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The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship |
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Reviews |
| | No Magic  |
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There's a good bit of information in this book. But I just did not perceive that the author effectively conveyed the "magic" that the story seemed to promise. I came away feeling like I had some more facts about these players but just none of the 'warm and fuzzy' that I expected. |
| | Baseball, Friendship and Life  |
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This brief but excellent book covers a lot of ground. It is a fine baseball book that follows the lives of its four main characters from their humble roots through their shared baseball careers and into their post baseball lives. Along the way, the reader learns a lot about how baseball worked during simpler times both at the minor and major league levels.
But it is much more. Among other things, Halberstam examines immigrant culture in America, friendship, success, love and aging. He also tells a lot of really entertaining stories including the Williams lunch with Tip o'Neil, the infamous tarpon fishing trip and the Red Sox/Cardinals World Series. The parallels between Williams and Joe Dimaggio were also interesting.
Ted Williams' "cantankerous" personality is a featured element of this story. As the book progresses, Pesky, Dimaggio and Doerr are presented as truly wonderful human beings (and there is no reason to believe that they are not). It is difficult to imagine what attracted them to Williams, but they clearly were all great friends with Williams as the glue. Despite his well known personality flaws, Williams clearly had some excellent qualities. Halberstam chronicles both sides of the Williams personality and leaves the reader with an overall positive feeling toward him.
This is an entertaining and meaningful story that is more about life and friendship than baseball. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and hated to see it end. |
| | Stupidity in living color |
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Good books need no blurbs, they can speak for themselves. This one has at least ten blurbs on the covers.
If you're curious about just how much of a bastard Ted Williams really was, read the book and marvel at the stature of a person who would repeatedly curse out a friend for "not fishing right". Then find out about his son's exploitive tendencies, presumably learned from his father. (Nah, a cryofreezing company would never, ever, not in a billion years, pay anyone to freeze their famous father. Couldn't possibly happen.)
I feel sorry for the other three guys who got lumped in with this mess, because they seem like reasonably decent people. And some of the stories are entertaining, though I felt like I had to fight through a lot of unnecessary verbiage to get there.
If you're in the target audience (people who worship sports heroes) this probably will work well for you. I was quite disappointed, and I'm not likely to read any of the author's other works; the effort wasn't worth it. |
| | Nicely done by Mr. Halberstam  |
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This is an intimate story of friendship between four ballplayers who were the stars of their team. It is a wonderful journey of friendship that passes through nearly 60 years. This provides some great insight especially for those of us who watch baseball now and can forget that these people are human beings with interesting lives and not just big money iconoclasts. |
| | Well Done Book About Baseball and Friendship |
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"The Teammates" begins and ends with a trip taken in October 2001 by former Red Sox players Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky (along with local television personality Dick Flavin) to visit a dying Ted Williams. The three, along with Bobby Doerr who could not make the trip, were not only teammates but also friends for years. "The Teammates" is the story of the friendship between four entirely different men.
"The Teammates" is a wonderful and thoroughly engrossing book about baseball and friendship. Baseball was different back then and with the exception of Pesky, the only team the four played for was the Red Sox which helped cement their friendship. David Halberstam does a terrific job of catching the personality of each player. While it would have been easy to focus just on Ted Williams, he focuses equally on each player and readers get to know all four as individuals by the end of the book. Johnny "needle nose" Pesky, who still works for the Red Sox, became a Red Sox player because his family liked the Red Sox representative; old-fashioned and all American boy Bobby Doerr, was the closest to Williams; Dom DiMaggio, playing in the shadow of his brothers, struggled to make it to the big leagues; and of course Ted Williams, immensely talented and as hard on himself as he was on the people in his life. "The Teammates" is filled with anecdotes about the players including two memorable encounters between Williams and Pedro Ramos, a young pitcher for Washington and a fishing trip that Williams and Doerr took in the early 1960's that tested Doerr's patience and friendship. Williams was a complex, not always likable, person and Halberstam does a remarkable job of creating an even-handed profile of him. Some of the interesting information in the book includes how Tom Yawkey almost blew the deal that landed Ted Williams; how much pitching has changed these days (back then teams had more than one pitcher who won 20 - 25 games a year); and how Williams was called to serve in both World War II and Korea and how the dynamics of the Red Sox had changed by the time Williams got back from Korea. Halbertstam also touches on the Red Sox "curse" notably in the 1946 World Series in which DiMaggio got hurt and Pesky was considered the goat for years, which he quietly accepted. The book ends, as it began, with the surviving teammates as they are today.
"The Teammates" is a well done book about friendship.
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