The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship was published by Hyperion in 2003. The book begins with a car journey: Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky drive from Boston to Hernando, Florida, to visit Ted Williams, who is dying. Bobby Doerr, the fourth member of their circle, is too frail to make the trip. These four men — Williams, DiMaggio, Pesky, and Doerr — had been teammates on the Boston Red Sox in the 1940s and 1950s, and their friendship had survived decades of separate lives, different fortunes, and the inevitable diminishments of age.
The book is Halberstam’s shortest and most personal. Where his major works are driven by institutional analysis and political argument, The Teammates is driven by affection — for these men, for the game they played, and for the kind of loyalty that modern professional sports, with its free agency and corporate ownership, no longer produces. The portraits of the four players are warm without being sentimental: Williams’s fierce, difficult genius; DiMaggio’s quiet elegance; Pesky’s irrepressible enthusiasm; Doerr’s steady, uncomplaining decency.
Halberstam uses the friendship to examine a particular moment in American sports history — the postwar era when baseball players were local figures, paid modestly, and bound to their teams and communities in ways that created genuine relationships rather than contractual arrangements. The book is, among other things, an elegy for that world.
Collecting The Teammates
First edition (Hyperion, New York, 2003): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $40–$100