FROM PITCH TO PITCH
SUN VALLEY, Idaho — Paul Hartzell has had little trouble making the transition from throwing pitches in Major League Baseball to making business pitches.
Using experience he gained through sports, Hartzell’s “team-first” mentality has made the Central Columbia alumnus and former California Angels, Minnesota Twins and Baltimore Orioles hurler both a success and a mainstay in the sales industry.
Through his role as advisory chairman and board member for Game Theory Group International, Hartzell often searches for, and helps, athletes looking to make it in sales.
Using Game Plan — a hiring platform started by fellow Lehigh University graduate Vin McCaffrey — Hartzell helps athletes from all levels make adjustments needed for the workforce.
In fact, as someone who helps hire people internationally for businesses, he notes that most already have one familiarity amongst them: They were once student-athletes.
“The common background [the hired] have is they were all college athletes and understood the competitive nature of sales,” Hartzell said.
“An employer wants to hire a person with proper academic credentials and traits that go along with being a college athlete because they know they have discipline, understand success and failure and how to deal with such.”
The company continues to grow. Hartzell says its largest client, the NFL, wants to provide all 130 Division I Football Bowl Subdivision teams with its services starting this summer.
“Young athletes need to get this info from someone,” Hartzell said. “Game Plan simply applies e-learning on devices with courses ranging from financial literacy to sexual harassment and gambling that stretch from 3 to 7 minutes because that’s how people interact these days.
“Kids eat that up today because that’s how they learn everything. If you do things in really concentrated, manageable lessons, they do really well.”
The company also does work with the NBA G-League, USA Basketball and the Kansas City Royals.
“It wasn’t so much about helping people, it was more as I grew in the business world, I was thinking I don’t want to make mistakes hiring people,” he said. “I want them to be highly trainable. Companies need people who can take rejection and loss and bounce back the next day or hour, whatever it takes.
“I wanted people with a higher probability of success. A background that helps in any way is sports. I naturally gravitated towards that.”
Hartzell would love to see Game Plan have more of a presence in baseball but says “the Players Association and MLB can’t agree on what time of day it is, much less take a look at the athletes and their personal development.”
Game Plan is far from the only job keeping Hartzell busy these days from his home in central Idaho. Hartzell also serves as the general manager of The Pitch Perfect and is the co-founder of True Digital Dossier.
And with the outbreak of the coronavirus, not much has changed for the salesman.
“My day isn’t much different; I just don’t travel,” he said. “I still do six to 10 Zoom meetings a week.”
Hartzell previously had successful tenures at Sorg Printing, RR Donnelly, Merrill Corp., PostX Corp. and Seagate International.
Playing days
Before successful business adventures took him all over the world, including living in New York City, Singapore and London with his wife Andrei, Hartzell was a standout athlete — even in a sport he never imagined he would play professionally.
The former pitcher recently was chosen among the Los Angeles Angels’ 100 best players, ranking No. 91 for the franchise that is nearly 60 years old.
“That came as a big surprise to me,” Hartzell said. “I had no idea they were doing such a thing, and I think that when you look back on things that happened 40 years ago, time tends to dull the memories of being one of the top players during that period of time.
“The nice thing about statistics is they bring those things to the forefront. They measure a lot of things these days and became an important criteria.”
The right-hander was used as both a starter and reliever and ranks third in franchise history in home runs allowed per 9 innings (.492), fourth in walks per nine innings (2.143) and eighth in ERA (3.27).
Hartzell may not have a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he’s quick to point out there are three ways one can still learn about him in Cooperstown.
“One is, of course, getting traded for Rod (Carew),” he said. “Another is giving up Hank Aaron’s home run No. 749 and the other is winning both games of a doubleheader.”
The last feat came in June 1977 when he won both ends of a doubleheader against the Texas Rangers. The achievement came in a stretch in which Hartzell pitched in four games within two days.
Where he comes from
But even before all of his success on the diamond, Hartzell was stellar on the field and basketball court for Central Columbia.
He was the first player in Blue Jays basketball history to score 1,000 points and fell eight rebounds shy of 1,000.
His relationship with former coach Duane Ford, with whom Hartzell calls “Skipper,” hasn’t wavered in the years since graduating in 1971. Instead, he credits much of his philosophies in sports and business to Ford.
“This team idea starts with playing for Duane,” Hartzell said. “I tend to think of sports and business in terms of basketball because someone has to pick for you and someone has to come down with rebounds.”
The two often communicate, exchanging emails regularly and sometimes calling one another three or four times a day, he said.
“I’m very interested in the things he’s been doing for a long time,” Hartzell said. “He’s been ahead of the curve for a long time with how he thinks about coaching and how he delivers that message.
“He remains relevant to young [softball] players. His ability to reach these people, coach these people and connect with these people has grown tremendously.”
Hartzell doesn’t come back to the area much since his mother passed away in 2011, having one last family connection — his niece, Stephanie Crawford — in the region. He did, however, find time in his schedule last summer to stop through and speak to Ford’s Rise Above softball team.
To this day, Hartzell carries the lessons he has learned at Central with him through everything he does.
“You have to keep your head up because you never know when the ball will hit you,” he said. “That’s true of life. I learned that sort of thing on the court or on the field.”
And don’t think for a second he’s ready to give up any of this anytime soon.
“People ask me all the time ‘Don’t you want to retire?’ And I say, ‘I help out with high school kids and work with a bunch of smart guys and help a bunch of great companies.’
“Who would want to retire from such?”
