Take the Money and Run

Game Six of the 2002 World Series wasn’t supposed to unfold the way it did.

The Los Angeles Angels were facing elimination against the San Francisco Giants. Late in the game, the season felt finished. The stadium carried that familiar, heavy quiet—fans bracing themselves for the long walk out, already rehearsing how close it had been.

Then the Giants’ closer began to unravel.

A hit. Then another. The crowd rose cautiously at first, unsure whether to trust what it was seeing. The noise grew as the inning stretched on. What had felt inevitable suddenly felt fragile. By the time it ended, the Angels had completed a stunning comeback, flipped the series, and set the stage for a Game Seven victory that delivered the first championship in franchise history.

It was a peak moment. Everything aligned at once—talent, timing, momentum, and just enough luck. The kind of season franchises chase for decades.

And peaks have a way of distorting judgment.

Not long after that championship, Arturo Moreno bought the Angels. From the outside, it looked like a dream move: a title-winning team, a passionate fan base, and a franchise riding its highest wave of relevance.

From a personal standpoint, Moreno didn’t need to do it.

He had already built and sold a billboard empire, achieving financial independence by any reasonable definition. Buying a Major League Baseball team wasn’t about security or necessity. It was about staying in the game—remaining competitive, visible, and engaged at the highest level.

But buying at the top carries a hidden cost: expectations freeze at their peak.

Championships compress memory. They make rare outcomes feel repeatable. They convince people that what just happened is a baseline rather than an outlier. Under Moreno’s ownership, the Angels spent aggressively, chased stars, and tried year after year to recreate a moment that, by definition, was unlikely to repeat.

This isn’t a story about incompetence or hubris. It’s a story about pressure. About what happens when success makes stopping feel like retreat.

Around the same time, in a very different industry, another leader was confronting the same temptation—only more quietly.

Ken Iverson was running one of the most successful steel companies in the country. Nucor was profitable, admired, and growing. Iverson had every reason to push harder: expand faster, add complexity, extract more prestige and personal reward.

Instead, he resisted.

He avoided unnecessary growth. He rejected lavish executive perks. He kept systems simple even when competitors chased scale. Iverson believed that success didn’t just create opportunity—it created temptation. And that fragility rarely appears during hard times. It shows up after things have been going well for a while.

Where Moreno extended the game, Iverson narrowed it. Where one accepted new volatility after winning, the other treated durability as the real victory.

Neither choice is irrational. But they carry very different risks.

This tension shows up constantly in personal finance, often in ways that don’t look dramatic at all.

It appears when someone reaches a level of comfort they once dreamed about and quietly moves the finish line. The house that felt perfect becomes temporary. The savings that once felt secure starts to feel merely “adequate.” The job that provided freedom begins to feel limiting—not because anything went wrong, but because success recalibrated expectations.

Momentum does that. When things are going well, risk feels smaller than it actually is. Recent conditions start to feel permanent. Decisions made during unusually favorable periods begin to feel normal.

That’s how people end up taking risks they never would have accepted earlier. Not out of recklessness, but out of confidence. Not because they need more, but because stopping feels like stagnation. Because it’s hard to tell the difference between progress and overextension when everything still looks fine.

Financial fragility rarely announces itself during struggle. It tends to emerge during stability—when income is high, markets are cooperative, and plans seem to be working. That’s when people concentrate too much, stretch a little further, assume a good run will last just a bit longer.

What often separates durable financial lives from fragile ones isn’t intelligence or ambition. It’s whether someone decides, at some point, that they’ve already won a particular game.

Defining “enough” doesn’t mean giving up on growth. It means recognizing when additional risk no longer improves life in meaningful ways. It means understanding that once a goal is met, the rules change. Preservation starts to matter more than expansion. Flexibility becomes more valuable than optimization.

Arturo Moreno bought a championship team at the peak of its success, stepping into a world where expectations were permanently elevated. Ken Iverson stepped back from opportunities others would have chased, understanding that resilience mattered more than scale.

Most of us will never own a baseball team or run a steel company. But we face smaller versions of the same decision all the time.

Do you keep pushing because it’s working—or because you’re afraid to stop?
Are you pursuing progress—or protecting what already matters?

The hardest financial skill isn’t accumulating more.

It’s recognizing when the rally is already over, the series is already won, and the smartest move is to protect what you’ve built—long after the cheering fades.