Dean Stotz: 37 Years Inside Stanford Baseball's Winning Culture

Few people have had a better seat to watch a winning culture get built than Dean Stotz. He spent 37 years as associate head coach at Stanford Baseball, working alongside Mark Marquess to create one of the most celebrated programs in college baseball history: two national titles, 14 College World Series appearances, and five straight trips to Omaha. In this episode, host Jason Piasecki talks with Dean about what made Stanford so hard to beat, how the coaching staff built and maintained standards year after year, and what any leader can take from it. He also talks about his book, 108 Double Stitches, and the thread that runs through 37 years of baseball stories.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Winning Cultures Podcast with Jason Paiseki. Conversations about how great cultures are built and how they show up every day.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Welcome to the Winning Cultures Podcast. I'm Jason Paiseki. Culture is one of the most powerful tools organizations have to attract and retain great people. And the ones that know that tend to win. On the show, we talk with leaders who are building cultures people want to be part of. Today's guest came to me through our mutual love for baseball. I'm joined by Dean Stotz, who's an associate head coach at the University of Stanford for 37 years, teaming up with Mark Marquis to create some of the most legendary teams in college baseball history. Dean, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

So we got connected in an interesting way. You were writing a book, which has come out, and you were searching for a uh a story, and you you happened to cross a blog I wrote, or I should say posted because I did not write it. It's from John Sculinos in a famous speech that he gave uh called Don't Wind the Play. And uh tell me about that uh that story and kind of talk about your book and what you're what you're hoping to share with baseball fans.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

So I'm uh 72 years old. I probably spent my entire life in baseball, coaching youth, uh 37 years at Stanford, and I've been retired about 10 or 12 years. I still run summer camps for Stanford for high school age. It's all about creating opportunity. And uh after I retired, one of our ex-coaches, Brock Unkridge, the head coach at San Diego, University of San Diego, had me down to talk to his team. And the night before I went down, I just kind of penned a bunch of ideas on paper and probably penned 75 of them in less than an hour, and approached his team like as a first baseman, you're either an air maker or an air eraser. I mean, you either create the air for the infielder or you erase the air for the infielder and have all these little tidbits of what I I think are wisdom, and spoke for an hour and a half to his team, and he responded two or three times during the year of how his team just gravitated to a lot of the things I mentioned. One of the things I mentioned is playing consequence free. As a coach, you prep them in practice, but you can't have them think mechanically once the game starts. They gotta they gotta be able to play with freedom. And I kind of picked that up. I've a lot of these things I picked up from other coaches. And uh in the process, the book is just kind of 194 thoughts on baseball, very short, very quick, reads very easily, written for you know high school and college athletes, high school and college coaches. And in it, I have a number of like 23 of my favorite stories, and we may get to a couple of those by the time we're done. But my favorite clinic speech, once a year, the the National Coaching Convention is in January, and it moves around the country. And there was a famous baseball coach named John Skelinis that we had played a number of times that coached down in Southern California, and he gave a talk about don't widen home plate. It's the best uh clinic speech I've ever heard in my entire life. Uh John was probably almost 80 years old and came out to the stage and literally had a home plate on a necklace around his around his neck and talked for 15 minutes and didn't address home plate. It was basically about not changing the culture and you like you set a certain standard, and you can't widen it if it's your best player. For you got certain principles that you're going to adapt to. Well, in trying to get permission to publish that, John has passed, and trying to run down uh his see if his wife and family was still living. I I went to the internet and started browsing, and it came across yours. And I called you with the idea of, okay, where did you get permission or how'd you get to do this? And you related. That was kind of an internal document that you just kind of picked up inspirational items. And from that, I I I ultimately wrote down, uh, followed, found the Scholinas family. Uh, the wife of John is still alive, although not doing well, and talked to her daughter and explained what I wanted to do, and she gave me permission to use it and became an integral part of my book. So that's kind of how you and I became associated. Love of baseball, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

You got it. And you know, it's baseball and sports in general have so many lessons that are transferable to business and life. And you know, that was uh that was a great speech that he had, and I was I was glad that we were able to uh to meet over that. So uh so today we're gonna talk about uh a few things. We're gonna get into Stanford baseball, and we're gonna talk about your journey. And from there, we'll dive deep into what made Stanford's culture so hard to beat. And then lastly, we'll open up with some advice and lessons learned to people who are looking to build a winning culture. Okay. All right. Well, let's start out with Stanford baseball. Uh, we're getting in the heat of college baseball season. This is a time where teams are jockeying for position either in their uh conference tournaments or seating for the postseason. And uh you and Coach Marcos had incredible success during your 37 years at Stanford. You won back-to-back World Series in 1997 and 1998 and made an unprecedented five trips in a row to Omaha, to the College World Series from 1999 to 2003. Uh, what set Stanford apart from other elite programs in that era?

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Well, um, certainly the academic requirements. I always felt uh, well, let me take a step back and say how I never intended to get into coaching. Uh I pitched on the Lilly World Series when I was 12 uh and represented Sacramento, and I kind of peaked at 12 and kind of went downhill from there, but had pretty big success all the way through and then through high school. And uh with five games left in my senior year, I was a very slow runner. We didn't have a fence. I hit a ball deep left center field and I was chunking around third. And back then you had kids' coach bases and stuff, and the the next hitter is saying, you know, I thought he was telling me to stand up, I'm gonna score. Nobody was telling me it's going back. Uh the ball's gonna beat you by about 30 feet, and the catcher's a guy named Stan Osofka, which was a defensive lineman, D1 defensive lineman, about 6'5 and about 260. And me being the chicken that I was tried to avoid him and fell and fell on my right arm. And in those days, we don't have MRIs and CAT scans and everything else, and was never the same again. And yet I would have never gotten a coaching. So I went to I was admitted to Stanford as a freshman, didn't go, went to junior college, and then was admitted, went back again as a junior college transfer and pitched 13 leads my junior year and my senior year. They had a big freshman group back then, and they called me in and said, Hey, you're not going to be an integral role of us playing, but we have this big group. Would you like to coach? And we set up about 20 games against junior college and have this kind of freshman team that kind of played their own schedule and developed, and that started the coaching. Uh, so I graduated with a degree in economics, went out, never thought about coaching again, and then started my first year of working on my MBA. And this one year after I was out in this in September, I got a call from Coach Marcos, who was the assistant coach when I played for, and he was Ray Young was the head coach. And he had been named the head coach in September, and it was so late in the summer that he was trying to find an assistant. He was only 28 years old. Um you know that could do this. And I took to, he said, What are you doing? I said, I'm doing nothing really. You know, working part-time and working on my MBA. And he goes, How about coming to coach? And I signed for $9,000 for nine months. And what turned into a one year turned into 37 years. And from the time we were able, it took us four years to put our recruiting classes on the field. But one of my greatest achievements was that in a 30-year period, if you came to Stanford as an athlete and you played four years for us, 29 of those 30 classes played in Omaha at the College World Series. So we really got rolling, and the academics became if if you were if you were ever get to be really competitive on the baseball field, the academics becomes the throw-in, and that's pretty big throw-in. So I never forget when they hired Jim Harbaugh to be the football coach. His his line was, you mean to tell me I can't find 25 guys in all of the United States that can play football at Stanford that academically get into Stanford? Well, yeah, and if so, if you ever become really uh competitive on the field, then the degree becomes just paramount because I mean the admit rate's less than 5%. But if you're you've identified as an athlete for us, we we got to identify 10 athletes. On average, we had eight to nine admitted. So it was parentally you went from 5% to 80%. And then we got lucky um with some walk-ons and some guys and put some classes together to where we really evolved in the 80s and 90s. I think baseball America named us the program of the decade back then. And Coach Marcus and I were kind of a unique combination. He was he was the reps, the the energy guy, and mine was the think outside the box guy. And they we just kind of meshed and he just we it it just kind of worked, and somehow it became 37 years later. And I don't know, I've coached what 65 major league players and Hall of Mike Messina's a Hall of Famer and a couple Cy Young winners, and I have a few general manners. I've had a remarkable life. So then the book evolved from me just wanting to pass the baton down of what I've learned for 50 years, and this is my hey, take it and run with it. You're gonna agree with some, you're gonna disagree with the others, but it's gonna make you think for sure.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

Yeah, that I mean it was an amazing run that you had at Stanford with Coach Marquis. And uh talk about your day-to-day uh coaching. What did you enjoy most about you know going to the well?

SPEAKER_02 11:05

I still miss the player relationship and the game, the the excitement of the game. I don't miss the politics of it. I don't uh I I always I I recruited on a national scope, and I always felt like I was my role was to create as much opportunity whether it was at Stanford or or not. So I mentored my literally over half my emails to my recruits, had nothing to do with baseball, had just to do with life. Like Veterans Day was really important to me because my father fought in World War II. Like, you need to have respect for that. What to what to get your mother from for for Christmas or for Mother's Day? Look, if you just sit down and pen her a two-paragraph note about how great a mom she's been, you know, the one that kept your dinner warm for three hours and washed your uniform at 11 o'clock at night so you have a clean one the next day, and just show a you know kind of the power of thank you. So my my approach has always been kind of try to demonstrate who we were. Uh I've never met a man, we lost Coach Marcus tragically two a couple months ago uh to uh a heart attack. And uh I'd never met a guy that that had to brought the same energy coaching every single day. I mean, that believe it or not, there's days when you don't feel like coaching, but it seems to me like he never had it. And just the combination of us, uh, he really let me have free reign. I I decided who recruit, who how much scholarship people got, and he was kind of the reps guy behind it. But uh you knew if you played Stanford University, you were gonna play toughness. Uh, because the first thing people are gonna do when they face Stanford is think it's a rich white kid that's really intellectual that you can intimidate. So we really we were really tough in practice. Our our practices and intersquad games were wars. Um by design. Uh we competed a tremendous amount. And the funny thing is when you learn about uh one of the reasons I think baseball players make such great employees is look, you only have control over two things really in life, your ability to prepare and your ability to try, but doesn't guarantee you win. Like it's the other team's trying to win, also. I mean, and to put that much effort into it and fail, and then have to get up and do it again the next day, and yeah, be disappointed, but not discouraged. The tremendous difference between the two. Discouraged means it affects your preparation level the next day. And to learn to cope with that, understand that. And for some reason, we played, seemed to play bigger in regionals and super regionals. And, you know, I think more of it was him than me on the on the just the game was really about against ourselves, not against the opponent. Like we had a certain standard. Like in my book, I referenced we we got laughed at how for how quickly we picked up balls in between our batting practice. I mean, Coach Marcus is our I would be behind the cage. We literally pick up all the balls and have them in the cage. Well, what it did was allow every kid to get three extra swings. Well, that doesn't seem like much. 30 seconds of work for three extra swings. Well, see if we hit six to seven days a week, so that's 18 swings. Four weeks, that's 80 swings. You know, six months, that's 400, 480 swings for 30 seconds of of just running around like your chicken with your head cut off, right? So people were just astounded that we could play with that energy, but it really wasn't that much energy. It's just it's just how we did things. I mean, we took care of our field and we sprinted on and off. Did it help us win? No, but it was who we were. So we traveled in coat and tie and we were respectful, and you somebody struggled, somebody struggled with the bag, you picked it up, you you ate indoors, you didn't eat with a hat on. I mean look, we we were I was pretty forefront on explaining that to you. Uh I had to find out in the recruiting problem. I was a really challenging recruiter. Uh, I think one of the things that have changed in today's world, it's become so focused on what the what the school and the coach is gonna do for the player. And it would be so refreshing for the players out there to actually explain to the coach why he should have you on your team, that you're gonna make the team better, the culture better, you're gonna be a great teammate. I if you if you took that approach, me you'd have guys standing in line to want you to play for them.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yeah, I think the same thing applies to business too, is you know, kind of taking that uh paradigm and and shifting it. And so talk about your um what were the elements that led to building such a winning culture during your time at Stanford? Were there some common threads?

SPEAKER_02 15:59

Um yes, certainly. Uh, as I said to you, I was a challenging recruiter, so I kind of painted the I'll give you a quick story. Uh we have a kid named Kyle Peterson, the ESPN announcer. Uh, does all the KP right? KP uh played for us and was out of Omaha, Nebraska. And uh he came out to camp and he was this broad-shouldered guy and I didn't have much money left. And our our athletic, one of the assistant athletic directors was a guy named Tom Beckett, who went on to be the athletic director at Yale for many years, and was he played in the minor leagues, and he happened to show up while KP was in the game and at camp. And I said, What do you think of this kid? And he goes, Look at his shoulder. He had he had just these monstrous shoulder. He was under velocity, the 85, 86. And he said, What are you waiting for? Can't you? You know, this guy's projection is pretty easy for me. So I had only 10% scholarship and had a great relationship with Monty and Susan, his parents. And uh I uh so they they Monty said, We can't afford to pay for 90% of it for four years. And I said, Here's my deal. Because there was you didn't know what junior is going to sign, you didn't know what kids were gonna be at the school. So in a given year, you might have more scholarship money. And my obligation to him was if I had more, I'd be the first guy that I you're the first guy I'd come to to help you. And so Kyle came out in his freshman year. He we we opened the season, he wasn't a starter, went down to Fullerton the very first weekend, and they kicked the living dog out of us. They went through every pitcher, and we had a game on Tuesday. We're driving home on the bus, and we're thinking, who's even capable of throwing any pitches? And Kyle had relieved on Friday and pitched today, in the near two, and well, he could give us some innings, so we started him on Tuesday, and he went like three, four innings the following Tuesday again, then moved him to the weekend. Before it's all said and done, just to show you how inexact this is, he's 14 and the one, and he's the freshman player of the year in America, and he pitches us Almaha. Three years later, he's the first-round draft pick for the Milwaukee Brewers, the eighth pick in the country. Phenomenal changeup, just competitive as you could get. So, right after he was drafted, they he and his dad negotiated the deal, and he was out with his girlfriend, who Julie, who's now his wife, and uh they ended up signing. So we all went to dinner as a celebration, the whole family. Here's Monty and Susan, my wife and I, Kathy and uh Kyle and Julie. And he said, Do you remember my home visit? Well, this home visit was kind of a fluke. I had a visit in Oklahoma that I was to see, and then I was gonna drive because one-way tickets were so expensive to Denver. And the kid in Oklahoma changed the time of my home visit. So I had to delay the Denver kid one more day, and I didn't want to waste the full day. And about halfway in between was Omaha. So I said, why don't I just go see Kyle and just make a home visit? I don't want to waste the day. Well, sure enough, he said, You remember you? So we're at dinner three years in, first round draft pick, you know, all American pitcher. And he says, You remember my home visit? I said, Yeah, I remember the dog. I remember you, I remember the Shag Carpet, I remember the dog sitting there. He said, You remember what you told me? And I said, I have come on, Kyle, I can't. He said, You look me dead in the eye, and you said, You know, I don't know if you're good enough to pitch her. And boy, did you piss me off. Well, Jason, if anybody would have known that about him, because the normal kid would tuck and run, that how do you not believe in me? And boy, I was gonna show you. And boy, did he. Um, you know, it made no sense to anybody but him. I mean, he was he was lower velocity, and he actually developed his phenomenal changeup. And I mean, maybe the best peer pitch we've ever had there. So I think and two, I was always looking for how they respected their parents, especially their mother. Uh so I spent a lot of time observing how the what their relationship with their parents because my my feelings is if you get somebody that doesn't have great respect for their mom, they're almost impossible to coach. Um they're not gonna take criticism, they're not gonna just wasn't our type of guy. So I think between me just kind of being on the challenging side, look, I was I I needed to know you were scared before you got there. I had Jeffrey Hammonds, the great outfiller for us, was the only player that I ever recruited in my entire 37 years that never asked in the recruiting process who we had in the outfield. Jason, the day he signs the letter of intent, I call him outside, I'm dying to ask you this question. Not one time in all our conversation the last year and a half, did you ever even imply like who we're recruiting, who did we have, who else didn't have? And he looked at me, he was on the phone. Remember it like it's yesterday. He goes, Coach, you might have one outfielder better than me. You might even have two. You don't have three outfielders better than me. Like, that's what I was looking for. It was Jeffrey Hammond's. So um, those no secrets off, it was all instincts on my part. And I took guys under the radar. I mean, I I wanted arm, I didn't travel with a radar gun. I let the hitter tell me if he had a plus hitter see it what they see. They only had velocity. I liked I liked a certain type of arm action. If he gave me that arm action, even though the stuff was a little bit below, I took it. And I was I we I was more right. I look, I took I put uh a kid named Todd La Rock out of Atlanta over, no Mark Garcia Parra. So there's plenty. Yeah, skeletons in my closet are missing too. So, but right more than wrong, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Yes. Yeah, for sure. And so baseball moms, are you listening? You are the key to getting recruited at an elite Division I college baseball program like Stanford.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

So Yeah, Jason, moms are the last to know that you can't play. So if your mother ever tells you, hey, maybe time to move, you've been done for a long time. I mean, just think about a mother of a pitcher. Just the emotion. The guy walks out to the mound, takes the ball from your son, and goes off. You know, I do still do camp, and one of the things I said, you know, I I just want to give you credit if you're a mother of a pitcher. Because just imagine your job. The boss comes up to you today, taps you on your shoulder, and says, Julie, we're taking you out today. We're replacing you with somebody we think you can do better. And how well do you cope with it? Like, right? So, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Uh, pitchers my wife and I uh were just remarking last weekend that we're just thankful that our son is not a pitcher because that's a special kind of stress watching a game. That's that's for sure.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

My mom went to the eighth grade. She had the superstition when I pitched in high school, she played Junior Walker in its all-stars. What does it take? So we had the old 33 album that she'd put on while I was eating breakfast. Play that song of the days I pitched. Like, come on, crazy.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah. So those are some great aspects of what made Stanford's culture uh special. How you know you had phenomenal success, back-to-back college world series, uh going to Omaha five years in a row. Like, how did you know, aside from wins and losses, because I'm sure you had some great teams that didn't make it to the College World Series, how did you know the culture was really working at Stanford?

SPEAKER_02 23:58

Uh if the sum of the parts are greater than the individual parts, right? And I think part of that was as we were as coaches, we were very accountable to our players. And let me explain that. Uh I had pitching for five, six years, and I I loved my staffs. And after the game, if you know, we called a lot of the pitches, although they had they were they must shake some because I wanted their input into it. And after the game, I would say, you know, I don't know if that I don't know why I called that 2-1 changeup in that spot. Like that was a terrible pitch call. Now I look back at it. And I remember some of my pitchers piping in one time, and one guy goes, it wasn't a pitch call, it was the execution. Well, if you can have that, where people are taking accountability and looking to themselves first, the great teams always look to themselves first. Even as the coaches, we when we played poorly, we didn't we didn't say our players were bad. Our first premise was Coach Marcus was, are we playing the right people? And the second pre premise was are we preparing them the right way? And we tried to look internally before we ever looked externally. And I think those traits carried over to their teams to where they felt a real accountability to each other. Uh I I sense the Indiana football coach has the same culture. Like they're just like the sum of the parts just kind of work. And I was you when you made an official visit to Stanford, you had a baseball player as a host. After the visit, that host was really critical. Would he fit into what would our locker room? Um we could eliminate some people like this. He doesn't he doesn't have the same um, doesn't have the right goals for us, might be the way to say. A little bit too much, you know, what's in it for me, and not enough what's in it. You know, we had a we had a first-round draft pick, Carlos Quinton, that played his whole junior year with his elbow 10% attached, and was was a first-round draft pick by the White Sox and never took outfield the whole year, never threw a ball overhand the whole year, and nobody knew his elbow was really bad. And everybody wanted him to get operated on, all the pro people, all the all the agents, everybody else. And his thing was, I got 34 other guys in that locker room dependent on me, man. What's the worst that can happen? If it snaps, I'm done, okay. But it doesn't bother me hitting, I'm playing. Well, that's the epitome of our culture. Was look, whether even if you even if you were a non-player for us, it was a privilege to keep a chart, right? Because we relied on the charts. So if we gave you the responsibility to be a chart keeper, we required that it be done exactly correct. Like that was like it wasn't a put-down, it was it was a reward. And we did a great job of explaining it. Coach Mark was never rewarded, uh, wasn't ever big on rewarding a home run, but you get it on a sackbunt. Um, you know, every time the pitcher made a move to first base, the right fielder took a couple steps toward the line. He recognized that. I mean, how often did we throw the ball by the first baseman? Once a year. So he has to back up, make two or three steps towards the line a couple hundred times a year for the one time it goes by him. I mean, the little things that make differences to the in the great teams. Like they got it at Indiana football. You can just sense it's a culture. It's it's they plan against themselves, a certain level of play, and I think that transcends. But it's not an exact science. I wish I could tell you, you know, you look at A, B, C, and D, and it's not that way.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

Well, you touched on a really important theme of accountability, and you know, accountability is undefeated when it comes to building a strong culture, being able to step up and say, you know, the buck stops with me and I didn't do my part, and I'm gonna do better next time. That's that's all we can do, especially in you know, whether it's in baseball or business, because uh, you know, baseball in particular is a game of failure. I mean, everyone knows you you you fail 70% of the time and you're in Cooperstown.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

So it's so did you have my favorite book, uh business book was Good to Great, written many years ago. Phenomenal book. Phenomenal. And in it, they talked about the they they expected to find this one major leader of these organizations that it depends, and nothing could be further from the truth. These people were really vulnerable. And their whole thing was to put the right people around the conference table, and the direction will take care of itself if you have the right people at the conference table. Well, if you really think about baseball and business culture, it's simply putting the the people plugging the people into the right roles, and the the business will take off if it's in the right roles and they get along. I mean, you'll figure out what works and what doesn't work. Don't worry about the direction, the direction will take care of itself as long as you get people to buy into and part of that is in leadership, you gotta be vulnerable. You know, you got to be vulnerable to be human. If you ask, I one of my ex-players, Mike Robbins, is a great motivational speaker and and has made a living doing it. It's phenomenal, speaks all over the world. And one of the things he does when he speaks to a crowd is he'll say to the uh secretary, tell me the best thing that your boss has ever done for you. And it's not that I got a raise, it's not that I moved my office. It's he walked over to me, knowing my son's in the little league all-star game, and then it's at four o'clock and it's away, and how much it meant to me that what Julie, why don't you take off at two o'clock today to make sure you get to the game on? Well, his awareness of what's going on at home means all the difference in the world. Coach Marcus, we bust to LA because one by one they came up and talked, and it wasn't about baseball, it was about life. Where are you academically? Are you still dating the same girl? How's your sister doing? How's your I mean, it was he was much more concerned that you become a quality human being than a quality baseball player.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

Yeah. For leaders that are trying to build strong teams, what matters most uh when you're putting together that that team?

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Uh respect for authority. Like the number one aspect for me as an assistant is in front of our team, I must be loyal to the head coach. But in order for me to do that, behind closed doors, you have to give my ability to say my piece, right? But I, as the assistant, have to also understand that at the end there has to be one decision maker. There's one guy making the decision on a lineup. He's gonna take the input from everybody, and I'm respectful of that that the deal. And I think that same thing, if you if like you want to find out how to run something and you're the manager, you got to get the boots on the ground to tell you what needs to be done. And a great and a great manager, a great coach, a great administrator looks at their role as being subservient, not authoritative. Like, how how is he gonna help what is he gonna do to help you become the to evolve and have the best results? My great administrator is to come down and said, okay, give us your wish list. What's the what's the 10 things that you need to need to happen? We need to be able to travel a day early if we go into Arizona, not the day of the game, or whatever may like, and and they've they would they would do everything in their power to try to make it work if you have a great administrator. And the big administrator looks at himself as you know, they got kind of in this bossism. So I think respect for authority from the subordinates, but in order to do that, you have to you, you know, if you if you love them hard, you can coach them really hard. You know, if you love them really hard, you can coach them really hard, you know. Uh and I think that transcends both the raising kids. You know, my daughter once told me I have five kids. My daughter once told me she's my baseball nut. She said, Dad, you got to be really careful when you say no to me. And I went, where is this coming from? I'm saying, what are you what are you talking about? She was in high school. And she said, you know, I have so much respect for you that if you told me no, I don't want you to do something, I wouldn't do it. But I don't want it to be too easy for you to say no. Like, like in other words, our discussions on whether you should go to this party or whether you should go to this. Look, the good and the good and the bad kid both go to the party. The good kid just slithers out when the when the behavior starts getting a little overboard. Nobody wants to be uncool in high school. I mean, that's just a given. But you want your kids to make a judgment. Hey, when the behavior starts getting over the edge, you got to get out of there and make better decisions.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

That's great advice, and that uh lesson of servant leadership coming from uh up above is really, you know, uh is a is a common thread in a lot of strong, strong organizations. So Jason, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 33:25

Isn't parenting, isn't parenting just about you telling me what you're capable of handing? In other words, when your child says, I'm going to this place with this person doing this, and we're gonna be home at X, you say yes or no as a parent based upon that, right? So if you betray my trust and one of those things isn't correct, you showed me that you don't have the responsibility yet for me to give you those freedoms. And I have to revert back until you earn my trust to gain more. So you tell me where you're going, what you're gonna be doing, who you're gonna be doing it with, and what time you're gonna be home, and I'll make the decision based upon that. But if you betray my trust, then you're not mature enough to take on that responsibility. And if you just approach parenting in that way rather than I just told you so, you'll find a totally different response from not only your kids, but also from your same work environment of explaining to like trying to give them the best mode to be successful. Look, if you're working on commission as a manager, you want your guys create as best possible to create those biggest commissions they could possibly can. So yeah, nothing, nothing nurse-shattering here by any means.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

No, I I agree whether it's uh parenting. I'm fortunate to have three great kids and uh a phenomenal wife who has raised those kids. Um, you know, it's whether it's whether it's family, business, work, whatever, it's you know, trust is earned, it's not an entitlement. Oh boy, absolutely. When we walk in, you know, we're uh we're building up that that currency. And so it's it's really, really key. So um one of the things I want to get back to uh was your book that you've written. And so this is a book of baseball stories, which I could read all day. That's like that's my favorite topic. Did you find there was a common thread in those baseball stories? So you know, something that was consistent through them that you kept coming back to.

SPEAKER_02 35:36

Well, it's written um in sections, so it's just isms for like there's a there's a section for pitchers, and there's a section for hitters, and there's a section about defense, but it deals with every aspect of those things. Um most of this stuff, I'm very inquisitive as a person. I had a big network of coaches, and I think through dialogue of going to events and sitting and talking about different aspects, you pick up things like when you're playing an opposing coach and you see something they do, I was comfortable enough to say, hey, what's your approach to doing this? Like, why are you successful? Like, I I I think we're chasing we're chasing velocity too much. And the reason I say that, Jason, is in 50 years of being in this game, no hitter, not one time, has ever said to me their favorite pitch to hit is the low outside fastball. So rather than trying to grind out two more miles per hour and have a no-command, because you can shoot it out of a gun. If it's elevated, a good hitter's gonna catch it. But none of them say they want the low outside fastball. Um Jeremy Guthrie, our pro player, told a story about uh uh Mazzoni, the great pitching coach for the Braves. He was at the Pirates one year when when Guthrie was with the Pirates. And he tells the story of going his very first bullpen. He throws in the ball and he says the catcher set up low and outside. He said, Jeremy, can you hit that target? He winds up and throws, hits the target. Guy throws the ball back, he says, Do it one more, do it again. Winds up, throws, hits the target. Throws it back, he said, How about one more time? Winds up, throws, hits the target again. He said, Your bullpen's done. Jeremy goes, What? He goes, if you can do that, we can spin off everything else in the pitch. And I'm thinking, here's the guy that's had Glavin and Schmultz and Maddox and like at the elite level. Just look you can't trick him every time. So at some point, he knows he's getting a 2-0 fastball, you better be blown outside. So I don't know if there's a in referring to my book, if there's a one common trait that I could summarize it, uh, because it every aspect of it is so different. Um nothing's long, it's all just a paragraph or two. Uh it's really interesting about my approach of recruiting and enlightening parents and players why I may recruit somebody and may not. Like if you if you ask me in the first two phone calls, like who you have at my position or who you're recruiting for against me. No, I'm running. Like he don't want to, he he doesn't want to compete. What he should be asking me is describe to me how I'm gonna get a fair opportunity. And at some point, performance has to back up opportunity, right? So if you've performed and you performed well and you hit 300 for the season, your your your margin for error is gonna be much greater than a new kid that's jumping in the lineup. New kid jumping in the lineup goes 0 for 10, he's gonna come over and sit by me for a while. But if you've hit 350 the year before, I'm gonna give you an 0 for 15 to get it straight because you've demonstrated that. Well, that same culture, all this stuff applies to business. Um in this environment, it's just you know, just work ethic, just old-time work ethic of just quit trying to find a shortcut and just grind it out. I mean, just get her done. Um that's that's from my father, just who an unbelievable man. But like I said, my dad barely finished high school, fought in World War II. My mom went to eighth grade. I didn't know I was poor. My parents didn't even go to the Lily World Series when I pitched the Lily World Series, you know, couldn't afford it. You know, just unimaginable that I have a brother who's a doctor and here I've coached at Stanford. Like it just it doesn't seem that they could uh bless my mom's bless her heart. I mean, she didn't she didn't know South Dakota State Teachers College from Harvard. I mean, you know, if you went to college, you were doing okay. I mean, but the salt of the irk and work ethic and a neighbor, being a good neighbor, just not always looking to get paid for it, right? Just your job is to help people who can't help themselves, period.

SPEAKER_01 40:21

Well, many of us are blessed with great parents that have given us a platform and the opportunity to uh have our own success in whatever whatever way we have. So I'm gonna bring us into uh our last topic here. Now uh, you know, you shared some great stories. If you were to share one story that epitomized Stanford baseball's culture, what would that story be?

unknown 40:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 40:50

If I was gonna share, this is you're gonna love this. This is Coach Marquis. It's the national title game against Rice. We both have we're in the final three-game series. We both have a loss. The winner of this game wins the national title. Every game, before every game, after we hit and after we took infield, went to the outfield, circled up around him, and he talked about he went over the signs. Here we got Stanford guys, right? Went over the signs over and over and over and over again. Would always have a little words of wisdom. And this time before this game, national title game, here's what he said. He said, Men, this game isn't any different to me than the intersquad game we had back in October. We're not gonna play any different. I'm not gonna coach any different. It's just a game against himself. Now, to the world, that seems hokey. But if you'd have seen him coach in October, he brought the same energy in October in an inner squad game with not one soul in the stance as he brought as he brought to the national title game for the whole trophy. And our players understood it. It it was just the epitome. We're we're playing the way we have always played. It's against it, we're playing the game against ourselves, not against the opponent. We we're gonna try, we're gonna try to the best of our ability. We're gonna have to kill us to stop us. Uh, we're gonna do what's best for the team. We're gonna pick each other up, we're gonna be supportive. If you're on the bench, you're gonna root for your guy because you don't have no other role other than root for your guy. So if there was one thing that says it was that idea that, hey, this we know that it took us a while. It took it takes you a while to develop what the standard is because not everybody's not everybody comes in with it. It's a learned trait. You know, work ethic and stuff, that's a learned trait. Effort, that's a learned trait. That's why you have to have a coach, because I don't feel you're getting tired. You know, it's that it's that one more rep on the on the bench press that you didn't think you could get to, and next a week later, it's two more reps and stuff, right? So if there's one thing that transcends our program, it's that idea that we were going to try to get the most out of every somebody's ability and the sum of those abilities. But that story, um, gosh, I've told that story many a time. And it's it's and you know, people say, well, you just tell it. No, if you were standing there, you you knew it was true, right? Because I swear the man never had a day when he didn't feel like coaching. It was like he could no matter what was going on off field, he had a daughter that had cancer at one point. He had the ability to separate it and just plug in and go, like just unheard of. I mean, he he was well, it's why he was what he was, I guess. I mean, just incredible. I think that's the story I would say.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Oh, that's a great story. And this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you sharing your insights so much and taking the time out of your day, Dean.

SPEAKER_02 44:11

Yeah, my book is 108 double stitches. Can be found on Amazon. Have a little website, 108 double stitches. You go there and get a few Tizbits. I mean, it's all a $15. I mean, it's I learned there's no money in books. It's not written because there's money. I got to sell three to buy a Starbucks. Um, but it wasn't done for that. It was done with the idea that I'm just passing the baton down. And anybody, you know, there's it's for any coach, really. There's a probably 40% of it doesn't even apply to baseball, just in coaching, and and parents will pick up some stuff by it. Uh business managers will pick up stuff, but it's just kind of life issues. Thank you for giving me the form to do this, Jason.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Well, thanks so much, and I'm glad our paths cross. And uh for everybody listening and watching, thanks for listening to the Winning Cultures podcast.

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Thanks for listening to the Winning Cultures Podcast. Follow and subscribe wherever you listen or watch podcasts for new episodes.