red sox performance from a business framework view

the author of this article indicates that there was never any reason to believe that the red sox were not going to win the world series. as many a new investor is taught, and as many a prospectus contain, past performance is not indicative of future performance. but this article falls short of evaluating the real reasons why the red sox were able to outperform their competition. in my opinion, this success is most ammenable to a resource based view of the team. it is without argument that human resources have the greatest impact on the teams success. superstars and allstars are obviously very valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate. if these stars are playing, then they are definitely being exploited by the team, leading to a sustained competitive advantage. along these same lines, the team possess great financial capital that is needed to obtain the aforementioned human capital. it could be argued that red sox management in previous years failed to exploit their financial capital by not obtaining the correct human capital.

what this model fails to adequately take into account is the notion of free agency, and the fact resources can be moved from a team to its competitors. thus, the concept of a sustained competivie advantage is somewhat misleading, as a prolonged advantage can only be obtained by retaining the valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate players. more often, especially in the current heavy free market system, competitive advantages are almost always temporary as evidenced by the lack of true dynasties.