Fred and Minnie.

The smartest person I know, the most-voracious, the most-curious, the most-tireless is my big brother, Fred. 

Fred's 21-months older than I. He lives in Chicago and is a lawyer. Fred, counter to his liberal sensibilities has also spent his life trying to bring back the six-day work-week. As a matter of course, he works on Saturdays. And always has.

Fred's competitive. 

Those Saturdays in the office are just one of his TWTW or TW2 affects. Fred epitomizes TWTW. (The Will To Win.)

For the past year or so, Fred and I have been arguing about retirement. I set Fred back on his heels when I told him I've decided to hang up my cleats on January 1, 2030. 

He was surprised that I had chosen a specific date, and so far into the future. Like the excellent lawyer he is, Fred quickly had me on the witness stand.

I explained through beads of younger-brotherly sweat.

"My baseball hero was the great Minnie Minoso. More precisely, Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta Miñoso, also known as "the Cuban Comet."

"Yeah, so," Fred eloquented. "If you want me to call you the 'Yonkers Yutz,' just say so. What does Minnie Minoso have to do with your retirement."

I thought about this yesterday as I walked three miles in the pouring-down rain and Connecticut cold. All so I wouldn't break my 92,004-day exercise streak. All fodder for yet another of my over seven-thousand blog posts.

I'm not a lawyer--my mind is far from neat and orderly--but I laid out my case with some forensic acuity. 

"Well, Minnie played major league ball in five decades," I answered. "The 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s. I want to make my living behind the typewriter for six decades. I want to last-longer than the longest-lasting of them all."

Minnie's last hit. 1976, age 52.

Minnie's last at bat. 1980, age 56.

Fred, uncharacteristically, was silenced by all this. Though he's been a Chicagoan since 1978, and Minnie toiled for the Chisox for many seasons, Fred wasn't aware of Minnie's longevity.

(I met Minnie once, in 1978, when I was a summer-job-cashier in an across the street from a whorehouse liquor store, Bragno's, on Rush Street in the City of Broad Shoulders. I worked the night shift, from four pm to midnight and Minnie came in one afternoon as a representative of Old Style beer--Chicagoland's best-seller before the beer market, along with everything else, got bought up, consolidated and oligopoly-ized. I shook Minnie's hand and admired the giant American League Championship ring he wore.)

Fred called me back a couple of days later. And has returned to his invective many times since.

"Your Minoso standard is a fraud," he said. "His appearances in his final two decades were attendance stunts perpetrated by the great baseball showman and team-owner, Bill Veeck. You can't count those as active playing. He didn't really make it five decades."

I let the record speak for itself. I see Minoso played in the 1970s and '80s. He got a major league hit as a 52-year-old, and as the clip above attests, could still put wood on the ball and hustle down the line at age of 56.

What's more, while Minoso didn't make it to what we stupidly and wrongly call the "majors" until he was 25. (You can't really call them the major leagues when they excluded some of the best because of their melanin levels.) 

Minoso's color kept him out. Before that he played for the New York Cubans in the Negro Leagues, and before that (and probably during the 1930s) he played in the Cuban Leagues, which qualitatively were probably the equal of the American majors or at least Double A. He played, ostensibly, as a paid professional for six decades, not five, though 1930s Cuban League data doesn't survive the pixelized putsches of modern record-keeping.

Fred disagrees with me. He regards Minoso's mini-major-league stints in the 1970s and '80s as stunts. He's not entirely wrong. But neither is he right. Minoso, indisputably, played in the bigs for parts of five decades.

(By the way, in our Age of Illusion--in advertising and life--most stints are stunts. When the shouting is over, most of what we're left with--in ads and trumpian politicking--ain't worth a bucket of warm spit.)

Come 2030, if there is life left on our dying orb, I will log my sixth decade in the advertising big leagues. I started at Lowe in the 1980s. Worked at Ally, Rosenfeld and Ogilvy during the 90s, Ogilvy, Hal Riney, Digitas and R\GA during the Oughts, and R\GA, Collins and Ogilvy during the 10s and Ogilvy and my biggest agency, GeorgeCo, LLC, a Delaware Company during the 20s. 

Looking ahead from 2025 to 2030, there seems to be plenty of business for an agency like mine that believes a return to common-sense is the next new thing. I follow two protocols that seem to serve me well with clients new and old and large and small. They might be the advertising equivalent of keeping your eye on the ball, having a level swing and hitting 'em where they ain't. In any event, they've been working for me, and like Minnie in the clip above, they seem to be resistant to the aches and creaks of old age.

I'm sure Minnie, regardless of age, watched what was going on between the chalk lines like an osprey looking for a fish. I'm sure he observed the baseball equivalent of every ripple in the sea. 

My own vision is under duress of late and I have cataract surgery scheduled for my left on the ninth and my right on the sixteenth. 

Seeing clearly works no matter what game you play and however how long you play it. What's more, if you're a potential client, remember what Minnie said above, come to GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, and "Go for a Double."