That year Williams hit .343 and led the league in homers, runs batted in, runs scored, doubles, walks and slugging percentage. But his Boston Red Sox booted the final two ballgames in Yankee Stadium–and lost the pennant by just a single game to the Bronx Bombers. Thus Halberstam’s book was, inevitably, a little more Yankee-centric and some of the best of Teddy Ballgame’s memories and musings were left on the cutting-room floor.
Halberstam appears to have grieved for those omissions. Midway through his new baseball yarn, “The Teammates,” (216 pages. Hyperion. $22.95) he fondly recalls that visit with Williams on the Florida Keys and confesses, “I have spent no small amount of time in retrospect trying to figure out why it was so glorious a day.” It isn’t all that hard for the rest of us, the readers, to figure it out. Though Williams was, as always, profane and contentious, he was also, in Halberstam’s retelling, bright, provocative, engaging and welcoming. He had what his teammates described as “sheer animal energy.” In a world where so many legends turn out to be far more diminutive than their name, Williams was unquestionably bigger-bigger than life.
“The Teammates” closes the author’s own chapter on the late, great slugger. The book is about the friendship between Williams and his three cohorts on the powerhouse Red Sox teams of the ’40s: Hall of Fame second baseman Bobby Doerr, centerfielder Dom DiMaggio and shortstop Johnny Pesky. (The last two, arguably, belong in Cooperstown, as well.) Though Williams would not have been comfortable hearing it labeled as such, it is something of a love story–lifelong friendships that defied distance, as well as enormous personality and lifestyle differences.
But however charming this conceit may be, it proves thin gruel to hang a book upon. Halberstam writes, in his afterword, that he envisioned “Teammates” as no more than “a small book.” It is all of that. Its sole dramatic hook is a drive DiMaggio and Pesky took from Boston to Florida in the fall of 2001 to visit, for what they knew would be the last time, the dying Williams. But beyond the emotion-packed setup, this narrative centerpiece lacks any real drama. The drive itself proved uneventful. And once they arrived, there were no crescendos, even in what surely was a wrenching, final goodbye. They came, they paid their heartfelt respects and they went their separate ways. And Doerr, who was caring for his wife at home in Oregon, wasn’t along to provide, at the very least, symmetry.
For readers unfamiliar with Doerr, Pesky and Joe DiMaggio’s younger brother, Dom, it will be a pleasure being introduced to them. All three were successful, both personally and professionally, in their postbaseball lives and, unlike many modern athletes, fully appreciative of the privileges stardom brought them. His warm portrait of the three men provides enough of a glimpse to suggest that they would be companionable folks with whom to spend an evening.
But the lives of companionable, even admirable, men don’t necessarily make for compelling reading. Williams’s life and legacy, however, unquestionably does. His baseball career was spent in direct competition, both on the field and in his own mind, with Joe DiMaggio. The time-honored consensus is that Williams was the better hitter, DiMaggio the better ballplayer. But the nod always went to DiMaggio, who won the championships, got the girl and never took a step without his sterling personal reputation in mind. Williams was his polar opposite. He was an angry, brooding young man who could be rude and crude–and didn’t give a damn about his image. Indeed he held most of the press in contempt, dubbing them “knights of the keyboard.”
Yet the passage of time and the passing of both men has seen a remarkable flip-flop in their respective reputations, not as ballplayers but as human beings. DiMaggio is now regarded as a strange, small, remote and withholding man who played the role of an American hero but never lived the part. And Williams did; the superstar ballplayer turned war hero was, as Halberstam writes, “the real John Wayne.” No baseball fan will forget the reception Williams received from both players and fans when he was wheeled onto the field before the 1999 All-Star Game. In his old age, he was, finally, the man–far more beloved by baseball than he ever was in the prime of his golden youth.
DiMaggio was the only mainstay of the ‘49 season who refused to talk with Halberstam for his earlier book. Now in “The Teammates” Halberstam writes: “Joe DiMaggio might have hit in 56 consecutive games, a seemly unrivaled record, but he never won 33,277 arguments in a row, like Ted Williams, the undisputed champion of contentiousness.” Yet Halberstam doesn’t really mine new depths with Williams or arrive at any fresh insights. And while he has always had a superb eye and an ear for a good anecdote, most of what he trots out here are old chestnuts, well known by true fans. There’s the stirring tale of how Williams refused to sit out a meaningless doubleheader and assure his historic .400 average on the final day of the ‘41 season–and went six for eight to finish at .406. And a detailed replay of the seventh game of the ‘46 World Series, one that exonerates Pesky from the rap that he held the ball too long while St. Louis’ Enos Slaughter dashed home with the winning run.
Halberstam has a well-deserved reputation for scrupulously reported examinations–“The Best and the Brightest,” “The Powers That Be” and “The Reckoning”–of power in America and its ramifications. But throughout the years, he has digressed numerous times for less weighty, but no less fascinating examinations of our culture of sports. (My personal favorite is “The Breaks of the Game,” an account of a season with the Bill Walton-led Portland Trailblazers.) “The Teammates,” though, is a mere trifle, one that can be read in less time than it takes to watch the average ballgame. If it is redeemed, it is only by the author’s good intentions and unmistakably affectionate tone.
