Toronto Blue Jays General Manager Alex Anthopoulos.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Whatever the Toronto Blue Jays accomplish in the season that begins this week will be a reflection of one man's hunger to learn, and a testament to the power of curiosity.
When Alex Anthopoulos, who built the team, decided to make baseball his life, he had no baseball background and no contacts. He was a 23-year-old Montrealer running a heating and ventilation business started by his Greek-immigrant father. Today, at 35, he's starting his fourth season as the Jays' head of baseball operations. His team is a favourite to win the World Series.
How did he get from there to here? It was the willingness to ask questions. There is as much power in a question as in the home-run swing of slugger Jose Bautista.
There was, and is, no university or community-college program for becoming a general manager for a major-league sports franchise. But like countless self-taught entrepreneurs before him, Mr. Anthopoulos had the innate ability to absorb information from his environment. His story is not very different from that of, say, Steve Jobs, the late co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. He was driven to know. He asked questions incessantly.
People will go out of their way to help a young person who asks questions. When Mr. Anthopoulos was a lowly volunteer, opening fan mail on weekends for the Montreal Expos, a baseball scout, Fred Ferreira, passing through town, recognized something in him and brought him to his Florida baseball academy as an unpaid intern for a year and a half. Later, when the Expos gave their erstwhile volunteer a low-paid scouting job, he sent away to baseball's scouting bureau for video on every amateur player, and stayed up nights watching on his laptop; next day he'd ask the Expos' scouting director, Dana Brown, about what he'd seen.
Blue Jays president Paul Beeston, who presided over the team during the World Series championships of 1992 and 1993, hired Mr. Anthopoulos as general manager because he "learns relentlessly." As the Blue Jays take to the field today, forget, for a moment, the great pitching, the speed, the home-run hitters. This Blue Jays team was built on the power of questions.