The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship

David Halberstam Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship is a wonderful baseball book that transcends the game, by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking. It is the story of four Boston Red Sox teammates - Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Johnny Pesky - who after their playing days remained lifelong friends. Halberstam chronicles their personalities, their interrelationships, their careers (and a marvelous recap of the pivotal play in the seventh game of the 1946 Red Sox-Cardinals World Series), all leading to DiMaggio and Pesky’s October 2001 road trip to pay a final visit to Williams, his health failing, in his last dying days.

Reads like a postscript to the author’s Summer of ‘49, from which it recycles a few too many anecdotes. Dom Dimaggio and Johnny Pesky make a trip to Florida to see Ted Williams, dying. Bobby Doerr can’t make the trip from Oregon; he’s caring for his wife, who after suffering for years from MS has had two strokes. Halberstam combines, as usual, sharp reporting with clear prose, and continues his project of using the lens of baseball, and our obsession with it, to make larger statements about post-war American society. It's not only about baseball, it's an elegaic meditation on friendship, aging and death. A good read.

I used to be a big Red Sox fan, before they became a self-pitying mob, engaged in some self-victimized group think. What a bunch of whiners.

I loved the forties teams with Ted Williams, Bob Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio. This is their story, not as players, but as men in their twilight years. More importantly, it is the story of three great players who always lived under the hot light cast by Williams, perhaps the most brilliant, publicly annoying man that ever played the game (one of my baseball heroes, I might add,)and how they prepare for his approaching death.

It is an affecting story, well told by David Halberstam.

Really enjoyed this book. Well-researched, and based on interviews with the four team members, Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio, and John Pesky, it paints a realistic, if mostly unflattering, picture of Ted Williams. But it also provides insight into why Ted was the way he was, and offers examples of his generosity. It also reconfirmed by belief that ball players used to play for the love of the game itself, and as a result they were more invested in the game and the fans more invested in the players. Greed has helped to ruin America's Pastime.

This book is a short biography of Ted Williams, Dominic Dimaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr, four men who formed lifelong friendships while playing for the Boston Red Sox. I generally am not interested in reading about baseball players' personal lives, and this book is no exception, its best parts are when they talk about baseball. Halberstam is far too worshipful of his subjects to make this anything more than a cute little book. I’m particularly fond of Dom Dimaggio though, the type of man and ball player he is in the shadow of both his brother and Ted Williams.

Surprisingly little on the years these guys played together on the Red Sox--what makes them of interest in the first place. But Halberstam manages to make us interested in these guys as men rather than players. I could easily have been disappointed, but I'm not. Though a few chapters on their glory years would have been to the good.

It's October 2001. Johnny Pesky, Dominic DiMaggio and Dick Flavin are on their way to Florida. Friend Bobby Doerr unfortunately cannot make the trip. Their purpose? One final visit with Ted Williams, friend and baseball legend, who is very close to death.

Admittedly, I don't know very much about baseball and the great players of yore. Of course, I know their names and that they are revered, but I don't have a brain for statistics and I wasn't alive to see how these players got to be the legends they are today. I've watched baseball my entire life, but not MLB until college. I bought this book for my dad a number of years ago - he being the man that instilled a love of baseball in me - and he never read it (my mother claims he's "saving show more it for retirement"), so I've been in a baseball mood (having watched the 18+ hours of Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary) and decided to pick it up while I waited for my boyfriend to finish our book club book. I liked learning more about these men - they are, after all, the greats from my team. And it felt appropriate to read after the recent passing of Dominic DiMaggio - he comes across as the biggest hero of this tale. However, something was missing for me. I can't put my finger on it, though. I think perhaps I am too woefully ignorant of these men's backstories that I couldn't fully appreciate the story of their friendship. For me, this book almost felt like the bare bones of the story - yes, there is information about each man's baseball career, and his childhood, and his life post-baseball, and how they've managed to stay in touch, but something was still lacking. I'm definitely glad I read it - I appreciate each player more now and I want to expand my knowledge about them. show less