I recently finished David Ross’s book Teammate. This is another of my 2016 Cubs World Series nostalgia right of passage books. This is how I coped with the Cubs exit from the playoffs this year in less than spectacular fashion.
I wasn’t a huge David Ross celebrity guy. I never really got why he was on Dancing with the Stars or received some of the other publicity that he got, but I did appreciate his role on the Cubs as a model teammate and leader. And that’s why I liked this book. It’s a good baseball book full of anecdotes about players from today’s game and in year’s past. There are good reflections on what makes a good leader and teammate from a practical standpoint, but mostly I just liked the stories.
The book alternates between Ross’s own journey as a person and ballplayer with many of the lesson’s learned from other players and coaches with a narrative of the World Series games, culminating with the Epic Game 7. There’s great humor and insight about the best year of baseball for my favorite team and great peer insights about the other guys on the team. I loved hearing perspectives on different Cubs players from a teammate as opposed to reporters.
So this was a fun book, perhaps a guilty pleasure. I will read it again not because it’s the best book of all time but because it covers a special season of my sports fandom and life in a unique and instructive way. I liked the teammate angle – where it’s more about being a good teammate, lead by example person, than it is about presenting x number of steps for leadership.
It was good for the soul too to remember how awesome things were a year ago and how thankful I am to have a Cubs team that is consistently good after years of garbage.
