The 2020 baseball season almost didn’t happen, so when Opening Day was finally announced, T-Mobile wanted to celebrate (and also inform fans about their suite of baseball benefits).

The trick was to acknowledge the unfortunate pandemic-related circumstances without depressing everyone. I came up with the idea to use the hilarious National Anthem and umpire scenes from The Naked Gun to make the tricky transition.

To get around pandemic-related production difficulties, I produced the entire spot myself in Adobe Premiere.

Full Disclosure: This spot never aired. The date for Opening Day kept changing, and we were left with too little time to get the rights to the footage and clear it with the MLB Players Association.