- By James A. Schiavone, Head of NY Operations

I was born and raised in Manhattan, which means a few things are in my blood: walking like I have somewhere to be. Talking fast. A low tolerance for inefficiency. A default assumption that if something isn’t happening right now, it should be. 

I’ve always felt baseball understands time better than anything else in this modern world. 

It’s slow by design. It stretches across months, not moments. It asks you to live with it, to allow it to curl up quietly in the background of your days, rather than demanding your full attention at all times. That said, in today’s attention-starved economy, it’s noteworthy that the most tradition-bound sport in America decided it needed a pitch clock. Not to make the game frantic, but to protect its rhythm. The pitch clock wasn’t about speeding up baseball for novelty’s sake. It was about preserving tension, momentum, and ensuring when those big moments happen, there is an audience present to pay attention.

Communications is wrestling with the same problem, just with far less willingness to admit it and address it.

We work in a profession that rewards immediacy, volume, and reaction. These days. The news cycle never shuts off. Social media collapses the distance between thinking it and saying it. AI has lowered the bar for content, which means output is no longer the constraint that judgement is. The result is a constant, low-grade pressure to be everywhere, all the time, just in case this may be the moment that matters. On the off chance someone is hitting refresh.

Perhaps you’ve reported to – or have the level of self-reflection to admit that you are - the always-on executive or the dashboard-driven comms lead. The one who scans the weekly update and worries if it’s looking a bit light. In a world where standing still can mean getting caught flat-footed, one can be forgiven for confusing motion with momentum.

I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that while this instinct is understandable, it’s usually counterproductive. Inside many organizations and agencies, there’s a familiar internal tension. Everyone wants their moment to be a prime-time game. Every announcement is framed as critical. Every update is positioned as urgent. There’s an unspoken anxiety that if you’re not constantly visible, you’re falling behind or, worse, being forgotten.

Baseball doesn’t work like that. And neither does attention.

For decades, the sport celebrated its iron men: Lou Gehrig. Cal Ripken Jr. Players who showed up every day, played every game, and never took themselves out of the lineup. That endurance became mythology – I still love those guys. But even baseball eventually accepted a hard truth: a constant presence isn’t the same as sustained performance. Rest, rotation, and load management aren’t signs of weakness. They’re how you make it through a long season in one piece.

Communications still struggles with this concept.

An effective communications strategy takes a long view. Like a baseball season, it accepts that attention is uneven, energy fluctuates, and not every moment deserves the same level of intensity (this was not intuitive to me early in my career). Given the way many of us are wired, we assumed action proved relevance. 

Responsiveness meant effectiveness. And silence equalled failure – or worse, proved your voice didn’t matter. I’ve put pressure on myself, and on my team to follow up with reporters on stories that weren’t really all that relevant simply because they were important. I’ve turned around work on unrealistic deadlines and told myself I was mastering the fine art of not letting great be the enemy of good. And that logic works occasionally, but it’s not a plan for sustained success. And it’s certainly not strategic. 

Communications, like baseball, has a natural rhythm.

Start with the offseason:

I’ve never seen an effective strategy built during a crisis or in the middle of a relentless news cycle. In baseball, the offseason isn’t dead time. It’s when teams reassess, rebuild and make decisions that may not generate headlines, but will determine how the season unfolds. In communications, quieter periods must serve the same purpose. These periods are when you can reframe positioning, sharpen messages, and stress-test assumptions without the pressure of everything being live and reactive. That isn’t going dark. It’s choosing not to confuse activity with progress.

Then there’s spring training:

Spring training isn’t about winning games. It’s about repetition, experimentation, and finding your groove. Players try things, some of which don’t work, in these low-stakes conditions. In my experience, communications teams benefit from the same space. This is when messages should be piloted, spokespeople vetted through media training, and tone refined before attention peaks. If you’re attempting something new for the first time when the spotlight is brightest, you’ve reduced your margin for error to near zero.

The regular season is where discipline tends to break down:

Baseball teams play almost every day – 162 games in around 6 months. Communications often feels the same. But baseball doesn’t pretend every game is equal. Some matchups are circled months in advance and aired in prime time. Others take place on a Tuesday afternoon in May, in front of a smaller audience, and that’s fine. It’s just the calendar and the nature of the sport. 

I’ve learned that not every story proposed is going to land. It just doesn’t work like that. Treating every moment like a World Series game exhausts audiences and devalues the moments that genuinely matter. It also burns out teams who feel like they’re expected to play nine innings at full intensity, every single day, with no off days.

Constraints force you to make choices. They protect what’s important by acknowledging that attention, like stamina, is finite. The pitch clock didn’t make baseball less thoughtful. It made it more watchable. It created structure without eliminating nuance. In communications, the equivalent is accepting that prime time is earned, not scheduled. And that’s why you don’t start your ace pitcher on short rest in July. You save that for the playoffs. 

The moments that truly cut through usually work because of what came before them.

The narratives that were developed and the attention was paced, rather than burned through. You don’t manufacture those moments by shouting louder or publishing faster. You create them by deciding which games matter most and having the discipline to let others go without panic.

For someone raised to step lively, that lesson took a long time to internalize. In an economy where attention is scarce and speed is commoditized, judgement isn’t. The goal isn’t constant visibility, but sustained relevance. The answer isn’t silence, its selectivity. The strongest communications strategies don’t leave it all on the field every game. They plan for the season. They know when to speak and when to step back. And they accept that some games are about strengthening form, not filling stadiums.

That’s not slow. That’s strategic.