The Changing Tides of Talent: What Los Angeles Teaches Us About Value Creation

The Leverage of Fresh Perspectives

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ promotion of 24-year-old catcher Dalton Rushing tells us something profound about value creation in any system. Rushing hit .308 with five home runs in Triple-A—tangible, measurable output that created more value than veteran Austin Barnes could provide. This isn’t just baseball; it’s game theory playing out in real time.

Organizations that understand leverage—the ability to create disproportionate returns with minimal input—tend to outcompete those who don’t. The Dodgers aren’t making decisions based on sentiment; they’re making cold, rational assessments of value creation. A young player with upside represents asymmetric opportunity. The potential outcomes aren’t linear; they’re exponential.

What’s particularly interesting is how this mirrors broader societal shifts. Just as the Dodgers are willing to move on from Barnes despite his years of service, institutions across America are increasingly valuing output over tenure. The modern economy rewards specific knowledge and unique skills over seniority.

Permissionless Value Creation

Miguel Rojas’ clutch RBI double that gave the Dodgers a 4-3 lead demonstrates another key principle: value creation happens at the margins, often by those not designated as the primary producers. Rojas isn’t a superstar, but in that moment, he created disproportionate value.

This principle extends well beyond baseball. In a networked world, value creation is increasingly permissionless. You don’t need to be at the center of a system to create substantial impact. Alvaro Rojas covering Reid Anderson’s “The Vastness of Space” represents this same dynamic in the cultural sphere—taking existing ideas and recombining them creates new value.

The old industrial model required permission from gatekeepers. The new model allows talent to emerge from unexpected places. This is the fundamental shift happening across politics, business, and culture. The best networks are permissionless meritocracies where anyone can create value.

The Wealth of Systems

The article critiquing Democratic leadership highlights something essential about all systems: they calcify over time. Organizations optimize for yesterday’s world, not tomorrow’s. This is as true for political parties as it is for baseball teams.

The proposal for a 50-state campaign to support working-class candidates parallels what the Dodgers are doing with their roster. Both recognize that renewal requires systematic approaches to talent development, not just replacing individual components.

Wealth in any domain comes from owning equity in productive systems. The Dodgers understand this—they’re not just acquiring players; they’re building a self-sustaining talent pipeline. Similarly, political movements that focus on developing new leaders rather than propping up established ones are making systems-level investments.

Long-Term Games with Long-Term People

The Dodgers’ focus on Rushing’s development as a catcher—planning for him to catch twice weekly to build relationships with the pitching staff—reveals another fundamental truth: success comes from playing long-term games with long-term people.

Short-term thinking would have them extract maximum immediate value from Rushing. Instead, they’re deliberately suboptimizing short-term outcomes to build long-term capabilities. This patience creates compound returns that aren’t possible with a short-term mindset.

The same principle applies to cities like Los Angeles. Cities that prioritize immediate gratification decline over time. Those that invest in foundations—infrastructure, education, culture—create compound returns that accrue for generations.

The Game Within the Game

There’s a meta-lesson across these trends: understanding the game being played is often more important than how well you play it. The Dodgers aren’t just playing baseball; they’re playing the game of building a sustainable competitive advantage through intelligent talent management.

Politics isn’t just about winning the next election; it’s about shaping the landscape where future elections will be contested. Culture isn’t just about creating the next hit; it’s about influencing the standards by which future work will be judged.

Most people are playing checkers when they should be playing chess. But the truly successful are playing games no one else recognizes yet.

Specific Knowledge in a World of Generalists

The Dodgers’ appreciation for Rushing’s left-handed bat and defensive versatility highlights how specific knowledge creates outsized value. In baseball and beyond, being uniquely skilled in a valuable niche creates leverage that general competence cannot.

This applies equally to Alvaro Rojas’ musical project. By deeply understanding both Reid Anderson’s melodic writing and Ben Monder’s guitar style, he creates unique value through specific knowledge that can’t be easily replicated.

The future belongs to those who develop specific knowledge in areas where they have genuine interest and natural advantages. Whether in sports, arts, or politics, the generalist approach is increasingly insufficient in a world of increasing specialization.

The Accountability of Reality

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Dodgers’ roster moves is the ultimate accountability that reality provides. In baseball, performance is measurable, and consequences for underperformance are swift. Austin Barnes’ offensive struggles led directly to his designation for assignment.

This accountability is often missing in political and cultural institutions, where feedback loops are longer and more diffuse. The article critiquing Democratic leadership reflects this frustration—a sense that the normal accountability mechanisms aren’t functioning properly.

Systems that maintain tight feedback loops between action and consequence tend to improve over time. Those that insulate decision-makers from the consequences of their decisions tend to degrade.

Los Angeles, with its mixture of ruthless meritocracy in some domains and entrenched interests in others, offers a microcosm of this broader tension in American society. The cities, teams, and institutions that embrace reality-based accountability will ultimately outperform those that don’t.

The wisdom of crowds, properly harnessed, will always outperform the wisdom of experts. The challenge for our age is designing systems that properly harness that wisdom rather than distorting it.