Baseball, according to Ares Management CEO Michael Arougheti, offers a masterclass in collaboration that no business school can match.

“For me, both as a player but also as a fan, baseball has always just been the closest to my heart,” he said. “There’s just something about the structure of the game, the nature of the teamwork that it fosters.”

That teamwork operates within a framework of mathematical precision. “There’s a lot of math involved in the game that has always intrigued me,” he explained, describing how analytics and intuition merge. “There’s a real spirituality about the game.”

Consider the sport’s arithmetic: “What’s so remarkable if you just think about 162 games per season, 30 teams, and the number of pitches in any given game is 300, and the margin of error and the margin of success is just so narrow,” said Arougheti. Yet teams must show up and compete through this marathon season. “You have to keep doing it over and over and over again—and the success compounds.”

Fans witness how small shifts over the course of a season can create vastly different outcomes. “The way that people, I think, experience the sport is they tally up all of these random events that occur over the course of the season and really understand that a modest deviation from that could result in a completely different outcome,” Arougheti said. “So I think there’s something thrilling about that.”