8/16/2014: Tempe, AZ – A young man strode purposefully down the halls at Tempe’s headquarters, the sound of his shoes drowned out by the janitor wrestling with the floor buffer. It was nearly one in the morning and only every third hall light or so was lit. He stepped past the janitor, who had headphones on and didn’t so much as glance in his direction. The young man wore a new Italian suit, but it was wrinkled. His silk tie was loosely knotted, hanging beneath the undone button at the top of his shirt. He juggled two cans of cold Diet Coke from hand to hand and walked with more vigor than anyone should have at this hour. But he felt energized.

His name was Joel Mowry. He was fresh out of Wharton and had just moved to Arizona the previous weekend. He didn’t even have his own place yet. Instead, he was shacked up with a buddy from school who had grown up in the area.

Joel was entering his second week as a financial analyst for the Tempe Knights. He had always wanted to work in professional baseball. As a kid growing up in Upper Gwynedd Township in the suburbs of Philadelphia, he had been the star pitcher and shortstop on his Little League team. He hit everything they threw at him, ran like the wind, and had some pop, too. He and his friends used to joke about him being a “five tool player”.

But for every small town in America, there is always a star player, and only a handful of those remain stars through high school. The numbers grew smaller and smaller at each subsequent level and only the cream of the crop made it into professional baseball. So although Joel had fantasized about leading a team to a championship like many kids, the truth was that by the time he reached middle school, he was considered “middle of the pack”, athletically speaking. In ninth grade, after Harry Willis hit him full in the side of the head with a fastball, Joel decided that he was ready to focus on academic pursuits instead.

Now there, Joel excelled. Graduated from his high school as class valedictorian. Partial scholarship to University of Pennsylvania. Graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in finance. Proceeded straight on to grad school, where he got his MBA from Wharton. Fresh out of school, he was now precisely where he wanted to be. His strength was in numbers, but he had been a lifelong baseball fan, and he had his sights on eventually becoming a general manager. This was the perfect opportunity. The GM of the Knights was from Philly as well and had handpicked him, bringing him west to Tempe. Joel just needed to make a good impression.

Luckily for Joel, Tempe was in a perfect situation for a guy like him. The GM’s focus, for now anyway, had to be on money. Tempe was average this year, still coming off the high of their recent championship. They had one of the lowest payrolls in the league, yet the team was a financial mess. There wasn’t a lot they could do about it mid-season, but it gave them a few extra months to start planning for the off-season.

Already, evidence of his predecessor’s poor choices was appearing. Joel had double- and triple-checked the personnel files and the reports from the rest of the league, and some of the discrepancies were astounding. Tempe had the third-highest staff payroll in the entire league, behind only New Jersey and Arlington. On top of that, their bench coach, Martyn Steger, was making $1.75 million a year! That was more than three times what their manager was making, and it made him the second-highest-paid staff member in the entire league! Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it, since he was signed for another three years. From what he had learned, the guy was good at his job. Still, it killed him to think that this guy, no matter how good he was, would be sucking up nearly 20% of their staff expenses for the entire organization for the next three years! And it had to bother Joe Moore, who was making a paltry $550,000 in the middle of a lame duck season.

To make matters even better, the assistant GM had just quit in a tizzy, leaving a deliciously open position for an aggressive, talented hard worker, and giving him direct access to the general manager for all of these analysis sessions.

Things were definitely falling into place.