In all professional sports, many retired players remain active even after their athletic careers end. While some become coaches, others are engaged in scouting, media work, and management. In the past twenty years, yet another career trajectory for successful executives has emerged. Today, successful executives give interviews and speak on podcasts about leadership, management, and strategic thinking at sports events and business meetings. Such discussions have become a part of broader intellectual debates on entrepreneurship and sports. Instead of the competitive aspect alone, such discussions address the way organizations are formed and teams evolve.
Against this backdrop, Cade Griffis has gradually expanded his public profile beyond his responsibilities as founder and chief executive officer of D-BAT. Although his primary work remains connected to the baseball and softball training organization he helped establish in 1998, Griffis has increasingly participated in interviews, podcasts, and public discussions centered on entrepreneurship, franchising, coaching, and leadership. His appearances have reflected the experiences of someone who has worked in several parts of baseball, including collegiate athletics, professional baseball, scouting, and business management. Rather than presenting a single formula for success, these discussions have typically focused on practical experiences gathered throughout his career.
Griffis’s background provides the context for many of those conversations. Before entering business, he played collegiate baseball at Dallas Baptist University, earning recognition as a two-time NAIA All-American. He later signed with the Kansas City Royals organization. He spent time in professional baseball before moving into scouting with the Chicago White Sox. Those experiences exposed him to player development from multiple perspectives. As a player, he experienced the demands of competitive baseball. As a scout, he evaluated talent and observed how organizations identified and developed athletes. Those combined experiences later became recurring themes whenever he discussed baseball instruction or business leadership in public settings.
Many of Griffis’s public appearances have focused on entrepreneurship rather than athletic performance. With the expansion of D-BAT into a franchise network operating throughout the USA and abroad, people became curious about the development of the company’s business model. This resulted in interviews on franchise expansion and business organization with business publications, podcasts, and other media. Unlike the purely financial approach often used to analyze D-BAT, many discussions revolved around decision-making, company culture, leadership, and the long-term challenges of expanding a specialized sports business.
An example of this is the Dugout CEO Podcast conducted by entrepreneur Casey Cavell. In the course of the interview, Griffin touched upon topics such as selecting business partners, preserving company culture during expansion, leadership and planning, and the realities of growing a franchise organization. Far from representing entrepreneurship as a process of following predictable steps, the discussion showed the uncertainties associated with business creation and management. It also demonstrated the connection between the lessons learned while competing in baseball and the responsibilities of the executive when growing the business and using the experiences acquired while being a professional athlete.
Griffin also participated in baseball-specific interviews which focused mostly on the origins of D-BAT and the development of the training model. Discussions in the programs such as Behind the Dish and the PlayMakers Talk Show concerned the history of the business – how the academy started as a business of private lessons and turned into a large company providing services to players of all ages in various locations. These discussions covered the early days of the business, the decision to integrate instruction with equipment production, and eventual franchising.
One more platform where Griffin has expressed himself is publishing. Specifically, in 2020 Griffin became one of the authors of the book Swinging for the Fences: The D-BAT Story together with Don Wall. The book covers the story of the organization in the context of valuable experience related to baseball and entrepreneurship. While authored by people involved in founding the company, it also touches on many of the topics Griffis discussed during interviews, such as persistence, leadership, team spirit, and organizational growth. Moreover, the publication’s release has provided more opportunities to discuss relationships between competitive sports and business, including book events and other discussions of experiences described in the book.
Moreover, sports-related podcasts can be considered a platform where Griffin was able to talk to broader audiences. According to research carried out by Edison Research, podcast listening has continued to grow steadily in the United States over the last decade. This means that this format can be considered a new medium for professional discussions that used to be held exclusively in the form of conferences and industry journals before. In this context, Griffis’ appearances in various podcasts can be regarded as a contribution to discussions of baseball instruction, franchise operation, and leadership. Unlike formal speeches, interviews in podcasts provide an opportunity to share not only success stories but failures as well.
Griffis has stated that he gets invitations to participate in school and business presentations. However, many of them are not covered in independent sources. All of them can be added to the list of ways that Griffis contributes to industry discussions as well. Overall, Cade Griffis’ role has been growing from being a baseball executive to being a participant in the discussions of leadership, coaching, and franchises. While his role cannot be considered as an industry spokesman, the activities discussed above show him as a professional whose experiences are the topic of discussion.
