Good role models are hard to find these days. It seems a good and wholesome reputation doesn't sell that well, and in today's professional sports, it's all about the money. Albert Pujols appears to stand out from amongst the others. His numbers are staggering. If his career were to end at only ten years, one could very easily argue that over that span, he is the simply the best player the world has ever seen. That is not an overstatement.
More Than The Game, a biography by Scott Lamb and Tim Ellsworth, chronicles the career of this future Hall-of-Famer. From his beginnings in the Dominican Republic to his rise to fame in a Cardinals uniform, the reader is taken inside the life and mind of Pujols. More than simply a book about baseball, there is a strong focus on the faith of Albert Pujols. The man is a deeply committed Christian whose character, work ethic, and family values like his baseball numbers are laudable.
If you love baseball and you're a follower of Christ, then no doubt you will love this book. In fact, I would recommend it for your reading enjoyment. If you're only one of the above, you may want to skip this one. I say that based solely on my reading. I am a follower of Christ, but I am not a big baseball fan. As a result, I simply didn't enjoy it all that much. There was - in my opinion - a little too much of "didn't I just read that chapter" going on. Don't misunderstand that to mean that this is not a good book; it is. It is well written and very easy to read. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had it been written 20 plus years from now when history could reveal a little more than ten years. One thing that experience should have taught us all by now is that our heroes can easily let us down ... Tiger Woods anyone!
As for Pujols, let's say for now I'm cautiously optimistic about what the future holds. But...when one turns down a contract in excess of 200 million dollars in the hopes of testing the market, I'm left scratching my head. And that is a good way to end this review. More Than The Game was a good read, but in the end, I was left scratching my head.
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