Before the First Pitch: What Opening Day Teaches About Building a Practice That Lasts

The last time I watched the Cleveland Guardians play the Chicago Cubs, it was Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. Extra innings. A rain delay that may have changed baseball history. One of the greatest games ever played — and I was in the building.

That night, one team’s decade-long plan finally paid off. The other fell one run short of theirs.

Nine years later, I am back at the ballpark watching them play again. This time with my son. The home opener. Both teams a week into the season, the early results already in. The whole summer still ahead.

A lot happened in the nine years between those two games. For me. For both franchises. For the sport. But the thing that strikes me most, sitting in this seat today, is how much the intervening years were shaped by decisions made long before anyone threw a pitch.

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The Speech That Set the Table

On Opening Day — March 26th — I took my son to the YSU Thomas Colloquium Lecture Series to hear Alex Rodriguez speak.

My son is ten. He plays travel baseball — first base and third base, the same position A-Rod played. He is tall for his age, athletic, and serious about the game in the way that ten-year-olds are when they have genuinely decided something matters to them.

I did not know how much of the evening he would absorb. He absorbed almost all of it.

A-Rod talked about his mother working two and three jobs to keep the family afloat. He talked about getting drafted and understanding immediately that the window was finite — that the career would end, and that the question was what you built while it was open. He talked about the athletes at the peak of their earning power who ended up with nothing. He came into the league with a plan specifically because he had seen what happened to the players who didn’t.

What resonated most — for my son, and honestly for me — were three things:

Focus. A-Rod understood early that reaching the major leagues would require a level of commitment that most people were not willing to make. He did not dabble. He did not hedge. He decided what he was building and structured everything around that decision.

Visualization. He talked about rehearsing his day before it happened — mentally walking through at-bats, situations, outcomes. Not as a motivational exercise, but as preparation. By the time the moment arrived, he had already been there.

Work ethic. Not as a virtue in the abstract, but as a competitive strategy. The player who outworks the room in the offseason arrives at spring training ahead of everyone who didn’t. That gap compounds.

My son was dialed in for every word. That was worth the drive to Youngstown by itself.

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The Fourth Thing He Said

A-Rod closed with something that has stayed with me.

3,115 career hits. 696 career home runs — fifth all time.

Also fifth all time in strikeouts.

The same swing. The same commitment. The same willingness to step into the box and take a full cut. The discipline that produced the home runs also produced the strikeouts. You cannot have one without the other. The willingness to fail at scale is the price of succeeding at scale.

He said: in life, you get knocked down. Never stop getting back up.

And then he offered the frame that I think every person in that room needed to hear — whether they were a ten-year-old travel baseball player or a practice owner in the back row:

The player who fails 70% of the time is in the Hall of Fame.

A .300 batting average is elite. A .400 season is historic. In any other field, a 30% success rate gets you fired. In baseball, it gets you a plaque in Cooperstown.

For anyone who has made a bad hire, signed a contract they didn’t fully understand, expanded too fast, or watched a deal fall apart — that reframe matters. The question is not whether you failed. The question is whether you kept stepping into the box.

A-Rod did not just talk about resilience in the abstract. He lived the most public version of it in the history of the sport. The suspension. The humiliation. The years of rebuilding his reputation and his career. He stepped back into the box. He built something after baseball that most players never build during it.

My son heard all of that at ten years old. I am still processing parts of it.

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What This Has to Do With Your Practice

The four things A-Rod described — focus, visualization, work ethic, and the willingness to keep stepping back into the box — are not baseball concepts. They are the architecture of any deliberate outcome.

In my book, The Root of Leadership, the first pillar is Clarity of Vision. Not vision as a poster on the wall. Vision as a specific, internalized picture of where you are going and what it will take to get there. A-Rod had that at twenty-two. Most practice owners develop it at fifty-five, when the broker calls.

The practices that command the strongest valuations — the ones that sell cleanly, transition smoothly, and retain their value through the process — are the ones where the owner made deliberate choices years before the sale. They decided what kind of practice they were building. They built systems around that decision. They rehearsed the outcome before it arrived.

That is not a metaphor. It is the literal mechanism.

The dentist who walks into a sale having spent three years preparing the narrative, cleaning the data, documenting the SOPs, and stabilizing the team — that dentist has been visualizing this outcome and working toward it. The buyer’s QoE team arrives and finds a practice that looks exactly like what the seller said it would be. There is nothing to cut. There is no re-trade. The deal closes on Friday.

The dentist who calls the broker when they are ready to stop working has not been visualizing the outcome. They have been hoping for it. Those are not the same thing.

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Opening Day as a Leadership Frame

MLB Opening Day was March 26th. As you read this, both the Guardians and the Cubs are a week into the season. The ledger is no longer blank — there are wins and losses on the board, early adjustments being made, plans already meeting reality.

But here is the thing about those first seven games: they were shaped almost entirely by decisions made months before anyone threw a pitch. Roster construction. Spring training priorities. How the coaching staff prepared the rotation. The culture in the clubhouse. None of that was improvised in the first week of April.

There is something about Opening Day that I find genuinely useful as a leadership concept — not because the slate is clean, but because it is the moment when the offseason work either shows up or it doesn’t. The plan meets the field. The preparation meets the competition.

The teams that win in October are not the ones who got lucky in April. They are the ones who made deliberate decisions in November — about roster construction, about systems, about culture — that positioned them to compete when the games mattered. The work that determines the outcome happens before the first pitch.

The Cubs’ 2016 championship was not built in 2016. It was built in 2012, when Theo Epstein arrived with a plan for a multi-year rebuild that would require losing before it required winning. The organization visualized an outcome that was years away and built every decision around it. When the moment arrived — extra innings, Game 7, rain delay and all — they were ready because they had already been there, in the work, in the preparation, in the plan.

The Guardians have been one of the most analytically disciplined organizations in baseball for over a decade. They compete consistently with a fraction of the payroll of larger markets because their systems are better. Their player development, their data infrastructure, their decision-making frameworks — all of it is built to produce outcomes that the raw numbers suggest they should not be able to achieve. That is not luck. That is leadership.

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The Season Ahead

Right now, my son and I are at Progressive Field for the Guardians home opener. His favorite player, José Ramírez, plays third base — the same position my son plays, the same position A-Rod played. The lineage is not lost on either of us.

At ten, he is beginning to understand something that most people do not fully grasp until much later: that the outcomes you want require decisions made long before the moment arrives. That focus is not the absence of distraction — it is the active choice to build toward something specific. That visualization is not wishful thinking — it is preparation in a different form.

A-Rod came into the league with a plan because he had seen the alternative. He built something that outlasted his playing days because he started building it before his playing days were over.

That is the question worth sitting with as the season begins — in baseball and in your practice.

What are you building? And are you building it now, or waiting until you have to?

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The Bottom Line

Every practice owner has an Opening Day — the moment when the work they have done in the offseason either shows up or it doesn’t. The buyer who walks in, the broker who calls, the QoE team that opens the data room.

The teams that win in October started preparing in November.

The practices that sell at a premium started preparing three years before the broker called.

The season is not won on Opening Day. But it can absolutely be lost there.

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The preparation that determines your exit starts long before the transaction. Use the Valuation Calculator to model where your practice stands today, or schedule a Practice Intelligence Brief to begin building the foundation for the outcome you want.