Baseball's Mitt Romney Strikes Again

In the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, I profiled Houston Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow, a former McKinsey consultant who found his way into baseball and is now trying to pull off one of the most ambitious turnarounds in Major League Baseball history. In my piece, I likened him to Mitt Romney: Luhnow is stripping down the Astros with ruthless efficiency, the way Romney once ripped apart steel companies at Bain Capital. The common idea is that this allows organizations to be rebuilt for greater strength and success. But as the 2012 presidential election made clear, Romney’s approach often entailed the unsentimental firing of a lot of people.

On Monday, Luhnow again lived up to the Romney comparison when he fired Astros manager Bo Porter less than two seasons into the job. Porter had been less than happy with the analytics-driven style of baseball that Luhnow and his brain trust are pioneering, and he apparently made his unhappiness known. Fox’s Ken Rosenthal wrote an article about it last week that seems to have been the proximate cause of Porter’s dismissal.