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44 How to Hire A-Players
Building Your Farm Team
The third step to creating an organization of A-players is to build
your farm team, which brings your A-player mind-set and your
commitment to interviewing together in one simple system. Major
league baseball teams, for instance, don’t just hire players off the
street; they draft talented college and international players, put
them on a minor league ‘‘farm team,’’ and then promote the best
players to the big leagues when they need them.
In the spring of 1999 (before cell phones became ubiquitous), a
major league baseball scout for the Colorado Rockies named Jay
Darnell pulled into a truck stop to report on a young player he had
recently spotted. 1 He informed his contact at the Rockies’ home office
that this college player was going to hit for a lot of power in the
major leagues one day. But Darnell received no response. The Rockies
never pursued the player.
Later that year, this same player—Albert Pujols—got a chance to
try out for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which also chose not to sign
him. Finally, the St. Louis Cardinals drafted Pujols in the thirteenth
round of the 1999 draft. Major league scouts will tell you that it is
rare to find a superstar in the fifth or sixth round of the draft. To
find one in the thirteenth round is essentially unheard of. Albert
Pujols was the 402nd overall pick in the baseball draft that year and
received a $70,000 bonus—pennies in the world of big-league
sports.
Pujols was then assigned to one of the Cardinals’ minor league
farm teams. In 2001, he was playing well in the minors when the
Cardinals’ regular third baseman got injured. So Pujols was called
up to the big leagues—and he never looked back. He was the 2001
National League Rookie of the Year, won the National League Most
Valuable Player title three times, received numerous other awards,
and is now mentioned in the same breath as legendary players like
Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Joe DiMaggio. The Cardinals have
gone on to compete in two World Series (one of which they won),
build a new stadium, and have near-sellout games for years—in
large part because of this thirteenth-round pick. All of this happened
because the Cardinals—rather than the Rays or the