Throughout his adult life, Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams maintained a close relationship with his teammates Dominic DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky. Williams and Doerr were inducted into the Baseball Hall Of Fame, while DiMaggio remains well-known among fans as a good player with a famous older brother, and Pesky has a place in Red Sox lore thanks to a botched World Series play and a Fenway Park foul pole that sports his name (because he reportedly used to hook home runs around it). But even if they hadn't all been All-Star-caliber players, and even if they hadn't been friends in their playing days, time and common experience might have made them equally compatible as senior citizens. David Halberstam's slim heart-tugger The Teammates considers the strange and strong relationships binding DiMaggio, Doerr, Pesky, and cantankerous superstar Williams—a boastful, self-absorbed, big-hearted, funny, and often cruel man. Halberstam writes about DiMaggio and Pesky's final road trip to visit the dying Williams in October 2001, and he recounts the three days the two men spent together in a car, swapping stories. Halberstam drifts easily past anecdotes of their playing days to brief biographical sketches: All four men came of age during the Depression and had their major-league careers interrupted by WWII. The baseball lore is well-reported and frequently funny, and Halberstam possesses keen insights into Williams' enduring affection for his three friends. (The author suspects that the analytical DiMaggio, the emotionally steady Doerr, and the always-upbeat Pesky represented personality types that Williams wished to emulate.) But biographies and reminiscences of old ballplayers are easy to come by. The Teammates is strongest when it covers its subjects' declining years, in passages that don't pop up often enough. The frailer the men become, the more the gap between their peak physical abilities narrows, and the more they see eye to eye. The leveling applies equally to their other peers, athletes and otherwise. Halberstam broadly evaluates the shared hopes and fears of Williams' generation, and he writes a relaxed-but-pointed study of a time when men played baseball for prestige as much as money. In a clumsier writer's hands, such ideologically loaded paeans to the good old days would border on the unbearable, but Halberstam can get away with it, because his prose is lean and clear, and because he always cuts straight to the beating heart.