When The Crowd Is Cheering

You may have seen the New York Mets lose game 5 to the Kansas City Royals in the World Series. Even if you didn’t see it, you’ve probably heard what happened. Kansas City won the game in the 12th inning by a score of 7 to 2.

Matt Harvey had pitched a brilliant game for the Mets through the first 8 innings. At the end of 8, the Mets led 2-0. Three more outs and they live to see another day.

When the Mets were at bat in the bottom of the 8th, Terry Collins, the Mets’ manager, had the Mets pitching coach tell Matt Harvey they were going to put their ace reliever, Jeurys Familia in the game to close out the 9th.

Harvey approaches Collins in the dugout, has a very heated conversation and is adamant that he wants to pitch the 9th. The crowd is chanting “We want Har-vey!” they roared. “We want Har-vey!” The fans are going crazy.

Harvey had already thrown 102 pitches, but rather than go with his smarts, Terry Collins allows Harvey to start the 9th.

Harvey walks the first man he faces. It gets worse. Collins allows him to pitch to a second batter, Eric Hosmer, who rips a run-scoring double to leftfield that silenced Citi Field and cut the Mets’ lead in half. Familia replaces Harvey and Hosmer scores after a bad throw from first baseman Lucas Duda. Game tied in the 9th.

As many of you know, I refereed NCAA college basketball for 17 years. I’ve had calls booed and cheered that I’ve made. They weren’t exactly booing or cheering me, but it certainly can feel that way. (Ok, they were booing me.)

Here’s the point. Booing or cheering, it was my job to get it right based on what I’m seeing, my knowledge of the game and my knowledge of the play in front of me.

It was Terry Collins job to get it right based on his expertise and all the factors he knows about managing the game of baseball. He let the cheering crowd affect his decision making.

There’s a real lesson here. Never let the cheering, good or bad, affect your decision making.

Sometimes dealers let people cheer them into making bad decisions when they know better. They know they shouldn’t keep units past 60 days, but they get cheered into doing so.

I wrote an article this past week about paying on volume VS paying on gross profit. When the dealer tosses out a trial balloon about paying on volume the crowd boos. The dealer doesn’t want to hear the boos, so he says ok, let’s stay with paying on gross. The crowd cheers.

Don’t let the cheering crowd push you into bad decisions. That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs