Thursday , March 28 2024
A marvelous book of baseball and friendship...

Book Review: The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam

Last week it was Selena Roberts and her A-Rod expose.  Today it's Jeff Pearlman and Roger Clemens.  Earlier this year, future Hall of Famer Joe Torre's The Yankee Years drew its share of controversy and criticism.  Baseball and baseball books used to be a lot more fun.  Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam's The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship is one of those books, in part because it's written about four men who played during that time.

Those four men — Ted Williams, Dominic DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky — did more than play baseball together, and Halberstam crafts a book that takes readers on the diamond and beyond.  Baseball made them teammates, but this story doesn't end when Ted Williams hit his 521st home run in the final at bat of his career in 1960, or when Doerr, Pesky, or DiMaggio hung up their cleats.  They shared the highs and lows that are part of the beauty of baseball at a time when the game was the crown jewel of American sports; America loved baseball, and baseball — with the occasional exception of Theodore Samuel Williams — loved America back.  Halberstam's story doesn't end there.  In fact, it doesn't really even begin there. 

The Teammates opens with Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and their friend Dick Flavin making the decision to travel to Florida to visit an ailing Williams one last time before he passes.  Plans for the visit happened shortly after September 11, 2001, and no one was eager to board an airplane.  DiMaggio, at this point in his 80s, was having a tough time selling his wife, Emily, on a solo roadie from New England to Florida so the younger Flavin stepped forward and then Pesky signed on to share the journey.  Doerr wanted to make the roadtrip with his teammates and friends but was living in the Portland, Oregon area and caring for his wife, Monica, who was weakened by multiple sclerosis and two strokes. 

The book begins with this trip, but quickly digresses taking us back in time into the early years of all four of these former Red Sox teammates.  We get a glimpse into the DiMaggio house and Dominic's more famous older brother, Joe.  We learn about John Paveskovich becoming the much beloved Johnny Pesky.  We learn that Bobby Doerr was regarded as the kindest man most people ever met.  We also get a glimpse into the turbulent life of the complicated, profane, blaspehmous Ted Williams, a man who used the phrase 'goddamn' as a noun, verb, adverb, conjunction, and punctuation.

These four men played together and with others, but these four remained close long after the game was over.  Why was that?  Halberstam doesn't openly ask it, nor does he definitely answer it but he does leave us clues and the answer is both obvious and hidden.  The reason?  Ted Williams. 

No, these friendships and this loyalty were not created because Ted was as great a man off the field as he was a player on it.  We see candid glimpses his perpetual frustration manifest itself in angry outbursts, infantile tantrums, and a lack of graciousness.  In part what binds these four together is the way the other three — DiMaggio, Doerr, and Pesky — see beyond the frustration and accept Williams. 

We also see a certain odd charm in Williams' relentlessness.  This is a man who never lost an argument in his entire life because he had the good sense to never be wrong.  We see a man who used a celebration of his greatness — his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York — to take up the cause for the induction of players who played in the Negro Leagues prior to Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Acceptance eluded Williams most of his life and yet here, at the pinnacle of acceptance, he shed light on the greatness of others because it was just one of the myriad things about which he, Ted Williams, was right.

Halberstam devotes plenty of attention to Williams, but we also learn about each of these four men.  We learn of Doerr's devotion to his wife through her battle with MS.  We learn of Johnny Pesky's 'Friendship Dinner' and the ambassador for all things Red Sox he would become despite being the only member of the four to play elsewhere in his career.  We get a glimpse into what it was like for Dominic DiMaggio to not only overcome the huge shadow of his older brother and more famous teammate, but his fight just to get a chance to play baseball at all.  As Flavin tells Halberstam, "I think both Ted and Joe were aware of it, how well he had dealt with his life, and what a complete life it had been, and Ted to his credit admired him for it, and Joe, I am afraid, resented him for it."

The Teammates is like a museum, but it's more than just an exhibition of baseball.  We observe friendship, loyalty, adversity, and mortality.  The book begins with the sadness of the inevitable and encroaching end of Williams' life, but rather than focusing on the end celebrates the lives and relationships.  Its appeal will primarily be for baseball fans, but there's something far richer here than debates about the designated hitter or endless recitations of statistics. 

The Teammates fires the romantic notions so many have about baseball's past, notions that have been violently stripped away over the past several years. The Teammates not only nourishes readers with tales that extend beyond the diamond, it reminds us that our love and faith were once well placed.

About Josh Hathaway

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