It was the latter part of the dog days of the summer of 2025 when the Philadelphia Phillies had won a baseball game.

The storyline of this game was that then-Phillies outfielder Max Kepler had a banner game, knocking in some runs on a few extra base hits that had ended a months-long slump.

At the time, anti-Kepler sentiment had reached a boiling point in the city. Every time the team’s social media posted the starting lineup before the game, fans would flock to the comments to express their disgust if they saw Kepler. And when manager Rob Thomson still continued to field Kepler, despite him having a batting average in the low .200s at the time, fans began to make their displeasure known by booing every time he came to bat. 

But on this day, he was one of the stars, and his teammate — fellow outfielder Brandon Marsh, who also had a great game — was ready to share the spotlight, declaring, in a way that only a baseball player can, that Kepler was a “dawg.”

Now this was nothing new. Baseball players talk up their teammates all the time. But what was different this time was that something had clicked for me in that moment. Why? Because I agreed with Marsh, Kepler was a “dawg.” Never mind that I had spent an inordinate amount of time before the game liking every post calling him a bum and criticizing Thomson for running him out there again.

I can be too introspective for my own good at times, but I had taken a moment to observe something very simple: This is what it means to be part of a team. 

With spring training kicking off last week, you will be able to see what I am talking about soon enough. It is not just the Phillies. You can see this with every team. The player who is going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts and a ground out into a double play is still going to cheer for his teammate who hits a liner into the gap for a double that earned a steak. 

The opposite is true as well. The team will support the player in the slump, and when he breaks out of it, he will pull on the team’s name on the front of his jersey and gesture toward the electric fans in the stands. That is what it means to be a part of a team.  

You will also learn that it is about sharing your individual accomplishments with the group. The pitcher who threw a quality start into the eighth will say that it was about what the team did behind him. “They handled all those grounders;” “They were able to string together runs for me.”

They pick each other up when they are down. When the Phillies season ended in the National League Division Series on a very, very unfortunate throw home by right-handed reliever Orion Kerkering, then-Phillies right fielder Nick Castellanos was right by side to walk him to the dugout, where Thomson pulled him aside, put a hand on his shoulder and consoled him.

When asked about it, both Thomson and Castellanos gave pretty much the same answer: They did not want him to feel alone out there at that moment. That is what it means to be a team.

So, what does that mean to you? How do these baseball anecdotes teach us anything? They do when you realize that you are frequently a part of a team yourself.

Your lab partners or your group project partners, or the members of your university club are your team. Even classmates that you are not directly working with. You can have a sense of camaraderie in your small, niche 400-level class that you are taking with your peers in the same major.

These are not your enemies. They are not people you need to crush in some competition. Our degrees are worth more for each of us when more of us graduate from this institution and become successful.

That does not mean a complete dissolution of your ego. Pitchers will still mention that they liked how they were able to locate their fastball or that they were able to put a good spin on their slider. And you, too, will need to advocate for yourself to get a job.

But this does not have to come with the expense of keeping others down. You can be a teammate, and as they do in baseball, let your work show on the field. 

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