In baseball, you’d never bench an all-star pitcher for a high-A arm. So why do we tolerate unearned, six-figure leadership in business?

The result: mediocrity wins, innovation dies, and the economy suffers.

Baseball and pitching are brutal, beautiful meritocracies. Your stats don’t lie. Your value is clear. You either earn the ball—or you don’t. That’s part of why we love the game. It rewards what’s real.

Great leaders are like great pitchers. They don’t need to manipulate the game to stay on top. They don’t politic, cut corners, or shift the rules to protect their position. They dominate through performance. Their confidence comes from proving it—not clinging to a title.

But bad leaders? They can’t survive in a fair game. So they rig it. They rewrite the rules. They politic, manipulate incentives, and cling to job preservation like it’s a trophy. They don’t just block innovation—they block people. The result? A self-preservation machine where truth, talent, and trust all get choked.

It’s the equivalent of handing the opening day start to a guy with a 6.90 ERA just because he “knows someone.” No team would tolerate that. But in corporate leadership? It happens every day.

If a bad pitcher hurts a team for one day, a bad leader hurts it for years.

1. From Pitch Counts to Paychecks: A Lesson in Accountability

In a real meritocracy, every role is held to a standard. ERA. WHIP. WAR. Baseball is ruthless in how it exposes truth.

If you’re a leader who hasn’t been forced to sweat for every dollar, you’re not just failing yourself—you’re dragging down the entire team.

The leader is the only person who can create an environment where accountability isn’t optional but essential. Without real accountability, a team doesn’t just stall—it learns to lie to itself.

Baseball never asks, "Who do you know?" It asks, "What did you do today?" Leadership should be the same.

2. Real Cost, Real Damage: How Bad Leaders Hurt the Economy

A. Organizational Drag
Gallup shows 70% of the variance in team engagement is tied to the quality of management. When unearned leaders stay in power, they kill initiative and normalize average. That’s not leadership. That’s stagnation.

B. Economic Manipulation
Effective leadership has a measurable r = 0.32 correlation with overall performance. That’s not a stat—it’s a drag coefficient. These people aren’t neutral. They’re negative dollars on your balance sheet.

C. ROI on Earned Leadership
Executive coaching has shown up to 529% ROI. Targeted frontline manager development delivers 200–300% ROI. That’s the return on forcing leaders to prove it.

A bad pitcher gives up runs. A bad leader gives up decades.

3. Firsthand: What Happens When Leadership is Earned vs. Inherited

I’ve worked under both. One made me sharper. The other made me question if showing up even mattered.

A leader who earns their role every day inspires people to speak up, build, and challenge each other. That environment wins.

But the inverse? When leaders are protected by politics or tenure? They silence dissent, weaponize incentives, and cultivate fear.

There’s nothing more powerful than watching someone earn their job. Every day. That’s leadership.

4. Middle Management: The Silenced Majority

Middle managers live in the tension. They see the dysfunction but are too at-risk to name it. Why? Because the cost of challenging upward is too high.

If you’ve ever watched a great teammate lose hope because the wrong person got promoted, you’ve seen it. That’s human potential walking out the door.

When good people stop trying, bad leadership isn’t just annoying—it’s lethal.

5. What Needs to Change: A New Standard for Leadership

You want a better economy? Start by holding your leaders to the same replacement-level standard a sports team would use.

If your leader couldn’t pass the test today, they shouldn’t lead tomorrow.

True leaders don’t fear the standard—they set it.

Speak up. Demand earned leadership. Your job—and your economy—depend on it.

6. Closing the Gap: From Fake Titles to Real Results

Unearned leadership is more than an organizational flaw—it’s an economic drag.

By demanding every leader earn their role—like a starting pitcher earns every inning—we can build an economy that thrives on merit, not manipulation.

If you’re tired of watching title-chasers win while builders get ignored, join me. Let’s demand truth, performance, and earned leadership at every level.

Because when aces get benched, we all lose the game.

The stakes aren’t just cultural—they’re financial.

It’s time to stop benching the aces.

The only standard is the truth.