Streak the Truth (Part II)

Today’s article is the final part of a two-part essay. The first part was about our fascination with dominant streaks in sports.

Eight years ago, long after Kevin Mench retired, my fascination with streaks extended beyond my parasocial sports fan life and into my professional life.  

(Mench, a player you’d have no reason to know, had seven consecutive games with a homer which was one shy of the record eight straight and tied with two of the game’s great power bats – Barry Bonds and Jim Thome.  Mench hit just nine more homers in the 200+ remaining games of his career.)

I lived in New York City, where I was a salesman at the prominent luxury fitness club Equinox. The type of sale was customer facing and involved working a pipeline of online prospects, convincing them to visit the club so we could meet one-on-one. Once they met me in the lobby, I would walk them into my office, where we’d sit down to converse about their fitness goals; I’d soon after give them a tour of the facility, and eventually bring them back to my office for the pricing presentation and hard-sell. 

I considered myself a pretty good salesman. I was passionate about the brand, lifestyle, and commitment to health. I wholeheartedly believed the high price was worth the investment and that honesty worked in my favor. 

I enjoyed what I sold, but over time the excitement of the sale was quickly waning. The only external measurement that mattered was the monthly sales quota and I wanted a fresh challenge - something invigorating and quantifiable.

In April 2017 (1.5 years into my job), I noticed I had gone an impressive 12 straight days with at least one sale. 

It was the first time that I embraced this type of win streak and keeping the streak alive became my new motivator. Thus I created the significance of “The streak”. 

The streak in itself would prove I was an excellent salesperson - a barometer of consistency and reliability. But while I was proud of growing this streak, the bells and whistles of consecutive days selling a membership meant little to my management team. I found this strange because selling consistently each day wasn’t at odds with my success, in fact accumulating these consecutive sales helped me hit my monthly quota and first accelerator bonus. Yet management saw this streak through a different lens, seeing I could have worked harder and ultimately sold more memberships. 

They had a point. 

Alongside the sales I closed through building relationships with potential buyers and conveying the club’s value, management knew that not every tally for which I received commission was due to my skill set. From time to time, I would get credit for sales where people signed up online or where former members rejoined. There were several sales with the unspoken words of don’t pitch me, just take my credit card for which I didn’t need to persuade anyone of anything. While some of these sales in the streak were merited, many were fluked. 

My General Manager Steve, from whom I learned a lot about business, didn’t care about my output from an absolute standpoint, but from a relative standpoint. The total number of sales I had to my name didn’t matter to him; What mattered was how many of those sales came from working my sales pipeline. He cared about the daily amount of calls and emails I sent or my strategy for building my pipeline.

For a few weeks, I was frustrated that my choice of success metric didn’t align with him. But once I transferred his rebuttal into baseball analogies, I understood why he disliked the streak. 

Although Steve was happy that I was getting hits, he wanted me to take more at bats. Within those at bats he wanted me to work the count more, which would give me additional opportunities for more hits and not just hits which primarily came from first-pitch fastballs down the plate. 

If I’m comparing my streak to Joe Dimaggio’s hit streak, then the consistency is admirable. But through Steve's eyes, my Joltin’ Joe streak only mattered if a) I’m hitting for a high average (Joe batted .408) and b) I’m helping the team win (the Yankees won 73% of games during Joe’s streak). Steve likely saw my performance during my streak as one where I was batting .300 and our sales team “winning” at a 50% rate. 

He was right. In focusing on the streak, I became satisfied with one daily sale and not playing with house money to get other sales. I had days where I’d get a sale within one hour of my shift thus diminishing my effort for the rest of the day. 

I finished the streak at 44 days. In both those months, I hit my quota but our sales team missed our collective quota. If I hadn’t used my “keep the streak alive” attitude as my compass, I could’ve made more sales and therefore more money for both me and my team. 

My sales approach self-served my vanity metric and not what was best for me and the team. This feeling of complacency is anathema to a successful sales career and sales team. 

I love a good streak, but not when it’s the sole purpose of playing the game. 

We love streaks in baseball for its orderly nature and ability to revere players for eternity, but while focusing on my own streak, I learned that the numbers aren’t impressive in itself as much as what they represent.

Perhaps that’s why Cal Ripken’s consecutive games streak - one of grinding and not settling - is the most impressive in baseball history, but that’s for another article. 

Writing this essay seven years later, in a different city, on a more nebulous life path, feels like a tribute to a bygone career woven into my new one.

With this totem memory from my work experience, I use my fan experience to dip into my memory bank of sports moments to explain away these innocuous happenings. For every athlete, significant play, or historic achievement my younger self registered, their imprints stand timeless - surfacing in my consciousness when I least expect. 

Such is the case of Kevin Mench’s impact. At sixteen, I was in awe of his fluke streak - how can a nobody, just like me, achieve this milestone?!. Ten years later, I brought his metaphor to life as a way to assess job success - I can become somebody. Seven years later, I find myself wrapping the gift of Mench into one large bow - I learned who I was.  

Mench is the captain who chartered my fascination with streaks. He helped me explore the myriad ways hot streaks and surges illuminate our own relationships with consistency and effort. But then again, Mench also is the lodestar of flukes - teaching how to deal with sharp declines, bemoaning the flicker of potential that never fully ignites.

He constituted the sports fan’s perpetual rhetorical marriage of what was and what could’ve been.

We’ve seen more ostentatious versions of this flash in the pan. In 2012, Jeremy Lin had three weeks of global superstardom, but after an injury derailed Linsanity, he never sniffed the same level of excellence again.

In his ascension, Lin’s pulverized basketball stereotypes of race, religion, and academic intelligence; Graced with the stage of New York City, he became sports’ most striking underdog of the 21st century.

Mench, on the other hand, didn’t collect any glamor, fame, or celebrity to his streak. It went as quiet and innocuous as the man himself - a white-as-wonderbread average joe with an oversized head and feet, playing for an after-thought franchise. Homering in seven straight games was as forgotten as quickly as it apexed.

His similarities to the brief superstardom of Lin and legends of longevity like DiMaggio, Griffey, Bonds, Thome, and Mattingly have boundaries, but the symbolism of Kevin Mench will go as far as I take them. 

Every athlete you’ve watched or been told tales about are mirrors to show you something about your own life.

You just have to use your creativity.