Life is a competition
Front-office wunderkind Andrew Friedman has a zeal for winning that can be traced to his upbringing in Houston
It thrilled Temple Brown to see the Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers advance last October to the World Series. His Episcopal High School buddy Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, would get to compete for a championship against their hometown team.
The friends enjoyed early forays into the kind of number crunching and risk assessment that Friedman would use as an investment banker on Wall Street, a front-office wunderkind who turned around the Tampa Bay Rays and a heralded executive with the Dodgers.
Brown used to pump gas and shout out a gallon amount, such as “16¼!” while Friedman, seated in the passenger’s seat, had to calculate in his head the total cost based on the price per gallon. They also won beer money on $2 bets playing the horses at the Sam Houston Race Park.
They would catch up over coffee in recent years, but Brown envisioned the fun of meeting up at Minute Maid Park in Game 3. He reached out to Friedman for tickets. Friedman only had some available in the team’s family section.
“There is no way in hell I’m giving one of those to an Astros fan,” Friedman replied, according to Brown.
Brown was not the only Houstonian to hit up Friedman, but he should have known as well as anyone how seriously his friend treats a competition.
“It’s basically anything and everything I do,” Freidman said.
A year after he began working in baseball, Friedman attended the 2005 World Series. He felt indifferent about whether the Astros or White Sox won.
“Obviously as a kid I wanted the Astros to win more than anything,” Friedman said.
A hardwiring of almost unflinching qualities is how Friedman, 41, emerged from the city of Houston to become one of baseball’s most winningest executives the last decade.
His lust for competition verges on compulsive. His motivation to win pushed him on past trade deadline days to work around an emergency appendectomy and the birth of his second son.
He tries to shape his professional performance with the same data-driven approach that he uses to construct teams, which is to say, he has programmed himself to avoid the inefficiency and interference of emotions.
“My thought process,” he said, “is more analytical and extremely logical.”
He enjoys fiction books but has trouble justifying them “from a time management perspective.” He dislikes indulging in introspection because it is antithetical to forward thinking.
Despite the Astros and Dodgers playing each other this weekend in Los Angeles, nothing has compelled Friedman to rehash memories of the World Series, which the Astros won in seven games for their first championship in franchise history.
“Game 5 took years off my life,” he said, referring to the epic five-hour 13-12 Astros victory in Houston. “It didn’t land with me then, and it doesn’t land with me now.”
Friedman’s father, Kenny, who is chairman of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, sat in the Dodgers’ family section at Minute Maid Park during the World Series, but he has been an Astros season-ticket holder for 30 years.
“I was really rooting for the team that was paying my son,” he said.
Early love of baseball
As the son of Southern progressives, Friedman, by age 9, formed strong political opinions and could name obscure congressmen from around the country. His parents were so close with civil rights activist and Democratic congressman Mickey Leland that they named him a godfather of their son. Friedman’s mother, Barbara, brought him along to see Walter Mondale speak.
Around the same time, Friedman sat along the third-base side in the Astrodome for Game 6 of the 1986 National League Championship Series. He high-fived strangers after Billy Hatcher’s tying home run in the 14th inning, but he called seeing the New York Mets prevail 7-6 in the 16th so “traumatic” that “Little Andrew swore off baseball” for a while, the first but not the last time the Astros would ruin his expectations.
He gravitated to baseball abstracts at bookstores and applied other findings in Little League. While playing second base, he instructed infielders on how to reposition based on each batter.
“I probably peaked around 12,” he said, blaming an early growth spurt.
At Episcopal, he became an all-out hustle leadoff hitter and center fielder. The team nicknamed him “Pig-Pen” for the dirt clouds he dusted up with headfirst slides and called him a “One More Guy” for his eagerness to get extra reps.
“He was kind of an overachiever,” said Chris Russ, his coach at Episcopal. “He was better than he should’ve been. That’s why he’s at where he’s at.”
Friedman also developed an advanced understanding of the sport.
“He could analyze the game at that age and break down what players were valuable to a team beyond Moneyball,” Russ said. “He was like a GM at 17 years old.”
Data had not yet ruled Friedman’s world. He enjoyed getting dirty because he felt like it was tied to effort. After hitting a home run his sophomore year, he believed listening to “Crown of Thorns” by Mother Love Bone brought good luck.
“Now I look back and laugh at my superstitions,” he said.
An athletic scholarship from Tulane reinforced his self-image as a ballplayer, but he could not match the talent level. Wrist and shoulder injuries his freshman year made his decision to walk away easier.
“For the first time he realized he wasn’t a good college baseball player and actually showed up in class and paid attention,” Kenny Friedman said.
There had been little to no consequence when Friedman had not taken Episcopal seriously. “Andrew just wasn’t afraid of anything,” Episcopal teammate Brad Kirklin said. “A teacher, a coach, an opposing player — he was not intimidated by anything.”
Flirtation with Wall Street
He opened up the business section of a newspaper in a class and sat at the teacher’s desk to read it. He also completed the coursework and made his grades.
“He went farther and faster than anyone in our class for sure,” Kirklin said.
Friedman’s selective interest revealed how he would pursue his adulthood obsessions.
“Things that I am interested in, I devour and enjoy,” he said. “Things that I don’t, I probably am not thrilled about doing, probably to a greater extreme than most.”
College humbled and focused Friedman. At 21, he received a standing job offer from the New York-based investment firm Bear Stearns & Co. Inc.
He still wondered if a career in baseball would be more satisfying. He met with Astros president of baseball operations Tal Smith to learn about the life.
Smith stressed: “It can be rewarding later on, but you really have to have a passion.”
The talk persuaded Friedman to go to Wall Street, and in 2004 he had the passion to come back to baseball on a deal he could not refuse from the then-Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Ownership essentially created an amorphous position that would groom Friedman to run the team in two years at age 28.
The teenager who kicked back with the business section was gone by then. Friedman uplifted the franchise, a perennial loser using a piggybank budget, with a bold talent acquisition model — Friedman rebuffs credit for making “tanking” fashionable in baseball — that Astros fans would become familiar with under executive Jeff Luhnow.
Friedman made the World Series in his third season. From 2008-13, the Rays had the second-most wins in the American League. By comparison, the New York Yankees had the most but spent more than $1 billion to the Rays’ $330 million.
He pulled off the same threeyear feat after taking over the flush operations for the Dodgers, who hired Friedman in October of 2014.
“He had a very clear vision of what he wanted to do,” said Gerry Hunsicker, the former Astros general manager, who worked with Friedman on the Rays and now works for the Dodgers. “His mind worked like a computer. He was relentless in his work ethic.”
Little stands in his way
Friedman proved his temerity in Tampa at the trade deadline. Four days before it in 2011, a dull pain burrowed in Freidman’s belly. He diagnosed himself with stress. Then he woke up July 30 and could not stand up straight.
Friedman lay in the fetal position on the ground hours later at Tropicana Field.
After getting wheeled in for an emergency appendectomy, Friedman came to and, to no one’s surprise, wanted to work until the deadline. He gathered about 10 of his staff and a whiteboard in his hospital room, while he directed from the bed. Problematically the pain medication made him delirious.
“I kept slipping in and out of consciousness,” he said.
Hunsicker was there: “It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced.”
A year later, Friedman’s wife was due to give birth to their second son. Friedman worried that so long as he worked in baseball he would have to miss his son’s birthday every year for the deadline. He spoke with his wife and her doctor.
“I negotiated them to August 1st for the induction date,” Friedman said.
It was a savvy deadline deal, but it fell through when his wife involuntarily went into labor at 4:30 a.m. the day before.
“We still came pretty close to pulling off a big trade that day,” Friedman said.
In L.A., Friedman has spread his infectious compulsion for filling dull hours with competition. In spring training, he organized touch football for baseball operations beneath the outfield lights past 10:30 p.m. He estimated the “epic” game injured “seven or eight” out of 12 people with hamstring strains.
It’s not unusual to see him cycling through an array of balls and coming up with games. He thrived at one that required using a Spalding pink ball, standing on opposite sides of a conference table and throwing a shorthop intended to jam your fielding opponent. Friedman aims for the table’s edge.
Out of the many transformative transactions he has pulled off for the Dodgers — who made the biggest trade of the summer to land Manny Machado — how he acquired general manager Farhan Zaidi gets overlooked.
Friedman lured Zaidi — an MIT graduate with an economics doctorate from California-Berkeley, who is of Pakistani descent — away from Oakland Athletics executive Billy Beane.
“Son,” Kenny told Andrew, “I don’t know how many games you’re gonna win, but I think the Jewish kid hiring a Muslim qualifies you for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
The father and son are close. They have shared their most significant baseball moments, often in person, from Game 6 of 1986 NLCS to Game 5 of the 2017 World Series.
“It took Andrew a long time to get over Game 5,” Kenny said. “He just wasn’t as relaxed and communicative after the game, or the next one, as he normally would be.”
Still looking ahead
Game 7 was not easier. Sports executives can be inaccessible at games, even to their surrounding pack of wonks and relatives, because they feel like the score controls their oxygen supply. But a TV camera showed Friedman, usually looking young and rosycheeked, in a Dodger Stadium suite sitting in intense silence and appearing on the verge of turning ashen.
Friedman was not emotionally steeled as a boy inside the Astrodome, but the Astros — the team he grew up loving and professionally disowned — tapped into Little Andrew’s trauma.
With the Astros leading 5-0 through four innings, Friedman broke from his rigidly rational behavior. The chances of a Dodgers’ win dwindled. He needed hope beyond reason. He remembered their 47 comeback victories from the regular season. He psyched himself into believing that this World Series proved anything could happen.
“Through the fifth or sixth there was genuine optimism,” he said.
The Dodgers pushed across one run, but no more.
Friedman pulled himself together. He made sure to congratulate Astros owner Jim Crane, manager A.J. Hinch, president of business operations Reid Ryan and Luhnow with handshakes before their hands pruned from the spray of sparkling wine.
Friedman met with his own brain trust. Someone mentioned the Kansas City Royals. They had lost Game 7 of the 2014 World Series and returned to win the following year. “I clung to it,” Friedman said. He called his father, who had watched the game from Houston.
They went through this before, when the Rays lost the 2008 World Series to the Phillies.
Before that, Andrew had given the AL pennant ring to his father and said: “I’m going to wait until I get a World Series ring.”
Kenny tried to uplift his son with praise for leading the Dodgers so far. “Thanks, dad,” Andrew said. Two days later, the Astros rolled out a parade. Friedman gave up screaming from the seats to hold his breath in the suites. Were this 20 years ago, he would have been among the one million people in his home city to engulf downtown for a championship celebration they had worried might never come.
Friedman continues his chase. He is not one to wait or wallow. Friends and colleagues say he relates well to ballplayers because he shares their tunnel vision.
He looked out of his office. In the foreground of Chavez Ravine he saw closer Kenley Jansen, who had faltered multiple times in the Series, running the stadium steps. The next day Friedman saw 10 players come to work out.
Friedman did not dwell on the Astros. He remembered the Royals. He made plans for the Dodgers.
“I’m not good at reflection,” he said. “Everything is about looking ahead.” hunter.atkins@chron.com twitter.com/hunteratkins35