The Catch and the Pitch

Mara Collins could see the whole field from behind home plate, which was precisely why everybody kept asking her to make another brochure.

It was the bottom of the ninth in Grandstand Manufacturing Company’s largest baseball-distributor opportunity of the year. The real meeting was scheduled for Tuesday morning. In Mara’s mind, however, the stadium was already full, the lights were on, and Jack Mercer was standing on the mound pretending he had not looked toward the dugout for help.

Jack was Grandstand’s Sales Director. He had been selling sporting goods long enough to know that customers rarely followed the presentation. They interrupted, changed the subject, introduced a problem nobody had mentioned, and occasionally decided that the most important feature in a baseball was something the company had placed on page seventeen. Jack considered improvisation a professional virtue. Mara considered unprepared improvisation an expensive hobby.

She had spent three weeks studying the distributor’s business: the school districts it served, the leagues it had lost, the private-label program it wanted to build, the complaints hidden in return data, and the seasonal inventory risk that nobody had raised in the first conversation. Her team had prepared a one-page decision map, a competitive proof sheet, samples from two manufacturing lots, and a delivery scenario Operations had actually approved. None of it was glamorous. All of it was designed to make Jack look very good on Tuesday.