Today is opening day of baseball season.
Yes, the Mets played the Cardinals last night in the “Season Opener”.
That was a night game.
Doesn’t count.
The season doesn’t open till a game is played in daylight.

The first day of baseball season is a good time to remember how lucky we are to work in the business of advertising.
We can take the afternoon off and go to the game.

Is the world going to miss one afternoon’s worth of advertising?
Will anyone be able to tell if you withheld an afternoon’s worth of effort from a campaign?

However, leaving work to go to a baseball game will make a difference inside you.
Leaving work to go to a baseball game opens something inside your heart that advertising has been doing its best to lock up.
The quest for award-winning work keeps you at work late.
The struggle to do better than those around you makes you work through dinner, get up early, cancel the vacation you planned.
There are times these sacrifices bear fruit.
Mostly they don’t.
Because greatness at writing ads comes only partly from how hard you work at reaching inside yourself.
A greater deal of it has to do with being a person worth reaching into.
Leaving work to go to a baseball game is a sign you have taken charge of your life.
It’s a sign you accept death is coming and have chosen what to do about it for today.
It will do you no good to learn to write from your heart if you have nothing in your heart.
I was slow to learn this.
Here’s hoping you won’t be.

This is the team I root for.

My favorite player is Joe Crede, the White Sox 3rd baseman.
The best player in the game, I think, is Albert Pujols.
I used to think Ichiro was the best player in baseball, but when Pujols came up in the last inning of game 6 against the Astros and hit the ball out, almost sending the Cardinals to the World Series in 2005 I changed my mind.

Go give your heart away for the afternoon to a team who can break it.
Eat the hot dogs and damn the sodium because we are for lives that are more full than they are long.