Damn Yankees

By Martha Duffy

SUMMER OF '49

by David Halberstam

Morrow; 304 pages; $21.95

Even casual baseball fans know the drears of the Boston Red Sox, those goats of fate, a team usually long on talent but short on luck and even minimal strategy from the dugout. The New York Yankees are another legend: power at bat, awesome pitching, managerial smarts to spare.

David Halberstam's engaging account of the 1949 season proves both these mythic profiles to be absolutely accurate. That year the pennant race between the two teams came down to the very last game. Of course the Sox lost it. They had done the same thing against the Cleveland Indians in a sudden-death playoff game the year before. Both teams were hobbled by injuries. But the Yankees had the poise and power to win.

For Halberstam, author of such books as The Best and the Brightest and The Reckoning, this new work may be his most appealing, mainly because it is quirky and informal and the author leaves his moral fervor in the bat rack. He intersperses the season's important action with portraits of key personnel: the Yanks' Tommy Henrich, Jerry Coleman, Yogi Berra; the Sox's Bobby Doerr, Ellis Kinder, Johnny Pesky. While he does adequately by Boston, clearly his heart is in the Bronx. In his hagiography, the Yankees are a little more godlike. Perhaps they were.

The Summer of '49 is much enhanced by the author's ruminations about the era. He captures both the glamour and the quaintness of the late '40s, when the corner bar, the movie palace and the ball park were the major entertainment centers. The new age of expansion clubs and megasalaries was coming on fast. Though TV was in the wings, radio ruled a fan's life. Teams still traveled by train and, in Halberstam's view, the clubs lost priceless cohesiveness when they boarded airplanes. For these old-timers, alcohol was the prevailing addiction. Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy hectored his players about the evils of drink and then went on benders himself. Kinder, whom Halberstam considers the American League's best relief pitcher of the time, was usually boiled as an owl.

Of all the surviving players Halberstam sought out, only Joe DiMaggio turned him down (not even mutual friend Edward Bennett Williams could twist his arm). Yet Halberstam's portrait of DiMaggio is the finest part of the book. The author has a tender, intuitive sympathy for the proud, remote athlete. DiMaggio does not need a writer to confirm his stature, but still he is lucky to have such a thoughtful, intelligent chronicler. Boston had its own superstar in Ted Williams, and that brings up the inevitable comparison between Halberstam's work and John Updike's classic account of Williams' last game, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Nearly 30 years later, Updike's achievement seems as secure as Williams' 1941 batting mark of .406. He turns out to be the better writer, even the tougher reporter. But readers who want to savor a memoir of two outsize ball clubs and the rude dawn of modern baseball can turn with relish to Halberstam.