Dream Small
Small is not the opposite of ambitious. It's the opposite of generic.
Bottom of the seventh in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Grasshoppers were down by two. Guilford, the giant grasshopper mascot named after the county, was riding a four-wheeler around the warning track. A black Labrador retriever named Miss Willie Mae Mays was waiting by the dugout to retrieve a bat — the sixth dog in a twenty-year unbroken Greensboro lineage that includes a Miss Babe Ruth, a Master Yogi Berra (the only dog ever ejected from a professional baseball game, for an “unsporting" act in the middle of a tennis ball promotion in 2009), and a Miss Lou Lou Gehrig. There are bronze statues of three of them at the intersection of Bellemeade and Eugene, a block from the ballpark. The city helped pay for them.
On the grass berm past the right field wall, a kid in an oversized mitt was stalking a foul ball that had landed three minutes earlier; he was not letting it out of his sight. Two rows down from me, a six-year-old was watching cartoons on her mom's phone, eating a pretzel, displaying complete indifference to the game. Behind them, the crowd was the kind you almost don't see anywhere else in 2026: families on birthday party decks, retirees who'd been coming since the ballpark went by a different name, college kids on date nights, an office happy hour, workwear next to business casual, every race, every income bracket, all paying $14 to sit in the same ballpark for three hours.
Somewhere on the mound was a twenty-year-old throwing 88-mph fastballs who, statistically, will never throw a pitch in a Major League uniform. And one who will. You don't know which is which. Nobody there does. That's part of the deal.
I have been to 68 of these places. Dayton. Biloxi. Lansing. Modesto. Cedar Rapids. The list is longer than is probably reasonable.
People assume it's a baseball thing. It isn't, really. It's a place thing.
---
For a stretch of years at a previous agency, big brands paid me to do something they couldn't do themselves: figure out why their numbers were going sideways in places they didn't actually know. The kinds of brands that show up in every panel, every Nielsen cut, every spreadsheet on every floor. The data said underperforming. But the data couldn't say why.
So I went. Cities, neighborhoods, corner stores, bars, barber shops, kitchens. Got up, got out, found a coffee shop, walked around. (Sound familiar.) Almost every time, the answer wasn't hidden — it was just at a scale the spreadsheet didn't capture. A regional slang the brand hadn't earned the right to use. A competitor sponsoring the local Little League while they sponsored the Super Bowl. A flavor that everyone in the city had grown up on except the brand team in New York. Local was a different language and they were speaking the wrong one, loudly.
The instinct was always the same: zoom in until you can see what you're missing. Then zoom out, and you understand the whole market differently.
---
Minor League Baseball is that instinct in a uniform.
A MiLB team is, functionally, the most embedded institution most American small cities have left. The team rents the field from the parks department. The sponsors are the credit union, the HVAC guy, the regional hospital, the realtor whose face you see on the bus stop bench. The food is the local barbecue. The mascot is named after the county. The between-innings bit is somebody from row 14 trying to throw a wet sponge through a hole in a piece of plywood for a $25 gift card to the diner across the street. The bat dog has a dynastic line of succession and the city built it statues. The history is etched on a plaque by the third base side: Derek Jeter played short here. So did Mariano Rivera, and Don Mattingly, and Christian Yelich, and Giancarlo Stanton. So did a thousand guys you've never heard of. Both things are equally true and the place doesn't make you choose.
This is what I mean by small. Not modest. Not minor. Specific. Particular. Granular. The opposite of a stock photo.
The phrase that gets used in strategy decks is "human-centric." What the decks mean is one human, in one place, with a particular relationship to one gas station chain, one radio station, one church, one childhood. You cannot get to that from the air. You have to land somewhere and walk around.
---
We're in a cultural moment obsessed with scale. Every platform optimizes for reach. Every algorithm flattens for averages. Every brand strategy doc opens with TAM. The result is that almost everything you encounter is built for nobody in particular, which means it lands on nobody in particular, which means we're all walking around starving for the specific.
Thinking small is not a downgrade of ambition. It's an upgrade in resolution.
It's what the brand teams hired me for. It's what I do for free in 68 towns and counting. And it's most of what I think this site is about: get up, get out, find a coffee shop, walk around. The big idea is almost always sitting in plain sight in a small place. You just have to be willing to go.
The Grasshoppers lost that night. I don't even remember the score. I remember the bat dog's name. It’s the details that stick.
