The Teammates

At my brother’s suggestion, I recently read The Teammates by David Halbertstam, a book about the remarkable friendship between four ballplayers, Johnny Pesky, Dominic DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Ted Williams.

Halberstam was not your typical sportswriter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting during the Vietnam War, and published a famous book about Vietnam entitled The Best and the Brightest, which I probably ought to read. Tragically, Halberstam was killed in a car wreck in April, 2007.

Luke has already blogged about the book, so I won’t cover the ground that he did. But there are a couple or three other things which also stood out to me. One was the fact that Williams — who is one of two finalists for the distinction of Greatest Hitter Of All Time, with Babe Ruth being the other — was a quarter Latino; his mother was half Mexican.

Williams and Joe DiMaggio are the two great icons of 1940s era baseball (though I think I would take the amazingly classy Stan Musial over either of them; but that is another story). Dom DiMaggio had the unique distinction of being the brother of one of these icons and a very close friend of the other. No slouch of a baseball player himself (a .298 career hitter who played a magnificent center field), Dom had a more successful life than either Joe or Ted, according to Halberstam. He quotes Dick Flavin, who observed, “I think both Ted and Joe were aware of it, how well he had dealt with his life, and what a complete life it had been, and Ted to his credit admired him for it, and Joe, I am afraid, resented him for it.” (p. 22)

The Sox met St. Louis in the 1946 World Series. The climactic Game Seven was tied 3-3 going into the eighth inning, the Cardinals’ half of the inning. With two outs, Harry Walker was up, trying to advance his teammate Enos “Country” Slaughter, who was at first. Walker hit a bloop to left-center, which the official scorers recorded as a double, even though Walker himself admitted it was a “dying seagull.” Slaughter, who had broken for second with the pitch, managed to come all the way around to score what would prove to be both the game-winning and series-winning run.

Sportswriters would blame the run upon Pesky, the Sox shortstop, who, they felt, hesitated before throwing an errant relay throw home. More at fault than Pesky, however, was back-up centerfielder Leon Culberson. Culberson was filling in for Dom, who had injured himself earlier in the game, and failed to position himself appropriately for Walker, who had a penchant for punching the ball to left-center. Making matters worse, Culberson approached the ball tentatively and then made a throw to Pesky that was both soft and low. A third Sox player, hurler Bob Klinger, also deserves a measure of blame for the play, because he neglected to hold Country Slaughter at first in the first place.

Perhaps the play was caused not so much by what the Sox did wrong, but by what Slaughter did right. It was Slaughter who had broken with the pitch; it was Slaughter who had blown through the stop sign that his third base coach had thrown up. Marine general Archie Vandegrift, hero of Guadalcanal, once noted, “God favors the bold and the strong of heart.”

But in the hands of sportswriters, all of the blame fell upon Pesky. Rather than giving up Culberson — the most culpable Sox player — Pesky simply shouldered all of the blame himself. “By the time I turned and picked up Slaughter, he was virtually home,” he finally admitted in 2002, fifty-six years after the play, and several years after Culberson’s death. “They decided to make me the goat afterwards, and I decided I could take it — I could live with it. If they want to blame me, they can blame me. Because none of it changes what happened on the field.” (pp. 157-158)

How refreshing to those of us who live in an era where accepting personal responsibility is the exception, not the norm.