David Halberstam, The Teammates: a Portrait of a Friendship (2003).
Good Reads meta-data is 218 pages, rated 4.04 by 5789 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Red Sox Nation.
Verdict: ‘Good at life.’
Tagline: Life goes on.
The Brotherhood of the Bat was Dominic DiMaggio, Bob Doerr, John Pesky, and Ted Williams. No pitchers allowed. (Grizzle: while pitchers have to bat, batters never have to pitch. Can that be right?) Baseball brought these four together where they had fused into a lifetime camaraderie. A couple had become acquainted as teenagers, others later. One was marital matchmaker to another, and so on. Their children played together and, sometimes, more than that into the next generation.
The common currency in this unlikely union of such differing personalities was baseball, and specifically hitting a baseball. Even in their eighties they could and would argue over technique with the bat. By social norms these four had little in common but baseball, and it was enough. Even when they were no longer teammates, they remained fast friends, though I did wonder how that worked with the draconian fraternisation rules of baseball applied when the teammates were split up, but our author does not comment.
This short book is a welcome reminder that great performers, in this case athletes, have lives off and on the stage, as well as before and after their careers. It begins at the end with the death of the singular Ted Williams and works back with empathy and insight.