I haven't written anything in 436 days...

I used to stay up in the middle of the night and just write and let my brain unscramble the busyness of the day, of the week, of the year... and it made me incredibly happy to put things on paper (metaphorically of course, who has the dexterity for that nowadays). But, I haven't done that in awhile. 436 days as a matter of fact.

It's not that I've been unhappy, actually I'm doing the best I've ever been. I've been busy working on an amazing team building the future of healthcare. But before all of that, I was a professional baseball player who spent more time thinking about being a professional baseball player than actually training to become a better baseball player... I was so in awe that I got there that I lost sight of what got me there in the first place.

I knew it was fleeting. How fleeting you might ask? I got drafted in 2016 and spent 18 months with the New York Mets. Got injured and released and then a year and change later I'm on the first flight out of Texas to Tel Aviv to play on the Israeli baseball team that unbelievably qualified for the Olympics in Tokyo. I made it. Until I didn't.

In 2018, I started More Than Baseball which went onto form the Minor League Baseball Players Association, one of/if not the largest union in professional sports. It was a dream come true. Athletes and their families were desperate for the help, teams needed to provide better resources to bolster talent in their systems, and the league needed to get over the last 75+ years of inevitability.

In 4 years, we raised $2.5 million mostly from star MLBers who were sick of seeing minor leaguers Uber fans home after their own spring training games, the MLBPA who wanted more leverage, and we even got the almighty MLB league office and teams to fall for our sneaky plan.

You see, when you are the first organization to provide resources to players like a mental health program (which turned into MindReady), a food program (crazy, I know), a job placement team, legal guidance, hell, we helped 10+ players seek asylum, people take note. The same people who never wanted a union for minor leaguers helped our organization provide resources the teams were unwilling to pay for. We earned the right to support their players, and in turn, used our goodwill to turn into union votes.

Tl;dr - Major League Baseball was responsible for the union they never wanted to exist.

Why tell you this? Because looking back on my time in baseball, as a player and an operator (and "agitator" according to some front office staff who shall remain nameless. Good luck in the playoffs, by the way), there are little moments that make me think about the value of sport. Sport matters. Competition matters. Winning matters. Losing matters. It all matters.

What's most important is how we learn from what we see. This is what I'm most interested in.

Last year, I wrote 3 articles on winning, emotion, and imperfection. And for 436 days since I haven't written a thing. That's going to change.

See you next Friday.