With the season starting, new useful information will finally become available. Let me know if I can provide any hard to get information in which other analysts aren’t providing. I will continue trying to notice injured players, provide Quick Looks at new/suspect pitchers, give velocity updates, and prospect comparisons. Other writers can provide normal group-think information. Let me know where I can provide that early edge.
The principal shareholder in the Rays, Stuart Sternberg, discussed how finding and developing the new frontiers provides competitive advantages.
Maybe, Sternberg said, it’s by falling behind, taking a lead from companies that follow Starbucks into good locations, copy Apple electronics or make generic drugs.
“I think where the advantage for us is going forward — and it’s going to sound crazy — is to try to allow all, and I will say all, these other organizations to devote enormous resources, and that’s not just money but thinking, brain power and devotion, to things that will have very little payoff, while those resources, brainpower and money might be better spent somewhere else,” he said.
“You build it, you invest all the (research and development), you devote everything you can and like a drug company, I’ll do the generic version for nothing, and I’ll undersell you. And while you’re doing that, I’ll worry about some other stuff over here.
“Everything I’ve seen, it’s an arms race right now, and guys are using elephant guns to kill mosquitoes.”
No matter what the target, the Rays have to find a way to get back ahead.
“There’s always going to be new frontiers,” Bloom said. “If we don’t find them, somebody else will.”
Let me know which frontiers we can explore together.
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