The FPG Voices series highlights perspectives from across the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) and shares practical ideas for improving outcomes across systems and settings. In this installment, Stephen McKinney, MA, an implementation associate with the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) at FPG, brings implementation science to an unexpected arena: Major League Baseball. McKinney explores why baseball’s next competitive advantage may depend not on discovering more innovations, but on putting good ideas into practice consistently and sustainably.

Baseball organizations have invested heavily in analytics, technology, and specialized expertise to identify new competitive advantages. But as teams gain access to many of the same tools and insights, McKinney argues that the greater challenge is ensuring new approaches are understood, adopted, and applied consistently across coaches, players, departments, and levels of an organization.

“Baseball’s analytical revolution has transformed how teams think about talent and strategy. However, as the search for competitive advantage becomes increasingly widespread, the next frontier may lie in something less visible but equally important: how organizations translate knowledge into consistent behavior,” said McKinney. “In other words, the edge may not just be what you know; it may be how quickly and consistently your organization can act on what you know. And that is fundamentally an implementation challenge.”

Drawing on core implementation science principles—including clear expectations, training and coaching, aligned organizational supports, leadership, continuous feedback, and attention to sustainability—McKinney shows how teams can move from isolated innovation to reliable, system-wide execution. In a sport defined by small margins, the ability to act on knowledge quickly and consistently may be what separates good organizations from great ones.

Read McKinney’s full post (from NIRN’s Practicing Implementation Blog), “Why Major League Baseball’s Next Competitive Edge Is Implementation,” to explore how implementation science could reshape the way baseball organizations turn promising ideas into sustained performance.