Speaking and Communicating Podcast

I'm looking out of my phone, and I feel like poking on my shoulder.

Coming from in front of me, I look up, and it's Salvador Perez, with a big smile on his face.

He says, Joel, Joel, when's the last time I struck out four times in a game?

I didn't know that off the top of my head, but I just said, I don't know.

I was trying to avoid that topic.

And he says, why?

It's just a game.

It's over, it's done.

We get to play again tomorrow.

And I thought, wow, how's that for perspective?

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify, and leave us a rating and a review.

Now let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with Joel Goldberg, joining us from Kansas City, Missouri.

He, wait for it, he is an MLB broadcaster, Emmy Award winner, who's traveled with the Kansas City Royals since 2008 and has been in broadcasting for 30 years.

Joel has taken those skills from baseball and is teaching us leadership, culture, and trust lessons.

And he's also a keynote speaker who works with a lot of organization in helping them build a foundation of trust.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi Joel.

Hi Roberta.

Thanks for having me.

Hi.

My pleasure.

Welcome to the show.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

Well, my name is Joel Goldberg, as you said.

And first and foremost, I can't believe that I've been in television broadcasting for 30 years.

So I'm really living these two worlds that have come together in what's made for a very fulfilling life for me.

I always wanted to be a TV broadcaster.

I've been able to do that.

I still am doing it.

But I figured out about eight years ago, as a guy that works six months a year, almost every day during the baseball season, I never knew what to do with the other six months.

And I finally somewhat accidentally stumbled into someone saying, you should speak to companies and groups.

And that became my other endeavor.

And so they really both play off of each other.

And I speak more during the off season than in season, although I'm always looking to do anything I can.

And I get to share these lessons learned from baseball.

They're not how to hit a baseball or how to win a game.

But they're about building teams and the right teams and culture and leadership and trust.

And so it's really made the work that I do in baseball even more fulfilling and interesting to me beyond just the results of looking for those good stories and those stories that can help and influence and maybe encourage other people.

Wow, six months of the year, not knowing what to do with yourself.

That's a problem I'd like to have.

Yeah, well, the problem is that you get that when you work seven days a week for six months.

I guess I've always been an all-or-none kind of guy.

Where's the stuff in the middle, right?

There's no moderation.

Right, but I'm so impressed by the fact that you say the two worlds have merged.

And when somebody said, you have so much from your broadcasting career, you can take that to the corporate.

What were the first things that you noticed when you then made that shift?

The first thing I thought before I noticed anything was, what am I going to talk about?

What do I do here?

Everybody is telling me, you can do this, and you need to write books, and you need on and on and on.

And I thought, I've spoken in front of people, but I've never run a business.

I've never really lived in any world other than my very happy fantasy land bubble of going to baseball games and being paid to do it.

Then I started getting a lot of advice from people.

That's the first thing I would say, is don't ever be afraid to ask for advice.

There are a lot of people that know a lot more than any one of us at what we know.

And then I just started noticing, you know what happened, Roberta, is once I figured out what I wanted to talk about, which to me was championship culture, being in Kansas City, smaller market, I think in general people can relate to the smaller, the Cinderella story, the little guy, right?

The mom and pop, if you want to call it that, versus the Amazon or the Walmart or whatever the big one that you want to come up with is.

And so I was a little over a year removed from the Kansas City Royals winning a world championship.

And so that was the little guy doing it.

And I thought, that's something maybe people could relate to.

Well, how did they do it?

Yes, they had good people, but they didn't have the best, but they built a championship culture.

And so that's what I thought I could speak on.

And so what happened to answer your question is that once I started that business and I started going back to the ballpark to do the same job I was always doing, which is a pregame and postgame show host and the in game reporter, which means I'm always storytelling.

I'm always looking for stories to tell, but now suddenly I was looking for those stories that didn't just apply to the TV audience.

They might apply to people sitting in an audience watching me speak, and it might be a little bit more intimate that I'm not speaking to someone that's somewhere on the other end of the TV in a living room or a bedroom somewhere.

I'm looking at the people that I'm speaking to.

And what happened was I became more aware, more conscious.

It's not that I had to search more.

It's almost like for people that meditate, when you start meditating, you become more self-aware.

You become more in touch with everything.

Everything slows down.

And I think that's what happened for me in the fast pace of a baseball season, as I just started noticing lessons more because I was open to them.

You became more present.

Yeah, totally.

Yes.

And speaking of championship cultures, some of us have this misconception, I would say, that in order to have a championship team, for instance, when I started watching the NBA, it was the Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Chicago Bulls era when they were just winning everything.

So in our head, sometimes we think, I need to have a Michael Jordan and a Scottie Pippen in order for us to be champions.

When like you were saying, the small guy, what did you notice where the qualities developed in the not so famous team, not so Michael Jordan type teams, but they still were able to do great things on the field.

And I will tell you that I lived in Chicago or was back home visiting for all of those championships.

And so my bull's knowledge is good.

I mean, I want to play with this one a little bit because most teams don't have a Michael Jordan, right?

The 2015 World Champion Kansas City Royals did not have a Michael Jordan.

By the way, the 2025 Kansas City Royals may have a Michael Jordan.

So I'm not saying that you have to have a Michael Jordan or your superstar on the team to win, but you really have to get the culture right.

Now, I think the bulls, I wasn't at a level professionally to have known or thought about what the bull's culture was back then.

But I don't think you could just win if you have a superstar.

You have to be getting some other things right, too.

What I think is that when you have your Michael Jordan or your LeBron James, fill in the blank for whatever sport it is here in Kansas City, Patrick Mahomes in football, when you have that, maybe you don't have to get quite as much right.

But if you have a bad culture, you could waste that talent real easily.

When you don't have that superstar like a Michael Jordan, I think you have no choice.

You have to get all of that right.

You have to get the little things right because you don't have that superstar.

But if we go back to those bulls teams, we all know that it wasn't just Michael Jordan, and it wasn't just Scottie Pippen, as much as Scottie might talk sometimes, it seems like that it was just him.

But they had a lot of great role players, right?

Whether it be Horace Grant or John Paxson or Bill Cartwright or on and on and on, right?

And BJ Armstrong.

I mean, I'm talking about different teams there.

I'm going back to my early years and reminiscing about that.

But it wasn't just Michael Jordan.

I think that you always have to get the little things right.

And to me, the little things involves the role players.

It involves paying attention to detail.

It involves getting all of that right.

And it involves, to Roberta, people accepting their roles.

Not everybody can be, but most people are not Michael Jordan.

But every team is going to have their superstar, even if they're not at a Jordan level.

And that's true in business too, right?

You know, your top salesperson, whatever, whoever it is.

But without all of those surrounding pieces that buy into their role and are respected, you're not going to have that cohesiveness.

And that's what the best teams have been around, have had.

And I've seen some teams with a lot more talent that never made it, in part because they didn't have that chemistry and that culture.

And who's responsible for creating the culture?

Like in baseball, is it the coach?

Is it the players finding that chemistry, that synergy between them?

I firmly believe it starts top to bottom.

So I'll go beyond the coaches.

I'd start with ownership.

Ownership, and this is true in any profession.

They're going to set a tone.

How often are the people under the owner, the leadership team, whoever the players are in this case, in baseball, are they talking about that ownership in a positive light or negative light?

Oh, they're so cheap.

Oh, they never do this.

Or are they saying, boy, we really like this guy.

He really cares.

That's part of it.

Then to me, that filters down from a sports standpoint, it's going to be your general manager in the front office in baseball.

We would call that baseball operations.

But if you go back to the Bulls days, you're talking about the Jerry Crouses and guys like that, that built the team.

Then you're talking about the coach in the Bulls case, back then, Phil Jackson.

I think that it has to start there.

And then the next piece, I'll go back to the Bulls reference because it works really well.

Because everybody knows Michael Jordan, whether you're a sports fan or not.

If Michael Jordan isn't buying into your culture, then why would anybody else?

If the most talented person on your team that also happens to work harder than anyone else, and that's what I always heard about Jordan, is buying in to respecting the culture, the rules, then everybody's going to follow.

So when I look at the Kansas City Royals, they have a lot of synergy right now between their owner, the front office, the manager, and they changed ownership about six years ago, and they changed their general manager out three years ago, and they changed their manager two years ago.

So this whole group has been together for a few years.

They seem like they're always on the same page, but then most importantly, their two best players are their two hardest working players, and they're the ones that everybody watches.

And so if they're doing all of those little things that could easily be ignored, oh, I don't need to do this, I don't need to do that.

Well, if they're ignoring that, why would everybody else pay attention to it?

Some might, but if you see the most talented player on your team or the most talented employee in your organization respecting the culture and doing all those little things, you're probably going to follow.

And that's great leadership too.

And that creates the trust as well.

Oh, absolutely.

That's every day.

And I'm not saying you have to work on the trust every day, but it's very easy to overlook and ignore it.

There are pitfalls out there.

I mean, you could step in some mess by disrespecting the trust and the culture, and that's hard to correct.

So it's just those little touches every day.

I mean, trust to me is more important than anything.

And I believe we have an opportunity to work on it or to mess it up every single day.

And it's just a matter of you got to be thinking about it.

And I think that when you do and you respect it, others respect you.

When you work with your corporate clients, how do you make the trust and all these qualities become intrinsic to them instead of just thinking, okay, I need to be this way because my boss is here?

I think the starting point if you're going to buy in is sort of the, I guess, the worst case scenario of buying into the trust is, well, at least my boss told me, so I have to do it.

There might be some self-preservation there, like, you know, it's important to your job, the team and all of that.

Hopefully, there's more buy in than that.

You know, I mean, I'm of the belief that that if I like my job and I happen to love mine, that I'm going to want to do the things my boss wants me to do.

I'm not going to agree with all of them.

You know, otherwise, I guess I should be the one to set all the rules.

I'm not in that position.

So there is a respect factor there and an understanding.

And, you know, you're podcasting about communication.

I think that if you have a good enough relationship with your boss and you've built the trust, you could certainly articulate that, you know what, I don't agree with all of this, or I might do it differently if you've built up enough of that trust.

But this is what you want, and I'm going to do it the best that I could do it for you.

So there's always room to buy in and then leverage that into a stronger relationship.

But ultimately, if you're in the right place, you're probably believing in most of what you're doing.

And that should become a lot easier to buy in to the culture and the trust.

And then, I think there's a lot of reward for that too.

I mean, if you are, as I said before, if you're, as you said, present, you start to notice the dividends of building this trust.

You start to notice the payoff and maybe the better relationships.

And I'm not saying go in there and become best friends with people, but when you can build trust with your coworkers or your prospects or your clients or whoever it is in the ecosystem of your work, it really leads to a lot of productivity from a work standpoint and oftentimes just a purpose and a meaning standpoint.

That's very true.

And when you think of the 30 years you've spent covering baseball, if you can just share with us at least one story where you just realized how challenging it can be and how you were able to overcome that and the lesson learned.

Yeah, I have so many and I'm going to go to an early lesson I learned, at least early when I got to Kansas City 2008.

So, I mean, I'd already been in the business about 14, 15 years.

Not that I thought I knew everything, but I moved from St.

Louis, which was my previous job, to Kansas City.

I was covering baseball and other sports in St.

Louis.

The St.

Louis Cardinals, they won all the time.

I came to Kansas City where they were one of the worst teams.

I didn't switch jobs because of the team.

I switched job because of a better opportunity, more airtime, more exposure, more responsibility.

But I'd never really covered or been involved with a team that lost so much.

One night, I finished up hosting a post-game show.

One of our broadcasters came up to me, a guy by the name of Paul Splittorf.

Past a few years after he had this little talk with me of cancer, and he was a great mentor of mine.

And he was one of the greatest pitchers in Royals history and a phenomenal broadcaster.

He pulled me aside and he said, can I give you some advice?

I said, sure.

He said, you look like you're getting really frustrated and upset over the losses.

I said, well, yeah, I mean, I want these guys to win.

I've gotten to know them.

And it was sort of a sports fan in me, and I was rooting for them.

And he said, no, that's great.

He said, but the getting frustrated with these losses, it's a waste of your time.

He said, there are a lot of important people that are paid a lot of money to lose sleep over the losses, and you're not one of them.

And as he said that, my first gut reaction was, wait, you're telling me not to care?

Which he never said.

And it took me a while to process it, maybe some days or something like that.

And then it took me years to master it.

And I'm not going to say that I haven't mastered, but I feel very confident and warm on that right now and have been for years.

And the thought is this.

Yes, I'd love for them to win.

And yes, a typical sports fan is going to get a little irrational, emotional and upset.

If you're a sports fan, favorite teams, yes.

And it's part of it.

That's what you're supposed to do.

The beauty of sports and sports fandom, if you're a sports fan, is it takes you away from the real world.

That is my real world, though.

You know, I talked about the merging of two jobs before, and that's really given me a lot of clarity, too.

But I see sports differently than I saw them growing up, or even at that age in 2008.

I was still a fan, and it's not that I'm not a fan now.

I'm just a fan in an analytical way.

I'm a fan in a storytelling way.

It's not as fun in terms of the crazy emotion.

I have this ability after the Royals lose or any team loses, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Super Bowl saying, all right, well, we'll move on to tomorrow.

That's not really great for a fan, but it's really good in terms of being productive and being present, as you talked about, and able to continue to push forward.

And so, what I learned from him that served me so well, well beyond his passing, is that I've got a job to do every single day, and people are tuning in, and this is what I started to learn over the years.

People are tuning in, maybe if they're serving in our military, in the middle of the night overseas, because the game might come on via satellite, or someone laying in a hospital bed.

I've had people come up to me and say, my grandmother's in hospice, or my father is in the hospital, and the only thing that makes them happy right now, or the only thing they want to do is watch you guys at night in the game.

And I think that's a lot more than a win or a loss.

That's a lot more than caring about the result.

Yes, they're going to be happy, I'm going to be happy if they win.

But I still have stories to tell, I still have a job to do, and it might not be quite as fun, but there's no reason why I have to do that job at a lesser level, because the team lost.

And two years ago, the Kansas City Royals lost 106 games.

So to do the math on that one, they play 162 on the year, they only won 56.

That means that almost every night, I was talking about a loss.

And I was walking out one night with my longtime broadcast partner, another former pitcher who replaced Paul Splittorf as my partner, Splitt by the end when he passed away was my co-host.

And I'm walking out and I go up, another loss.

And my broadcast partner, Jeff Montgomery, who's now been with me about 15 years says, well, they don't pay us to lose sleep over the losses.

And I said, wait a minute, did Splitt talk to you too?

And he said, yeah, same message.

And it just has served me so well, Roberta.

And now, again, back to that being present, it just has me looking for more than just the wins and losses.

For me, that's been a very deep and fulfilling activity, I guess.

That's a very good analogy, because one, in life, we do the same thing.

Sure.

If you didn't get whatever you were working towards, you know, you downtrodden, you can't get out of bed, or even in corporate, you know, how you didn't get that big client, the project was discontinued and whatnot.

There comes a time when you have to just let that go and know that we just have to keep moving.

I'll give you another story on this.

That is one of my favorite, more recent stories.

And it's funny, because some of my best stories are now 10, 12, 15, 20 years old, and they're the best stories for a reason.

It's like you go to watch your favorite music group at a concert, and yeah, sure, you like the new stuff, but you want the greatest hits too.

So there's always a fear for me that there aren't going to be new stories.

And then I'm constantly reminded that something happens, and it's like, oh, wow.

So this is it.

Last year in, I think it was June, the Kansas City Royals were in Texas, Arlington, Texas, playing the Texas Rangers.

It was really their first bad weekend of the year.

They lost every single game.

They did not play well.

And their longtime star leader, a guy by the name of Salvador Perez, who I have covered now longer than any player in history.

He's now 34 years old.

He would have been 34 at that point last year.

He's a May birthday.

This was in June.

So Venezuelan, I've known him since he was about 1920 years old.

And he is the epitome of a leader.

He's one of the better players in the league, works hard, giant personality.

He and I have been linked together for years, and it's been an honor to cover him.

He is the team leader.

He is the guy that everybody goes to.

It starts with him.

So in that game, they lost.

He came to bat four times and he struck out all four times.

Now, after the game, I get on the team bus.

They've got a few buses staggered for leaving when guys are ready to leave the stadium to go back to the hotel.

And I've done this long enough.

You just know the etiquette of everything.

And so I mean, I'm not one of the players.

I'm not one of the coaches.

So you want to stay out of the way.

I get on the bus.

I sit in the second row.

Because if you've done this long enough, you understand that the front row is really going to be reserved for if somebody super important gets on.

You know, one of the coaches, the manager, one of the star players.

Well, he got on.

He sat in front of me.

So that was the right move.

Well, I had my AirPods in, and I was talking to my son back at college.

And Salvador Perez gets on the bus.

Then, of course, he sits in the front row.

And I'm talking to my college son, and I say, let me call you back.

Salvi just got on the bus.

I don't want to be disrespectful.

We call Salvador Perez Salvi.

And I put in my music, kind of put my head down.

We're going to take off for the hotel, and I just want to leave everybody alone.

Bad game.

I'm looking out of my phone, and I feel like poking on my shoulder, coming from in front of me.

I look up, and it's Salvador Perez.

He's a larger than life figure, too.

I mean, he's a big guy.

He says, Joel, Joel.

And I pull out my AirPods, and I look at him, and he says, with a big smile on his face, when's the last time I struck out four times in a game?

I didn't know that off the top of my head, but I just said, I don't know.

I was trying to avoid that topic.

I was just trying to be kind of cute with it.

And he says, why?

It's just a game.

It's over.

It's done.

We get to play again tomorrow.

And I thought, wow, how's that for perspective?

Now, he's not even downtrodden and feeling defeated the day of the loss.

He's looking forward to tomorrow's game.

If he is downtrodden, he's not going to let on to it.

And I guess the question would be, is he doing that to convince himself?

I don't think so.

I think he knows how to process it.

Doesn't mean he's not upset.

It means that he can, I think, channel that energy into the next day.

You know, there's always the next day until the season ends.

So that's the first piece.

But then the other piece I wasn't sure about was I look across the aisle from him, and there's a younger player sitting across from him with his wife and little baby.

And I thought, was this message of positivity for me to understand, hey, these guys are fine.

They're not panicking.

It's just a game.

You move on to the next one.

It's just a bad moment.

Or was the message for the young guy sitting across from him that's only been in the league a few years for him to notice that this is how you process a bad day.

It's part of it and move on.

It's not football.

It's not like there's only 17 games.

There's 161 more games.

Or at that point, another 100 games to go.

So the younger player, a couple weeks later, I said, Hey, did you notice back when we were in Texas, we were in Minnesota at this point?

I said, Did you notice when we were back in Texas, Salvi talking to me about it's no big deal about four strikeouts after that loss on the bus.

He goes, Oh, yeah, I heard every bit of it.

I said, Do you think that message was meant for me?

Or for you?

He said, Hmm, maybe both of us.

I don't know.

So I think that's such good leadership.

I think that was little to nothing to do with him convincing himself and more to do with him showing others within this.

I'll use ecosystem again of a team in a culture that it's okay to fail.

It's part of it.

Pick yourself up and let's go back again.

Young player can see it and maybe learn how to do that.

For me, it's less of a message like what I got from Paul Splendorf and more, maybe just a way of letting the messenger know because ultimately, I'm a messenger to the fans that, hey, these guys are fine.

And he's not telling me what to say.

But I probably went on the air the next day and said, boy, that was a really rough game and it's been a rough couple of days.

But I could tell you this much, the captain of the team isn't worried about it because he's as positive as ever.

So you don't carry the baggage from the last game.

Which reminds me of Andre Agassi.

I watch a lot of tennis.

And when he won at first and then he had a period of losing and he went to Tony Robbins and Tony Robbins pulled up one of the games where he lost to a non ranked player and said, what happened there?

Andre said, when I walked into the court, I remembered the last time this guy beat me.

Dude, you've lost before you even touched the tennis ball.

Purely because you remembered the loss and you carried it with you.

Yeah.

And I think the interesting question here is, and I don't know that I have the answer to this, other than knowing that we are all wired differently.

And Salvador Perez, I think Michael Jordan was probably this way, not that he failed a whole lot, at least not in basketball when he went and tried to play baseball for a little bit.

I think he understood what some of the that part is like, right?

But ability to move on from failure and to learn from failure is easier for some and harder for others.

I'll get back to again being present.

And how do you slow things down?

If Salvador Perez can sit there and walk away after a strikeout and say, OK, what do I need to work on next time?

And if Salvador Perez can walk out of the ballpark that night onto the bus and say, OK, it's over with.

Here's what I learned from it.

Can't wait till tomorrow.

Let's go back now and relax with family, friends, relatives, whoever that will join him a lot of times on the road, a lot of people from Venezuela and his sort of circle of people.

I'm going to guess that he was probably hanging out with all them after the game was over that night and that he wasn't going to be in his room sulking.

He may have a stronger ability to do that than others.

Not that he had it from day one, but some people are just better at this than others are not.

And so you hope that you could teach it to them a little bit.

But Andre Agassi is one of the greatest of all time, but it was still in his head, right?

And Tony Robbins is saying, come on, man.

Well, it's easier said than done.

And so we're all wired differently.

And for some, it's going to come natural.

And for others, we've got to really work at it.

That is so true.

But also the flip side to that, you talk about how champions handle success.

Because in our minds, we think, OK, if I'm successful, then everything is going to be easy.

If they can handle those losses in that fashion, have you seen instances where they also don't handle success as well as we think they probably would?

Yeah, and I think that there's probably a common link between both.

You know, I think that the ones that could handle that failure, it's not across the board, but the ones that could handle that failure probably know how to handle success well, too.

They have this ability to kind of stay in the middle.

A lot of us are are very emotional and we live maybe more on the edges.

Something stirs you emotionally in the best of ways or worst of ways, and it pulls you in.

And I think that Salvador Perez and the great ones have this ability to take that moment process it and then kind of come back to to your starting point.

That's not to say don't celebrate.

That's not to say don't feel it.

I don't think that's it.

I just think that someone like a Salvador Perez who could be as emotional and fired up as anyone, and then he moves on on to the next thing on to the next thing.

I think you have to enjoy these moments and you should feel the pain too.

I'm not telling anybody ignore it, but it can't linger.

You know, we'll hear this in sports a lot.

You hear it a lot in the NCAA tournament in a football game or inevitably as the star of the game or the coach is being interviewed after the game by someone like me.

And we'll say, all right, well, next up you're facing, you know, the University of Florida.

What do you know about them?

The coach will often say, can you let me enjoy this for the moment until I get in the locker room and have to focus on that?

They're trying to live in the moment right there, but they understand and the coaches have to understand this, that we've got work to do after this and we've got to turn the page or in the NFL.

Most coaches, and I covered the NFL for years, will tell their team after when, okay, go enjoy this for the next 24 hours.

There's a little bit of like, don't get in trouble speech in there, but also like enjoy this.

You worked for it, but we're getting back to work after a day.

So the length of wallowing in that failure or enjoying that success may vary based on when you have to get back to it.

That's, I think, one of the most important reasons why in baseball, you have to process failure quicker.

Or in the case of what Paul Splendorff was telling me, you got to move on and not live with it because it's not your job, is because like when you talked before, Roberto, about six months off, this is great.

Yes, but for six months, I'm on six to seven days a week, sometimes 15, 16, seven days in a row.

If we're working 17 days in a row, pregame, postgame, that's 17 games and 34 shows.

I don't have time to sit there and deal with that kind of stuff.

You've got to be able to move on.

If you're a baseball player and you struck out, you're coming back up in a couple of innings.

And if you just struck out for the fourth time and you're done with that, well, you got to play again tomorrow.

So there's not a whole lot of time to be messing with the emotions of it.

So feel it, move on.

But I think the best baseball players and maybe the best, most successful people in life know how to manage failure.

And I think that's a lot harder than managing success.

Yes, absolutely.

Now, let's talk about your book Small Ball Big Results.

What is the one lesson that you were hoping that us readers can learn from it?

So I think there's going to be a common theme to all of this.

The book Small Ball Big Results as well as second book Small Ball Big Dreams, they have a little bit of the same theme and a different sort of approach.

Small Ball Big Results was all about the little things that it takes to build good teams.

And not just in sports and not just in business, but also in life, whether that be building stronger trust, respecting every role in your organization, paying attention to detail, doing the right thing.

It's a lot of golden rule type of stuff that applies to all walks of life.

And then in Small Ball Big Dreams, it's a lot of the success stories, these crazy paths that dreams take and grit, resilience, and adversity that come along with the journey.

But the common theme of both books, what I like to call Small Ball, is the little things that don't show up in the sales sheet, that don't show up in the company reports, that don't show up in the box score or the game score or in the newspaper.

And so, in baseball, Small Ball is the bunts.

It's moving the runner, you know.

You ground out to the second baseman, but you do so intentionally, because the guy on second base moves to third, and you get no credit for that statistically.

None of that is going to help your bank account, but you get a lot of respect from your teammates, because you help them do whatever it might take to score that run.

Small Ball, and that's the common theme here, is the little things that oftentimes go unnoticed, that make you successful every single day.

The Daily Habits, for sure.

And now, your podcast.

Can you tell our listeners what you discussed there?

The podcast is called Rounding the Bases, and it came out, it began in 2017.

We release episodes once a week, conversations just like this.

I love to learn about people.

I love their stories.

It doesn't matter to me what profession they're in.

Very rarely, by the way, do I have sports guests on.

I do some.

I mean, I'll interview broadcast colleagues across the country that I think have interesting stories.

Two of them ended up in Small Ball Big Dreams, my most recent book.

One was a woman by the name of Susan Waldman, who was the first female announcer in the broadcast booth in baseball.

She was the first sports radio announcer in New York back when she was getting blackballed for being the only woman.

And now she's in the Radio Hall of Fame.

And this is a woman that was told she's in her 70s now, that graduating from college, you could be a nurse or you could be a teacher.

Well, she ended up going on Broadway and then switched over to announcing, having known sports, and she'd been singing the anthems at the game.

And now she's one of the most respected broadcasters in baseball.

I had her on my podcast.

And then in the book, there's an announcer.

Actually, he was with the Chicago White Sox for years, a Chicago native by the name of Jason Benetti.

I think he's one of the great young announcers in all of sports.

He's now the announcer for the Detroit Tigers.

He is energetic, super smart, fun, has this amazing knowledge of pop culture.

So he makes it more than just sports.

He also happens to have cerebral palsy.

You would never know that listening to him.

You might notice it if you saw him, and he's one of the best in the world.

I bring those two stories up because whether it's baseball or more likely than not, it's business entrepreneurship.

I'm always looking for the people that can inspire, that we can learn from, and I love to share those on the podcast.

And then at the end of the podcast, I always ask them three baseball-themed questions.

And like I said, it's never a baseball podcast, or a baseball speech, or a baseball book.

But I ask them, what's the biggest home run you've hit in your career?

And I say career because early on, a lot of people started, I mean, it was one after the next, marrying my wife or marrying my husband.

That's beautiful, that's great, but it's not helping the exercise.

So I'd say, okay, professionally speaking, what is the biggest home run you've hit?

Second question is, what's the biggest swing and miss you've taken?

And what did you learn from it?

And the third question is, what is small ball?

What are the little things as we just talked about that make you successful, that maybe go unnoticed?

Those are the only three questions that I give my guests before they come on.

And that's the one thing that's never changed with the podcast.

I love that.

Drowning the Basis, a podcast hosted by Joel Goldberg, the author of Small Ball Big Dreams and Small Ball Big Results.

Joel has hosted four World Series, two Super Bowls, and a number of Playoffs, and you still don't get tired of it.

No, never.

And, you know, as you and I are talking right now, the season is about to start, and I think it's like starting a marathon or a super marathon.

You just know that that you're in for the long haul and, like Paul Splittorf told me, don't get too upset about the losses and go day to day.

And so it's time to begin the marathon, and I feel like the luckiest, most fortunate person to be able to get to do what I love to do and then take those lessons and share them with audiences.

Absolutely.

And thank you for sharing them with us today.

We appreciate you being here, Joel.

Thanks, Roberta.

Great to talk to you.

My absolute pleasure.

Before you go, would you like our listeners to reach out to you, and where can they find you?

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly easy to find me via my website, joelgoldbergmedia.com, or I'm on all the social media stuff.

And I always say in the business world, LinkedIn is probably the best way.

If you search for Joel Goldberg, you'll find me there and all the other social media channels as well.

joelgoldbergmedia.com, the MLB broadcast.

I was with the Kansas City Royal since 2008.

Thank you so much for being here, Joel.

Thanks, Roberta.

I enjoyed it.

My absolute pleasure.

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