Baseball And Healthcare’s Similarities
Former New York Yankee pitcher-turned-author Jim Bouton once reflected on his lifelong passion for baseball with the following: “you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
I was reminded of those words with the rites of Spring Training beginning anew this month. But I was reminded of them, too, when I recently met with a group of nurses and heard the passion and lifelong commitment they have toward their profession. Healthcare has indeed gripped them and won’t let go.
Noted journalist Thomas Boswell once wrote a book called “How Life Imitates the World Series” and there is a popular course being taught at NYU entitled “Baseball as a Road to God.” So too, it isn’t hard to find the link between baseball and healthcare. Is it just a coincidence that Florence Nightingale and Yogi Berra share a May 12 birthday, or that Jonas Salk and Joe DiMaggio were both born in 1914, or that Babe Ruth entered the world the same year Louis Pasteur left it?
Baseball and healthcare. Healthcare and baseball.
Baseball and healthcare resist change to the extreme and yield most painfully to it only when pushed to the brink. Is it any wonder that it took 45 million uninsured Americans, frightening reports on medical errors (clearly a baseball term) and unacceptable barriers to access to trigger the national movement toward healthcare reform? We can only hope that reform in healthcare provides better outcomes than baseball’s foolish trials with artificial turf, bullpen carts and the designated hitter.
Baseball and healthcare are both guided by statistics and probabilities. Ty Cobb has the highest lifetime batting average at .366. But that means he failed more than six out of ten times. While such rates would be unacceptable in healthcare, medicine remains an imperfect science and even with “best practices” to guide us, we can’t cure everything no matter how much money and resources are expended.
The Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw recently signed a contract for north of $30 million a season –roughly $1 million per start. Every time he takes the mound he is no longer facing hitters. Instead, he is facing the expectations that have been set for him. Isn’t that true of our doctors and our healthcare institutions as a whole? Are they battling disease or are the battling our expectations?
Many a would-be superstar never made it out of the minor leagues because he couldn’t hit the curve. Today the most successful hospital or health plan CEOs are those who can handle the curves that regulators, business partners and the marketplace throw at them. Isn’t that ultimately what separates superstars from the also-rans?
Baseball is one of the few places in life where people still get credit for a sacrifice. Don’t we ask that of our healthcare professionals as well? The doctor who sacrifices time away from the family to handle a weekend emergency. The nurse who is asked to put aside her own emotions to comfort a cancer-sickened child. The spouse-turned-caregiver who turns their life upside down to ease the pain of loved one.
Today, consumers are attempting to take better control of their health through online portals, sensible eating, exercise and……health coaches. They know, as do baseball players, that they need to progress one base at a time and their best chance to make it safely around the bases depends on a coach who can see the whole field, draw upon past experiences and have nothing but their pupil’s best interest at heart.
And in the end, there is no better similarity between these two great American institutions than the end game for both. To go home.
Ross K. Goldberg is the president of Kevin/Ross Public Relations. He is a member of the Payers & Providers editorial board.
