of the open full-time area scout positions they were looking to fill.
I needed to make a decision soon. The timeline to find a place to live in Westwood, and then pack up and move, was fast approaching. The MLB scouting opportunity wasn’t a firm offer, but it felt like it might be there if I wanted to pursue it. I had to do some “futurecasting” and think about “optionality” in a way I hadn’t before. And to be clear, this was well before the term “optionality” had been crafted as a term of business art by Silicon Valley’s venture capital community.
Here’s roughly how I compared the two options, as best I can recall. Spoiler alert: it won’t be hard to determine as you read through the bullet points below which fork in the road I ultimately “took”:
The MLB scouting job was still in the “interviewing” phase, so the probability of even being offered either of the positions certainly wasn’t 100%.
Getting an MBA would allow me to pivot into any type of business role, including perhaps working for an MLB if that’s what I wanted to do, or instead heading to New York to be an obscenely rich investment banker.
Even if I was offered an area scouting role, there would be no guarantee I’d be able to transition into a full-time front office role. There was always the spectre that as a non-former MLB draftee I’d be on the outside looking in for senior level roles in professional baseball.
An MBA had a clearly defined net-present-value in terms of what it likely would be worth for me financially, and what that would mean for the life I hoped to eventually build with a family and home in California.
The Results
Yes, I went to UCLA and finished my MBA in 1997. I spent the summer of 1996 interning at MLB International, meeting and networking with people whom I both learned from and would later work with as part of my career journey.
I’ve never looked back with regret, wondering if I should have held out for a full-time scouting role. Not only had I not been a professional player, I hadn’t even played NCAA D1 baseball, so I’m pretty sure I would have been playing from behind as a scout in professional baseball. Remember, this was several years before Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” and the rush of Ivy League data analytics quants that poured into front offices across MLB.
Perhaps, in hindsight, my fork in the road moment seems like less of an agonizing decision today. It’s always easier to look back and add up all the reasons why a big life decision looks like a no-brainer many years after the fact. This is how our brains work, how we rationalize and come to terms with the decisions we make.
For me it turned out to be a great decision, but I also feel that taking an area scout job would have ended up being a great decision. And that’s the point. When Yogi Berra said “take it” in reference to a fork in the road, people thought it was just another funny Yogi-ism. Actually, he knew exactly what he was saying, which is basically, just pick a path based on whatever analysis and/or gut feeling algorithm you use, and race ahead.
Ultimately, it’s not the “fork” that matters so much as what you do once on the path that stretches forward from the fork. This matters most because it’s all about how you’ll proceed each time you encounter a fork in the road, and you’ll encounter many. Just remember Yogi’s sage advice each time you reach a fork in the road: “just take it”.
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