Tim Grassley

I love Seattle Mariners baseball, but not in a wear the swag, go to games, normal-fan way.

I grew up following the team’s ebbs and flows, and in 1995—when Edgar Martinez laced that iconic double and propelled Griffey around third to the game-winning dog pile at home, Griffey’s smile still ablaze on Seattle fans’ walls decades later—I wasn’t jumping up and down in front of our TV, awash in Sprite suds and popcorn.

No—This guy was living the life of an excruciatingly shy 12-year-old who absorbed that moment by the numbers.

Each morning between third and eighth grade, I poured over the Tacoma News Tribune’s sports page, memorizing numeric outcomes for as many baseball games as my mind could recall. Lest you believe we are on a Moneyball coming of age journey, this is not that kind of story. Statistics, for me, were an interpersonal crutch I relied on to have something—anything—to say to my peers at school.

An acquittance would ask, “How’s it going?” I’d reply, “Griffey’s missed 73 games, and the Mariners may not make the post-season.”

“You do anything fun?”

“Edgar’s batting average jumped to .356. He leads the AL.”

“Want to hang out Thursday?”

“Jay Buhner might hit 121 RBIs this weekend.”

Sports stats were not a puzzle meant to benchmark success or a behavioral algorithm through which I sought to predict the future. The numbers instead offered me a seemingly concrete, arms-distant thing that I could serve up to sound smart enough and redirect attention away.

My predisposition for shyness started at birth. My parents point out that I was a kid of few words who observed the world in saturated detail. I also blushed an acrylic, stoplight red, a shade so vivid a friend from Cambodia expressed concern to our fifth-grade teacher that, during a book report in front of class, my face was going to explode. This interpersonal tell signaled any discomfort—be it anxiety about a test, happiness at a complement, embarrassment at saying the wrong thing, stress from running hard—my body physically announcing to the world that I experienced something out of the ordinary.

It still does.

Connection has always been tricky territory. On the one hand, I desperately want to be known and feel understood. But then I fret that, in knowing me, others will find me wanting and my fragile sense of enoughness will shatter.

As numeric outcomes (i.e., data) pervaded the early 2000s workplace, I’ve regularly heard in annual employee reviews that my capacity to navigate and utilize outcomes, KPIs, OKRs, SMART goals and other trending buckets of numbers reads different, if personal. That difference tends to be evaluated officially as “average” or just a slice above but never outstanding—a question I’ll explore another time.

I’ve written previously about data’s allure and that tracking average behavior can strip you of individuality and a cohesive confidence in your purpose. But data, for me, also functions to push people away and offers a box to blush behind. In the office, I habitually avoid vulnerability because I’m still terrified of getting hurt or discovering that I’m not enough. In a culture that appears to objectively measure every aspect of work, my insecurity can spiral. So, I generate captivating reports and hope you, my data reader, spend more time considering their gloss than the person behind the page.

What we miss, though, when outcomes-first thinking gets plopped onto our professional dinner tables, are moments that make us curious and imperfect experiences through which we can connect with others. When the Mariners went 25–11 in their final 36 games to erase a 13-game deficit in the AL West, what I wanted, honestly, was the warmth of experiencing their run and fall among friends. Friends like my fellow Mariner fan, Aaron, who is always game for 15 minutes of catch over lunch. Or, even more so, a depth of connection I experience with my partner, Jenny.

Even twenty years later, I live for moments when her glance makes my heart flutter, when we laugh from our depths, when we can fully share who we are. These aren’t all the time, but their arrival, especially when unexpected, are the best kind of magic.

I wonder what a vulnerable organization might look like—what might happen if we created space for people to chase their sparks without quantifiable purpose. Or drafting a workplace culture away from insecurity and toward curiosity. If, instead of measuring output or effectiveness first, we talked through how a project feels or what magic we experience along the way.

Right now, I get to cultivate that kind of free-wheeling creativity and strategy-making, and what our interns produce is most often a combination of unexpected and professional. There are risks (and a plethora of bad project outcomes), but when I assume their best, believe in the people they are becoming and find them the tools and learning they want or need, the results knock me down. Some might say to the bottom of a dog pile.

In 1995, Randy Johnson was a statistical phenom. He was 18-2 and pitched a 2.48 ERA with 294 strikeouts. I looked up those statistics, and I don’t plan to remember them. When I watch his highlights—of that enormous human taking the mound, gorgeously manipulating physical laws and dropping a slider into an impossible angle—my heart races. What he accomplishes feels like magic. Remembering with friends over beers, even more so.