Hey, it's another great day to get better. I'm Toby Brooks. Becoming Undone is the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. Join me each week as I invite a new guest to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. Mike Penro the third is a man of many talents and a series of careers as diverse as they are cool. He's been everything from high producing real estate agent, a highly sought after motivational speaker, a championship winning minor league baseball manager, and now a professional musician. Through it all he's shown how being more prepared than the competition can pave the way to opportunity. How being your best means connecting with people. And how some seasons, no matter how hard we try, simply have to come to an end. But in the process of seeing one door close, others inevitably open. Join me as Coach Pennell tells me about his life on the diamond, in the dugout, and now behind the drums in episode 31, play. This week our guest is one who's near and dear to my heart. He was the manager of the Southern Illinois Miners in their inaugural season, and actually the only manager in franchise history. Later went on to become chief operating officer, but he's far from a one trick pony. Mike Pinto has a storied career, particularly in independent baseball, but has also worked as a professional speaker talking to Fortune 500 companies, and most recently has started maybe a third or fourth career as a professional musician. So Mike, we're thrilled to have you here today. Welcome. Well, thanks. It's certainly been a long time since 2007 when we met originally with the Sub-Illinois Miners and trying to get that going while our stadium wasn't built yet and trying to do spring training at a high school field or whoever would take us. Yeah, for sure. We were talking off camera before the show started, and one of the things I love about this show is it's allowed me to reconnect with people from my past, and you don't oftentimes get a chance to really share your story. And it's not like we had a tremendous amount of time to work together, it was just part of that first season. So I guess I would just have you tell your story to our listeners, start at the beginning, wherever that was for you. Well, I guess when I think back, I've had a long life, so it's a long story. But I'll start with, you mentioned that I went into professional speaking and one of the things that we had to take was a public speech class in high school and it was required in order to graduate. And I failed. It wasn't that I didn't prepare the speeches, I was just simply afraid to do them. And so I was forced to take summer school, where there I met a teacher who helped me get past that, helped me do a presentation on something I knew. And at that point it was how to be a little league umpire. That was my first, I guess, official speech where I kind of came out of my shell and was comfortable in doing it. And so strange years later that, you know, now to be on stage closing a convention, for example, for John Hancock with thousands, you know, 5,000 people in an audience. And that's a very comfortable thing for me now. So, you know, when you say, you know, where'd you start? Probably the speaking part was started there. My father was a professional musician, played the bass. So I grew up in a very music-oriented family. Started playing drums when I was 15 years old, which fast forward, you know, has led to the band I'm putting together now. But played baseball in high school, but my band kind of frankly took on a life of its own. I had a horn band back then that did Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Earth, Wind and Fire, stuff like that. And I was making really, really good money. Baseball had to take it really a second fiddle, you know, in my life. Next thing you know, I booking our band, I ran our band, I booked our band. And when we were busy, I booked other bands. And that led to one of the bands I had ended up with a top 10 hit. So next thing you know, our band is starting to go other directions, guys going on with their lives. And here I am in the booking agency business and handling bands that as you're driving down the street, you're hearing the records, those were bands that I booked. Interesting. So before we get too far ahead, I want to go back to the fact that you entered into this professional speaking space having failed a speech class. In that moment, what was that failure? Was that a motivator for you to get better? Was it a real seminal turning point for you? Well, first of all, the process of doing a speech, getting in front of these group of peers in a classroom, scared me to death. So I would go through all this work to write this required speech, and he would go to call my name, and I just simply couldn't do it. I would say, no, I'm not done yet. And I would get an incomplete. And so at the end of the year, when you have a bunch of incompletes, the only choice was I'd take summer school. Getting in front of a crowd of people and putting yourself out there that your words matter, that your opinion matters, and you can do that in a way that's convincing and compelling and tell a story. That's what I've learned is that's an art. Absolutely. Your story is particularly pertinent to this show because in my mind, it really centered around three groups of people. It's centered around athletes who have this athletic identity that oftentimes we either go into coaching or like me, athletic training, or we just lose it. Or it's entrepreneurs who have to work through failure and build their business. We know most businesses, nine out of ten fail in the first year, so it's not for the faint of heart. And then the last is artists who very much like athletes, there's a lot of failure. There's a lot of blown auditions. There are a lot of gigs you don't get. You're on all three of those spaces. You've played as an athlete. You've managed professional athletes. You have been an entrepreneur running your own speaking business, and now you're doing the music. Who did you see yourself as way back when in that high school season of life? What did you see yourself doing at this stage of your life? Well, I think first of all it all changes, you know, when you're young and you think you're gonna be young forever. So I thought first, oh, I'm gonna play professional baseball. I really wasn't good enough, I really wasn't. And then I played the drums and I was pretty good at that. But that's a tough business. There's a million bands out there all trying to make it. And it's very, it's a rare thing for a band to have a hit record. So what I did was I went on from there and said, okay, what's next? And for me, that was my business life, which was booking bands and helping them build their careers. So from there, I'm curious how baseball reenters the equation. When we met, I remember hearing and I think it was Tim Arsenault that told me our our manager is a he's a motivational speaker in the offseason. And I'm like, what is this deal? Like, you know, I'm used to college coaches and that's their full time gig. But once I met you and I got to kind of understand, it's like your two industries so kind of cross-pollinated one another. You could use analogies from baseball talking to corporate audiences. And likewise, you crafted your message as a speaker so that your clubhouse talks were legendary. And so, how does baseball enter the equation from dabbling and finding success in booking and in the music industry. To try to shorten a long story, I'm in the music business booking bands. The agency that I was with, the industry was changing and they were closing the Chicago office where I lived and I was either then going to have to move to New York or LA. And I had recently married and that really wasn't something my wife was comfortable with. That would have been a really big adjustment. So I went into the real estate business and started selling real estate, had a pretty good run. And from there was approached by a professional speaker, a guy named Tom Hopkins, who was a sales trainer. And so Tom recruited me to come in to be a sales manager for his organization. And so now I'm still somewhat in the real estate business because we specialize in that industry, but Tom was a master on stage, absolutely a master. And so it kind of inspired me as years went on. I had an opportunity to do a speech for the Redding California Association of Realtors. And the guy asked me if I was interested. I said, well, how many people do you normally have? And he said, you know, we normally have 50 to 75. I thought I could pull that off. I was going to do a three-hour seminar on kind of, in essence, what I did in real estate. How do you take an area and make yourself a household word in that area? I didn't care about any other area. I only cared about that one group of 750 homes. They had to know who I was. So how did I do that? So I've got the presentation all booked. I fly to Redding, California, check in at the Holiday Inn, go in to see the meeting room, and there are 400 chairs set up. So I called the guy at home and said, listen, there's way, way too many chairs in here. And he said, Mike, we had a lot more people sign up than we expected. So the next day I had more than 500 people as they brought more chairs in. My presentation was called Marketing Warfare, the Art of Beating the Competition. marketing warfare, the art of beating the competition. And I still have the videotape of that. And I got on stage and I put a lot of time into it. I prepared, I videotaped myself. I get on stage and I had some opening lines and they laughed when they were supposed to. And I got to the training part of it. I said, all right, now let me show you how do you start the process of building this, what's called a farm area. Number one, write this down. All of a sudden, heads are going down, people are starting to write. I went, wow, this is pretty cool. I took a break about halfway through. People were coming up asking me if I had cassette tapes of what I did. No, but I guess I could get some. The guy from Reading referred me to a guy in Omaha, who referred me to a guy in Champaign, Illinois, and the next thing you know, I was speaking at that point. I mean, the only, it's funny, I've had people say, how to become a professional speaker? There's only one way, speak. Speak, and you have to master your craft. And not only videotape you to see what you do, but videotape your audience to see how they're responding to you. That little story you told you thought was really good, when you watch the videotape, they weren't very engaged. And that thing that you were telling that was just kind of you were trying to fill some space, they were really engaged in it and you should have spent more time on it. So you learn that stuff as you speak, and the only way to do it is to do a lot of them. And I mean at this point I've done more than a thousand paid speaking engagements certainly in all this time. When I first met Mike, or Coach Pinto, as he will forever be to me, I was a full-time college professor who was enjoying the fun of minor league baseball as a summer athletic trainer, while he was a highly sought-after public speaker who spent his summers as a manager in independent baseball. We sat near one another on a road trip to play the Evansville Otters. Trivia alert, their stadium, Bossy Field, was built in 1915. Only Wrigley and Fenway Park are older baseball facilities still in use. It can even be seen in the classic baseball flick, A League of Their Own. Anyhow, we were getting to know one another a little bit on the bus, and Coach shared that he was a professional speaker. If I recall correctly, his topic brand champion could be delivered in three different durations, depending on the needs of the organizer and the audience. It was timely and important, and Coach Pinto was talking about the importance of controlling the narrative and crafting an image for all of us, players, audience members alike, well before the terms influencer or social media footprint were tossed around. It was a valuable lesson he taught me during my lone summer with the Miners. those two industries align. They didn't seem to on the surface to me, but when I saw you doing it, it's really all relationships. And it's about connecting, whether it's with a crowd of a thousand or a clubhouse with 25, it's about connecting. And I love the fact that you were vulnerable enough with yourself. Sometimes it's really painful. And I've done this with this show, like gone back and listened to the first couple of episodes and it's like, the only way you get better is to confront your suck and be willing to admit what worked and what didn't. I love it. That's a great line. I got to write that down. But I love the fact that you were willing to do that and that's the only way we get better is if we not only confront our failures but maybe even sometimes when things went okay, but we have to be reflective. It's that examined life, right? So how did you parlay that over into... Where does baseball fall into this equation? I haven't heard any mention of it yet. Yeah, no. Baseball was really not a part of my life. I'm speaking 100 and so times a year, and right around that time. So I'm driving down the street in Chicago, and I hear on the radio, the Chicago Cubs broadcaster says, if you've ever dreamed of playing in Wrigley Field, here's your chance. Former Cub Randy Hungley is going to do a fantasy camp here in Wrigley Field. I was playing a little softball, that was really about it, and I thought, this is incredible. Chance to play in my favorite baseball stadium of all time. So I signed up. Randy and I really hit it off, became friends, and months later he asked me would I help him kind of grow this business a little bit. So I consulted with him and my deal was that I got a kind of piece of the whole deal but more importantly I could play in whatever fantasy camps he ever did. We ultimately did the Cubs, the Cardinals, the Giants, the Yankees. You know, imagine, I mean, I have in my home a photograph of me and Mickey Mantle in Yankee uniforms with my father and my son that signed And if you're a sports guy, how do you get that opportunity? Right? So from that I'm coaching my son's kit My son's teams and I had a guy I think a young pitcher who's really talented And this is I want to say 10 years old 9 or 10 years old, but you could tell he was just special Well, I knew really very little about pitching. Fortunately, from my relationships with the fantasy camps, I knew a lot of former major leaguers. So, I started becoming knowledgeable as to how does pitching work, how do mechanics work? And that became an obsession to learn how does the body work, what is the kinetic chain, how does all that come together so that I could help this young guy? So that led to you know I coached and continued to coach my kids up through I think 17. I got a call from a guy named Rich Simmons one day who was the head coach at Oakton Community College and he said I hear you're really knowledgeable with pitchers would you like to come be my pitching coach here at Oakton? And I said nah I said you know I work with kids yeah I don't work with college guys. He said, well, try it during the fall, see if you like it. So, you know, as you talk about expand your horizons, I said, you know what, I'll give it a shot. Well, I love the kids and it really worked. I have relationships with some of them to this day. What ended up happening is, I was his pitching coach for a while. He retired. When he did, he recommended me for the job. I interviewed, got the job and became the head coach at Oakton Community College. All kind of flew on from there. I absolutely love this story. And I don't know about you, but I needed to hear it today. Mike had absolutely no expectations or goals of even working in baseball, but he had a love for the game. He managed to turn what he probably expected to be a few fun days at a fantasy camp at Wrigley Field into a successful business venture with a new business partner and former big leaguer Randy Hunley. From that, he develops a network with other former pros that he manages to use to help him coach his own kids' little league teams. Over time, while still serving as a professional speaker and a volunteer community coach, he becomes a recognized expert in pitching in his community. Eventually, word travels and he's offered a job as a pitching coach at Oakton Community College, which then eventually turns into the head job when his manager retires. Was he ever angry or bitter about opportunities that passed him by on his way up the ladder? No way. He simply focused on being the best he could at each stage and watching that wisdom and skill open doors in due time. It was a formula for success. One of my early interviews in the show was Mike Meyer, who is now the manager for the Sioux Falls Canaries. And I know you have spent some time there. So how do you make the jump from community college to getting involved in independent baseball? So a friend of mine, Pete Colliendo, one of the great guys in the game of baseball, is a really good personal friend. And Art Stewart, who was the vice president of the Kansas City Royals, was looking for someone to scout the Chicagoland area. And Pete recommended me. And so I did more, I guess, assignment-oriented things. We have a particular player we're looking to go see, and I would go see him, write a scouting report, get video, send that to the home office, et cetera. Along the way, I met a guy named Pat Arter. Pat was an agent. Sat with him in the stand scouting games. He had a client named Matt Noakes, who was a former major leaguer. Detroit Tiger, New York Yankee, he set us up to have lunch one day. Matt and I really hit it off. Months later, I get a phone call from Pat that Matt got a managerial job and wanted to bring me on as his bench coach. And again, you mentioned it, it's all about relationships. So here I am at the Joliet Jackhammers for three seasons, our assistant general manager got the job as president of the Sioux Falls Canaries and called me and said, I'd like you to be my manager. So that's kind of how that happened. Yeah. I don't think you could have scripted that. It's amazing how sometimes just people are in the right place at the right time. And I don't believe in coincidence. I believe in providence and there's certainly something to be said for preparing as best we can so that when that opportunity door does open now we're ready to blow through it. It crossed my mind as we were working together, I was a college professor even back then working at Southern Illinois and I remember having a little bit of resentment because I had all of these lectures I had to give and you had one topic that you gave and you just you got really really good at that one topic but as I got to know you, that melted away and I realized like, it's not just that you just have one PowerPoint, you drill down on this, you're dissecting what you do to make sure it works. And it also crossed my mind, these are college aged guys, you're kind of a professor without really giving credit. And the thing I loved about what you did with the miners and it certainly continued on until the franchise finally went away. Was this Miner's Way and this idea of culture and you were a big proponent of sweeping the sheds and doing things the right way. Where did that culture really emanate from you? Was that modeled for you or was that something you adopted along the way? Well, all right, so again you talk about relationships and how things happen. So I was in Sioux Falls for two seasons. Midway through the second season, Ben Zura, who was our owner, came to me and said, Mike, I'm going to let you know I'm selling the team. So there probably won't be a job for you next year. Just wanted to give you a heads up. He offered to sign me to a contract extension that the new owner would have to take on. I wasn't comfortable with that. Remembering I'm still speaking probably 50 times a year at that point during the offseason. So I said, you know what, I'm not going to do that, Ben, and thank you for the opportunity and off I went. One day, I get a phone call from a guy named Eric Haig, who you knew, who was at that time the Chief Operating Officer VP of the Miners Organization. He was building the organization from scratch, the stadium, the brand, etc. And he called and said, I got your name from Steve Malliot. Steve was my general manager at Joliet. And Steve was now an owner of a team in the Frontier League. And he said, we're going to be in Chicago next week. We're looking and talking to different managers. Would you like to talk to us about it? Absolutely. He said, do me a favor, bring a resume. I don't know a lot about you. And I didn't bring the resume. Instead, what I did was I spent the next week writing a book. It was about an inch thick, and it was, How Do You Build a Dynasty from the Ground Up? And it was, for me, the seven pillars of how do you build an organization from the ground up. And it was, I, what happens, I read a book called Mind Games, and it was about Theodore Epstein and how he built the Boston Red Sox organization. I liked so much about what he did, I said, well, how would that work for me? I put together the pillars. How do you build this from the ground up? I laid it out in a three-year and a five-year plan. I got done with the interview and Eric said, we've met a lot of managers already. Everybody tells us how they know how to win in baseball. And he said, but we're putting almost $30 million into a baseball stadium and millions into a new brand. We need somebody who has a long-term plan. And so I was fortunate to get the job. Did you catch that, kids? Eric Haig, tasked with building a new minor league franchise from the ground up, gets Mike's name from a trusted colleague. So he reaches out and requests an in-person interview. Since he didn't know much about Mike, Eric requested he bring a resume. Pretty simple, right? Instead, Mike spends the next week writing a comprehensive three and five year version of The Miner's Way along with his seven pillars of success and he shows up to the interview with an inch-thick actual book in which he has detailed the plan. It worked. He got the job and eventually it all came true, including that championship. It gave me chills when you said instead of sliding a one or two page resume across the desk, you slid a book that you prepared for that interview. That is, that's impressive. Uh, I can certainly imagine that that left a lasting impression and ultimately led to you getting the job for sure. It did. And one of the things that I always felt about independent ball was that most teams, most managers treat it as like a term I use is a one-off. In other words, I'm probably going to be there a season, maybe two, and then off I'm going to go to my next great opportunity. And they treat players and employees the same way. They treat it as though, all right, they're just going to be here short term. It's a name, it's a number, and they're interchangeable parts and I simply replaced them with the next guy. And we started as you remember, so the miners way was basically the seven pillars of the things I believed. And then the next part of that was I wanted this to be when they look back that they just didn't play independent ball, they played in southern Illinois. And that that would have meant something. And so with that, I started back then, you know, Twitter had just started and I started the hashtag always a miner. To this day, I'm still in touch. Last week, we had a guy named Gianfranco Wahoo, who had played for us, you know, in 19 and 21. I was a job reference for him with a new major league organization. And he called me last week to tell me he got the job and that the farm director said he should specifically call me because my recommendation made the difference. We had a guy named Matt Fields and Matt played for us back in 2012 and a couple weeks ago he called and thanked me for being a job reference for him and he's a fireman now in the city of Seattle. And so these go on all the time. There's honestly, it's probably not a week of my life where I'm not a job reference or hear back from, I mean you remember Mike Scanzano from back in 2007. I hear from Mike all the time. I got a video of his son getting his first Little League hit and all those relationships really meant something. They were never a one-off. They were never a name and a number that is going to be gone and a new guy replaces them. That's certainly something that I think stood out. A lot of the players who kind of make their rounds through the minor league system, whether that's affiliated ball or independent, they're treated very much as almost like livestock. They're expendable. And once, you know, whether you're hurt or whether you just kind of fizzle out, people lose faith in you, you try to catch on somewhere else. And I've heard multiple players say, my time in Southern Illinois was better than any other organization I ever played with. And that's certainly a tribute to you and what you built and what the Simmons family allowed you and the management team to do there. It's really remarkable. I mean, I was really lucky, Toby, in that Eric gives me the job, but Eric's got to build a stadium. Eric's trying to sell sponsorships and all that. He doesn't have any time to worry about me at all. So here, just go do it. So I had the freedom without oversight, honestly, there was just this trust. And then we get into the next year and I'm building on what I did the last time. And Eric called me, I'm gonna say like in February or so, the next year and he said, Mike, I don't want you to get the wrong impression. He said, if you knew me really well, you know I micromanage everything and he said the best compliment I can give you is that I don't ever call you and Because I trust you're doing what you're supposed to do and that you're building on your plan And it was the best compliment he could give me he was he Eric Hague was Probably the best business leader and I've been around a lot of them was one of the best business leaders that I've come across Yeah that whole franchise just from inception to the end, which we hated, but no doubt that COVID, coronavirus, certainly impacted minor league sports on a level unlike most other industries. For the fans that kind of follow the minors, there's a lot of misinformation out there about why the minors weren't anymore. And it had nothing to do with that. It had solely to do with the fact that John and Jane were starting to back off and sold all of, they sold the steel mill, the record company, the company makes basketball training equipment, the barbecue sauce company, the newspaper, the radio station. They sold them all. We were the last of the process to go and they just didn't want to be in baseball anymore. Unfortunately, when you have a small market like that, John and Jane were never going to make a profit in that size market. They were investing in their community. Hopefully, the people that bought the stadium will continue to do that. We had our run and we celebrated. Talk about the way the Simmons did things to the very end is we rented Wrigley Field and had a party for anybody who wanted to come. We had players flying in from California, bringing family members, and it was incredible. One thing I definitely loved about the franchise was certainly it tied into the local community, even the name, the logos, the color scheme, and it really dovetailed so perfectly with your message. You were talking about branding and branding yourself way before I heard that anywhere else. So, athletes today, they have their logo and they come out with their social media presence, but you were talking about how executives, how C-suite and even below really need to craft their brand. And you were one of the first people I remember talking about don't press send and how important it is to be aware of your social media presence. So talk me through that season, that dovetail between being a manager and eventually chief operating officer of a minor league sports team, and then how it worked with your platform as a motivational speaker. I go back to when I was in real estate. I really believe that there's a million realtors out there. There were a million in my area, it seemed like, right? And I worked for a big company. So the question would come down to why you? If I can get what you do from anybody, so you're going to hire a real estate agent, and anybody can list a home and stage it and take pictures and put flyers together. So why would I pick you? So that was really the core behind what I did. You talk about, and I hadn't thought about this till you mentioned it just now. Let's say you were thinking about selling your home and you'd call three, four, five real estate agents out. When I would come to your home, I would bring a presentation in a leather book. And now I think about it, sure enough, that's what I did with Eric years later. But I would bring a book to leave behind because when you were going to sit there and look at the proposals from all the agents, mine had to be better. I had to blow you out of the water with how I presented what I did and my story with how I would be able to help you get your home sold. I think it's really important, especially with the young men you worked with. These are guys who are, they're either on the first rung or the last rung of professional baseball. If they're on their way up, maybe it's a place to catch on and get signed. Tim Dorn comes to mind. He was the first minor to make the jump to the Cardinals organization. And for guys or anyone, frankly, that finds themselves in that circumstance, you can't afford to have an errant tweet or especially in today's cancel culture, you have to cultivate your brand. You have to align yourself with the message that you're trying to send. So I really appreciated that about you that if you signed with the Miners, you weren't just coming to play ball, you were coming to learn how to be a pro. And whether that led to getting signed to an affiliated team or you retired as a frontier leaguer, it didn't matter. Those attributes spilled over into whatever season life held for you next. Yeah, you know, what's funny was I was watching an ABC thing one day and they did a story about a woman who was a PR person in the East Coast and she did a tweet. It was negative to the country she was getting on a plane to go to. By the time she landed, she was everywhere in the world, and she was fired before she ever landed. And it really just brought to my mind that, of how many people just thinking they were funny, or putting some inane thought because they were upset, or aggravated or something, and they put that on social media, how many careers have been destroyed. We talked to our players about when they were out in public and photographs that they would put out there. So we had a player named Matt Fields and Matt was telling us how he was roommates with a very famous, now major league pitcher. They were coming up in the minor leagues, they were out grabbing a sandwich after a game one day and grabbing a beer and he said three beautiful women came to the table, had a beer and one of the girls said, oh, can we get a selfie with you? And the player who he was with said, ladies, I'd be glad to buy your beer for you, but I never allow photos after I've taken, after I've had my first beer. Here he got that at the youngest level. Nowadays you can look on and see, there's a Twitter page called at drunk athletes and where people are taking photographs of Athletes or famous people in public Craft your brand be careful what you in a moment of anger decide you're going to go ahead and throw out there Protect your brand protect your you know How people see you the internet is undefeated and your digital footprint is something you really have to guard and protect. Yeah, the one thing you'll see, you'll never see in any of my stuff is I never, ever address politics in any way, shape or form. And I think back to Michael Jordan, when the Democratic Party was get leaning on him because he wasn't supporting their agenda enough. And he said, Republicans buy sneakers too. And he's smart enough to understand that when you're a public person, or even if you're not, you're one party or the other and you go off on them. Now your future employer is thinking about bringing you into their company. But he's not real excited or she's not real excited about the fact that you so easily go off in public on another political party. I'm not sure I want that in our company. Whether that's right or not, I'm not judging, but the reality is that goes on. Expansion franchises aren't known for just coming out of the gates and winning championships, and it was a build process for you in Southern Illinois. And there were some roster churn, and there were some coaching changes, but you really started to hit your stride, and you started to see the impact of doing it a different way. It led to, I believe, a league record for consecutive wins, a championship. Talk me through those leading up to that championship season. What was your perception of the process? Were you going according to schedule or was it really just something you were crafting year by year? Well, it's funny. So, I had a two-year contract when I started with the minors and it was conditional. The second year was conditional upon me having a winning season in my first year. I appreciated about two weeks left to go in the season. Eric took me to lunch one day and said, hey, I want to let you know, we love what you're doing so don't worry about the record. Let's, you know what, we're bringing you back next year. So I appreciated that, but we weren't playing great down the stretch. I didn't hold a lot of team meetings, but when I did, I needed to make a point. And so I brought all the guys together one night after a ugly Sunday night loss. We had Monday off, so I called a Monday morning practice. 830 in the morning. We got everybody in the dugout and I got everybody together and I said, I want to apologize. I want to apologize for the way we've been playing because I realize it's my fault. It's my fault and I'm taking responsibility because I realize I must have sent all of you the contract that said you only had to play 80 games of the season, not 96. And if you think that the next 10 days are going to go the way these last 10 days have gone, you're mistaken. We're going to practice every single morning until we win three straight. We won 10 straight and put ourselves right back in it and got knocked out the Friday night. Not that we lost, we won that game, but with the matchups and how all that plays together, we got knocked out that Friday night, but we were in it right till the end and had a winning season that first year. I will tell you one thing, I was talking with another manager in another league earlier today. The challenge with independent baseball is that you've got two things working against each other. On one hand, your job is to win. On the other hand, you're making promises to young players that you're going to get them a chance to get back to an organization. Some teams, sadly, simply don't sell their players. They're not going to give them the opportunity to do that. Well, the challenge is when you do give them that chance, that replacement player isn't out there. That guy is not out there waiting to come back. Another guy as good as him is not waiting to come in. So if you sell too many during the season, that can really upset the other plan, which is to win a championship. You know, we got some years where, I mean, we were rolling and with two weeks left to go, sent our ace starting pitcher, the Atlanta Braves, our closer to the Milwaukee Brewers. And those things have a profound effect on what will ultimately happen to the baseball team in a season. But in the end, how do I look at a guy in the eyes who's been playing hard for me all year, giving his heart and soul to this baseball team to help us win games. And when I get a phone call from the Braves and they want to sign Matt Bywater, who's going to be the league's pitcher of the year, how do I put that in my pocket? Can't do that. So you're going to let them go whenever that opportunity comes and if I have to drive to the airport myself, I will. Yeah, and those are lessons in leadership to me. If I'm part of an organization, I want to be growing my people. If I don't have people that other places want, then I have people that other places don't want. If my roster isn't changing, then that tells me I'm not really growing people the way I really should. You're definitely right. It's bittersweet because sometimes you're giving these guys a last chance or you're speaking confidence back into them and you see them just blossom under your leadership. That investment, somebody else gets to cash in. And that is bittersweet for you as the manager, but in a lot of ways, you probably have kind of those proud dad moments where, you know, you were part of that athlete's redemption story. Well, you know, I look back and so in our 14 seasons, 60 players we sent to major league organizations, and four of those are guys that reached the major league. These are guys that an organization gave up on and didn't think they were good enough, released them, they came to us, they got to revive their career, go back and show people what they could do and reach the major league. So that's incredibly inspiring, you know, especially when, you know, you have a guy like Tanner Rourke, for example, who had, I want to say, seven or eight years in the big leagues. And one day I get a phone call, I mean, my phone's blowing up, that JP Morose on Fox had talked and specifically said my name and our organization that we had given Tanner Rourke a chance. And the only way he knew that was Tanner told him the story. And so that's really rewarding when guys, it meant something to them. So I've been a drummer all my life and I didn't realize you were until well after we were working together. So music is kind of laying dormant for you during this time. I mean, you're still probably playing around, but it certainly wasn't a professional pursuit. So during this time, I mean, you were speaking, you were managing, was music a part of the equation or was it on hold? I really had taken a, a very, very back burner. I had a kit at the home and I played from time to time. My son played around with a little bit. I didn't spend a lot of time with it. And then I just decided that I wanted to get back into it. And I'll tell you what inspired it. And it's kind of a weird story. And it really is one of those in putting yourself out there, right? I'm a big fan of the rock band Chicago. I've followed their career my whole life. They are the soundtrack of my life. And their drummer, Walfredo Reyes Jr., who had been with Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac, Santana, he was Santana's drummer, and then became the percussionist and then drummer for Chicago. And he put a tweet or an Instagram thing out one day. He said, most of you know me as a drummer from Chicago. What you don't realize is my passion is teaching the drums. I'm taking on a small number of drum students. If you are interested, send me an email with your story and we'll kind of go from there. So I wrote him an email that night, kind of gave him my story of what I was doing. I wasn't looking to start a band. I wasn't looking to make a living from this. I simply wanted to be a better drummer and go back and regain the skills that the muscle memory over years was no longer there. I just couldn't do the things that I could do when I was 20, 21, 22 years old. So I wake up the next day to an email from him. He said, here's my cell number, give me a call. So I did. I set up a thing to go in and do a two-hour lesson in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he lived. Not too far from Chicago, right? So I arrived on Sunday night, get a good night's sleep, wake up the next day, we meet for breakfast, spend an hour and a half for breakfast, just getting to know each other. We head over to the studio. Five and a half hours later, I'm still playing drums. Postpone my flight. Wally and I became great friends since then. Have continued with these lessons all this time, including we did one last week on Zoom because I couldn't get to Cincinnati. And he wanted to make sure that I was tuned up for my show coming up next week. Yeah, well, I guess the only part of that story that surprises me is that you emailed him and you didn't send him a leather bound proposal as to why you needed to be one of his students. So the Miner's franchise kind of reaches its end and that leaves you out of a job. Did you view that as kind of a logical conclusion to your career with baseball or were you still actively pursuing other things? Well, the first responsibility I had to do was finish out the Miners. So even though our season ended in September, I still really had responsibilities through the end of the year to help get this button down. So Kathy Perry and I really handled a lot of the details to make that happen. She gets all the credit for that. I helped and gave advice and all those things, but she was the one that really helped us get to a conclusion. At that point, it's January. The hiring season in baseball really is before that. Starts in October. I guess I didn't plan for my career to be done with baseball at that point, but the timing was not right for me to, so to speak, put myself out there. The other part was, and here's the big challenge, I worked for the single best owner in all professional baseball, in my opinion. I could not have possibly worked for a better man or family to have better support as a baseball manager. And that includes when I rolled into the, the COO position, they don't come better than John and Jane Simmons. And John's desire to always do things at the highest level. With that, it would take the right place, the right owner, the right place, somebody who wanted to win and that winning was important and somebody that also wanted to do something other than just have a bunch of one-off years. Somebody that wanted somebody to have had a bigger plan in mind. The theme of this show, Becoming Undone, sometimes things fall apart and sometimes, you know, you probably wouldn't have written the story this way. It was a good run and certainly a championship along the way and lots of being part of great stories, but it does come to an end. But high achievers don't focus on the failure or the end or the closure. They focus on what's next and that's the undone part of the equation. So you kind of pivoted and you've refocused on your music career. So tell us what your days look like today. Well, in all fairness in Kandor, I didn't handle it well. The Sudden Illinois Miners, although they belong to John and Jane Simmons, that was mine. And I spent really 16 years when you figure the COVID year plus the year before that, I had 16 years of my life in that. You ask anybody about the Southern Illinois Miners, my name is the one that's always attached to it. And what I built over all that time was treasured by me and people that that was important to and You know you talk about identity earlier in the show that was my identity Sudden Illinois miners were my identity what came from that I'd gotten lucky I had moved to Texas the year before my son lived down here I have two grandchildren, and they had kind of got used to quote grandpa's at baseball. And so I would see them for three or four days at a time, a couple times a year, and try to FaceTime. If you've ever tried to FaceTime with young kids, that's about a minute and a half, and then they're gone. And so what I've instead had the opportunity to do is say, first off, I don't miss anything. I go to every soccer game. I go to every gymnastics practice. I see them all the time. That's truly treasured because I really did not want to miss watching them grow up. I am Michael the third. My son is Michael the fourth. My grandson is Michael the fifth. I come from a big Italian family. Family's really important to us and now getting that time to be with them, I would not have had. So you think about last summer, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, I spent with my grandkids in the pool. I hadn't had a Memorial Day, Labor Day, or 4th of July off in 20 years. So you talk about, well, what's the positive to that? That was a huge positive. And then as I had gotten more and more back into music, I went, you know what, what is the music I love? I played with some bands down here. I was doing some country music here, Southern rock here, and I said, you know what, I love horn bands. And so one of my buddies in Chicago said to me, you know what, what are you bitching about? Why don't you go start your own? And so on a lark, I went ahead and I joined a San Antonio musicians page, put a post up there, hey is anybody interested? And all of a sudden I'm flooded with it, well now I got to do auditions. So in three months auditioning members of the band and sending out charts and tracks and all that. And so if you were a singer, for example, I would send you the Chicago tracks without the vocals. The first step was you would go ahead and record on your own, send me the recording of what you sounded like doing it, and that was the first step. And then we would go to a live rehearsal from there. Certainly the aspects of your personality and your business skills, all those things, we recognize that even though things didn't turn out maybe the way we would have scripted them, whether that was a career in real estate, whether that was speaking, whether that was managing, they still serve you well. And so you're talking about auditioning, I'm thinking about the Frontier League tryout that was hosted in our facility. In so many ways, again, it's about relationships, right? It's about being able to connect with people and recognize where those synergies can live and maybe even sometimes when they don't. Yeah, if you think back to our conversation, you figure, so I was going to be a rock star first. Well, that didn't work. Then I was going to be a booking agent that booked, you know, I was going to be the next guy and, you know, biggest agent in the business, right? And then I was in real estate and then I was going to be the biggest speaker. Although the speaking part of it certainly worked out very well for me. Real estate really did as well, but it led me to a new opportunity. Sometimes life is opening your eyes and going, boy that could be really cool over there and not be so locked in. I mean I remember when I came home and I said to my wife, I'm going to be a speaker. She was a flight attendant, came back from a long trip, there was a bottle of champagne, we need to talk. I booked my first speaking engagement and that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to leave managing the speaking business I was in and I'm going to do my own. And then I'm going to do baseball. And the COO job was interesting because again, never planned. I wanted to manage a baseball team. And I got a phone call from Jane Simmons first. I get a text and asked when my contract was up. And I said, well, I have one more year. She said, well, haven't we talked to you about extending it? John and Jane didn't do all that stuff. They had a family office that handled all that. And she said, well, never mind. John wants to know whether you want to go to the World Series next week. So they flew my wife and I to New York with John and Jane. We watched the World Series. We went to dinner. And John says, I want to lay a bomb on you. He said, I've been watching what you've been doing all these years and I think you run a silo in my business. You have your own business within our business. Well, I'd like you to run all of our business. And I said, John, I don't want to be a GM. He goes, no, no, no, you're going to hire your own GM. We're going to turn the chart upside, the employment chart upside down. We talked a little bit about it that night. He said, just think about it. I took the train down to his house a couple weeks later. And at the end of the day, I was the COO. And so I looked at it and said, well, where do you start? I thought, well, the best company in the world out there running an entertainment business is Disney. So I got on a plane and went down to Orlando and I went to the Disney Institute and learned how do you run a customer service business, how do you create an employment engagement business where people are engaged in buying your vision and a leadership course and all that led to how we ran the minors. You're maybe even better at this question than most. You've mentioned some of your likes, but the question is, I love music and I love the emotions that oftentimes it can represent. What song would you pick as the soundtrack of your life and why? Oh, you know what? I told you before we went on the recording, our band has our first gig this week. We have 11 pieces in our band, big horn band. It's a big sound. And the first song we open up with is called Make Me Smile. It is a in your face, happy, driving. And, um, that would be it. I love playing the song. I love playing the song. What an appropriate way to open our show next week. We sold out that way in 48 hours. That's awesome. What an appropriate way to really kind of book into the start of your new career as well. See, and that's where, you know, on these things, it doesn't have to be that for me. This is, as I told all the guys in the band, this is a passion project. You want to do this or you don't want to do this. If you're doing this solely for the money, and we'll make money, but if you're solely doing it for that, this probably isn't going to be the project for you. Do something you're passionate about. And I mean, how many The example would be, I put something I love doing on the shelf in the basement for a long time. In business, sometimes in life, we push things that are important to us, we push them aside, whereas instead we should embrace them and make time for them. Yeah, for sure. Last question, it's one I ask of every guest. What for Mike Pinto remains undone. Oh, boy. I am a what else thinker. I mean, I'm driven by the new idea. And so I don't know what the next thing is going to be. I'm open to whatever the next thing is. I've been consulting with a sports and entertainment company for about nine months. We'll see what possibilities evolve from them or not. Or I end up playing the drums and being a really great grandfather. But if something comes along, the mind is open. I'm never ever just like, okay, I'm a real estate agent. No, I'm not. Now I'm going to do this because that's a new opportunity. Be a what else thinker. Yeah, that's great. So how could listeners connect with you? All the social media stuff. I'm Facebook Mike Pinto, on Twitter at Mike Pinto 3, Instagram at Mike Pinto 3, or you can follow the band at San Antonio Transit. That's awesome. And I didn't put it together that Mike Pinto 3 was Mike Pinto the 3rd. Your jersey number as a manager. I wanted 3 because I am the 3rd and all of my stuff is all Mike Pinchot III, so why not Mike Pinchot III on my email too? That's cool. You were a branding expert before it was cool to be a branding expert, so kudos to that. Well, Coach, I can't thank you enough. It was great to reconnect. I am thankful for the opportunity to get to glean some knowledge. You are a wealth of info. I certainly cherish. I look back on that season of my career with nothing but great thoughts. It was fantastic to work with you and it was great to reconnect with you today. Thanks so much for having me and I hope somebody watches it and more importantly maybe somebody gets inspired by something that happened and went, hey you know what I could do that too. For Mike Pinto it's been a wild and unpredictable ride across the variety of careers, geography, and connections. Through it all he's recognized the power of genuine care and cultivating relationships, not for the purpose of climbing some ladder, but undoubtedly that approach has resulted in a long line of people with whom he has connected, people who have helped him and people he's helped. Whether it was real estate or event promotion, baseball, or now big horn bands, through it all he's shown that success is dependent on the relationships you build, the preparation you put in, and your willingness to eventually just put it all out there and play. If you find yourself in or around San Antonio be sure to check out San Antonio Transit Authority. We've officially kicked off to a series of sold-out shows since this episode was recorded. And if you go, pick up after yourself. Sweep the sheds. Leave the place nicer than you found it. That's the miner's way. Becoming Undone is a nitro-hype creative production written and produced by me Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for becoming undone Please contact me at undone Podcast.com where you can also sign up for a mailing list to be notified of new episode drops and exclusive team undone benefits Becoming undone can be heard on Apple podcasts Spotify Google podcasts stitcher I heart radio or wherever you get your podcasts till next time everybody keep getting better Till next time everybody, keep getting better.