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The Dartmouth
July 14, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Sandy Alderson '69 nominated to run for College Board of Trustees

Dartmouth students who are struggling to decide where they want to go with their professional lives now have a new people's champion. Few people have taken a more twisted road to success than Board of Trustees candidate and current San Diego Padres chief executive officer Sandy Alderson '69.

Alderson graduated Dartmouth with a bachelor of arts in history. He also played two years of baseball with little success before leaving the team to pursue other extracurricular interests.

"I played ball for two years, and because of my involvement in the ROTC I couldn't play in the summer," Alderson said. "Together with a general lack of talent, that made it difficult for me to succeed [at baseball]. I ended up quitting after my second year, but stayed active as a sportscaster for WDCR, through the outdoors program, independent study and I traveled to Vietnam during the Vietnamese War as a journalist."

After graduating, Alderson spent four years in the military as a Marine, then graduated from Harvard Law School and practiced law in San Francisco.

In 1980, Alderson found himself re-immersed into the world of baseball, as he puts it, "just serendipitously." Alderson was working for Roy Eisenhart '60 when the Eisenhart family purchased the Oakland Athletics.

"I did the legal work in connection with the purchase of the team, and a year later joined the A's as their general counsel, then remained with the A's for 17 years," Alderson said.

Alderson began his tenure with the A's as the team's general counsel, but this was just the beginning of his contributions to the organization and baseball as a whole. In 1983, Alderson, a man with no experience in scouting or player evaluation, found himself in the position of general manager.

"I think that when Roy Eisenhart decided I would be his new GM, it was more on my judgment and him having confidence in my judgment than my level of knowledge or experience with the game," Alderson said.

Alderson would accrue the basic skills to be a GM quickly, but given his inexperience, he was able to bring a fresh perspective to the position.

At the time, general managers across Major League Baseball were set in traditional methods of evaluating players based on five tools -- speed, arm strength, fielding, hitting, and the ability to hit with power.

Alderson, however, did not buy into the traditional approach.

"At this point I was not burdened by any past experience of traditional approaches to evaluation. I just didn't have the experience," he said.

Instead, Alderson took to the vanguard methods for finding undervalued talent, a movement spearheaded by baseball writer Bill James. James's theory holds that the five tools are not the most effective way to value a player. Instead, the focus should be on a player's on-base percentage and the player's ability to hit with power.

"I read [James's] material and put that with a more intuitive approach," Alderson said.

Alderson's "intuitive approach" was built around a batter getting on base and therefore not making an out. Getting on base prolongs innings and leads to the production of more runs, he thought. The ability to hit with power led to different treatment from pitchers, which led to a batter reaching base more often than a hitter who was not a power threat. Alderson's next challenge was to put these theories into practice with the A's.

"I got a group of students at Stanford to do regression analyses to see if this approach made sense," said Alderson. "I was convinced that it did. We gradually began to apply it in a lot of our decision making in our trades, drafts, acquisitions and so forth."

With the implementation of his experiment, Alderson gave birth to what has become known as the Moneyball approach. Since baseball has no salary cap, that approach has allowed smaller market teams to compete with higher income teams that have more money to spend on talent.

During Alderson's 17-year tenure, the A's consistently made decisions to pass on overpriced, highly-touted players in favor of players that passed under the radar and fit Alderson's blueprint for success. For years, Oakland's methods were baseball's best kept secret.

"Originally, we didn't publicize our methods," Alderson explained. "I was so new; I wanted to protect the credibility of the organization. On the other hand this was proprietary and we thought that it could give us a competitive advantage if it works."

Alderson's system did indeed work, and still does today.

"What [the A's] are still doing today is a derivative of what we were doing in '85," Alderson said.

Now Alderson faces new challenges. He left the A's organization in 2005 to become the CEO of the San Diego Padres, and has been nominated as a candidate for Dartmouth's Board of Trustees.

Alderson emphasizes adaptation and the ability to adapt quickly as the key to success in San Diego. "Things are different in San Diego, that's the challenge," Alderson said. "The challenge is not to take the Moneyball approach off the shelf and apply it here in San Diego, it's to adapt it to new situations."

Alderson has also been able to adapt his experiences in the realm of professional sports to succeed in any arena. Alderson said the most important lesson he has learned in his professional life is "the pursuit of excellence. In baseball, there are 162 games that are either won or lost. Those become in themselves an expression of excellence or lack thereof. There is no place to hide."

Baseball has also taught Alderson what winning represents. "I've experienced losing," Alderson said. "That's one thing I've learned is you have to learn how to lose. It's obviously more fun to win. You learn from defeat, but it's about winning, and not winning in itself, but striving to be the best is important at Dartmouth, that we strive to achieve that in academics, men's and women's sports teams, the newspaper... and I think that's how the College is now."

Transitioning to his agenda for the Board of Trustees, Alderson admitted that he does not plan on doing to Dartmouth what he did to Major League Baseball -- he does not foresee a complete overhaul, nor does he deem one necessary.

"Do I think the college is broken? I certainly do not... I wouldn't propone to have an agenda or a checklist of things that need to be corrected. I'm more open-minded than that. I think there are things that make some alums, students and faculty unhappy that have detracted from the reputation of the College over the last few years. This bothers me because of the respect I have for the College and the administration."

From Alderson's point of view, running a successful baseball team, business or college requires a set of skills that are interchangeable and transferable. Success in these realms is contingent upon continued involvement and a thorough understanding of what needs to be done to make improvements.

"When you have a business and a sport it's about being on the ground, understanding what's going on, and making corrections from time to time," Alderson said. Ultimately, what has made Alderson so successful is simple, as he shares his secret to success, "the real goal is to blend disciplines and come up with decisions that are more often right than wrong."