By RON BELLAMY
Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard

JUNCTION CITY – In the house he built 50 years ago, sitting in a chair just a few feet from the wife he met 67 years ago, Bobby Doerr is posing for a photograph, holding the bat with which he recorded his 2,000th hit for the Boston Red Sox 52 years ago.

On the handle of the bat is the residue of the stuff that Doerr put on his hands more than a half-century ago to grip the bat more firmly, a mixture of rosin and olive oil, a precursor to pine tar and a recipe invented by his teammate, the great hitter Ted Williams.

You watch this scene – the Hall of Famer, 85 now, leaning forward with the bat, looking toward the camera with the sharp eyes of a hitter who launched 223 career home runs and with the kind eyes of the most loyal friend and husband – and you are struck by the history, by the connections represented by the bat held in those deft hands.

Because on a particular afternoon in 1951, after Doerr had connected against a New York Yankees pitcher named Ed Lopat for that milestone hit, he dropped that bat in the dirt of the batter's box at Yankee Stadium. Dropped it at the feet of a future Hall of Fame catcher, Yogi Berra. Dropped it in the stadium that was said to have been built by the prowess of the slugger, Babe Ruth, who was still a Yankee when Bobby Doerr began playing professional baseball at age 16 in 1934.

In the minor leagues, Doerr had played with former major leaguers who had played alongside Ruth and Ty Cobb. The former second baseman's experience in the game is such that he can compare, first-hand, a thoroughly modern baseball player such as Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners with an icon such as Joe DiMaggio, seeing similarities in everything except DiMaggio's greater power and noting that like the Yankee Clipper, Ichiro can beat you many ways – with hits, with speed, with defense.

And yet more than a distinguished lesson in baseball history brings the photographer and reporter to the unpretentious house in the farmland west of Junction City, to listen to wonderful stories of baseball in the era of trains and day games and dusty uniforms, to hear Doerr vividly describe – "I can remember it like it was right now" – the home run he hit in the 1943 All-Star game, 60 years ago, off Mort Cooper.

Bobby Doerr is in the spotlight again, his career and his strength of character chronicled in a best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam.

In "The Teammates," Halberstam has captured the enduring friendship of four men who played for the Red Sox from the late 1930s and into the 1950s – Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky and Bobby Doerr. All four were born on the West Coast within 31 months of one another at the end of World War I; if the book strikes a chord, it's because of the Old School values embodied by the hard-working ballplayers, because of their loyalty and dignity, and because of the towering presence of Williams, whose impending death (in 2002) becomes the book's unifying element.

The book has been as high as No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list and No. 4 on the Publisher's Weekly list for hardcover non-fiction and currently ranks No. 8 and 12 in sales on those lists, respectively. There are 250,000 copies in print – the publisher, Hyperion Books, won't reveal how many have been sold – and every day, the mail seems to bring Doerr a couple of books to sign, and to forward to Pesky and DiMaggio for their autographs.

Doerr will discuss "The Teammates" and sign copies from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday at Borders in the Oakway Center. A one-hour documentary based on the book will debut at 5 p.m. Friday on ESPN.

"It was a good, strong, loyal friendship," Doerr said. "Each one would do anything for each other. I feel kind of proud and honored that you're put in a book like that."

Bobby Doerr's plaque in the Hall of Fame sketches the basic numbers of his career:

"Robert Pershing Doerr, Boston, A.L., 1937-1951. Quiet leader of the Red Sox during 1940's. Consistent second baseman. Top double play man and fine clutch hitter. Lifetime batting average of .288 with six seasons of over 100 RBI's. Held A.L. record for 2B by handling 414 consecutive chances without error. Led A.L. 2B in double plays five times, putouts four times and assists on three occasions. Batted .409 in 1946 World Series."

Behind the numbers are compelling stories and scenes, beginning with a boy growing up in Los Angeles, throwing a rubber ball against the front steps of his house or against a wall, having to gather the ball to himself rather than snatch it, lest it bounce away, developing, in that simple act, the "soft" hands of a great fielder.

Once, at a Hall of Fame banquet, Doerr sat with Ozzie Smith, the exemplary shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals.

"He was talking about bouncing the ball off the wall and the steps and I said, 'Gosh, I did that by the hour,'" Doerr recalled. "And he said 'I did that, too.' "

Doerr was a pro at age 16 in the Pacific Coast League in 1934, and in the majors by 1937. In his prime, he batted fifth in the order, behind Williams and Vern Stephens, and he saw a lot of brushback pitches, dusted himself off and dug in again; he figured that made him a better hitter. It was a different era in baseball – Doerr signed for $3,300 as a rookie – and with only 16 Major League teams, competition for jobs was fierce.

"You were always looking over your shoulder at who was playing at Louisville," Doerr said, referring to the minor-league affiliate. "There was always somebody who could take your job. Now, there's always a need for players who maybe aren't quite as good.

"And you were always playing for next year. You had to bear down and have a good year so you could have something to talk about to have a decent contract for next year. That was pressure on you, every day."

And so a slump would be reason for near-panic, reason to fidget with stance and swing and everything else, and Doerr remembers being in an awful slump in the days before the 1943 All-Star game, a slump so bad that Boston manager Joe Cronin, with nothing better to suggest, gave Doerr – a non-chewer – a plug of tobacco.

"It was hot in my throat, and I almost felt like I was going to throw up," Doerr recalled. "I was kind of half-sick. Well, I forgot where I was standing at the plate and everything else. I was lucky to play."

The Red Sox were in St. Louis on a Sunday, playing the Browns in a doubleheader, and Doerr – who had gotten rid of the chew – somehow got three hits in the first game, and a couple more in the second, and the slump was over. (Nevertheless, Doerr never chewed again.) That Monday he took the train to Philadelphia for the All-Star game, and on Tuesday he came up in the second inning, with two runners on base.

"Mort Cooper threw me a high, hanging curveball," Doerr said. "I'll always remember it coming in just like that, and I just about fell back and hit a home run off it." The three-run shot was the big hit in a 5-3 American League victory in the first All-Star game played at night.

"I'll always remember that," Doerr said, "that hanging curveball."

Bobby Doerr was standing by the batting cage when a gangly teenager came for a tryout with the PCL's San Diego team in 1936. Ted Williams was 6-feet-3 and 147 pounds then. "He looked like a broomstick," Doerr recalled, and the veterans grumbled that the kid was taking up their batting practice.

Then Williams stroked six or seven line drives and there was the sense that something special had been witnessed. "He'll be signed within a week," Doerr recalls someone saying, and Williams was, and quickly Doerr and Williams became friends, a friendship that became a brotherhood.

They went to movies together on the road – Williams liked Westerns – and drank milkshakes so Williams could put on weight. In the years to come, they would fish together, excellently.

Their personalities were opposite – Doerr never cursed, and Williams' vocabulary went beyond merely colorful; Doerr was steady and gentle, Williams was loud and overbearing, a huge-hearted friend but also a challenging one, a mixture of John Wayne and General George Patton – "no retreat and no compromise," Doerr said – with, in his sharp intellect, a bit of Bill Bowerman, perhaps.

Doerr would come to appreciate the excellence of the last major leaguer to hit .400, of the athlete who in 19 seasons hit 521 homers with a career average of .344 despite losing five seasons to military service in two wars.

"When you think back, he was just so far ahead of everybody," Doerr said. "He was like a Ben Hogan in golf. He was creative and developed new ideas. He was just so far ahead."

Williams studied hitting intensely. He seemed to hit every pitch on the sweet spot of the bat, so that it was white and clean while the rest of the bat was dark with sticky stuff and dirt. He developed the mixture of rosin and olive oil. He chose a 32-ounce bat – very light for that era, when Doerr himself swung a 34- or 35-ounce bat – on the theory that wood wasn't any good unless the batter could handle it.

Once, Doerr and Williams visited the Hillerich & Bradsby bat factory – then major leaguers, they arrived early and sat on the steps until the place opened – and Williams asked the lathe operator to save wood with pin knots for his bats, because Williams believed that made them harder.

Williams had come from a troubled family; he appreciated the evident love in Doerr's. Williams' father ran a photography shop, not very successfully; his mother was an activist in the Salvation Army. In 1961, Williams and Doerr were in San Diego, scouting a young pitcher for the Red Sox, and Williams took Doerr to the former site of his father's shop – it wasn't impressive – and to the street corner where his mother had marched with the Salvation Army, bringing Williams to march as a child.

Williams told Doerr that he'd always tried to hide behind the bass drum. And at that moment, Doerr said, he got it – Williams' embarrassment and loneliness as a child, and the impact that had.

"I thought, 'Oh, boy, this is where it all started,'" Doerr said. "To fight embarrassment, he had to become a perfectionist, in a way. He never wanted to look bad doing anything. That's where he got the perfectionist kind of makeup that he had."

As cantankerous as Williams could be – in his own mind, he never lost an argument – Doerr said, "I always felt that if I was in trouble financially and needed $10,000, he'd have it there as quick as he could. ...

"He had a wonderful personality. He'd do anything in the world for you. He loved his teammates, but he got constant pressure on him all the time and those type of guys almost demand the pressure on them, almost demand attention. It seemed like anytime anything happened, he was always the center of it."

Boston's World Series loss to the Cardinals in 1946 seemed to promise future appearances by the Red Sox, but that group of Williams, Pesky, Dom DiMaggio and Doerr never got back to the fall classic, and Halberstam met the four teammates while writing a book about their most excruciating pennant loss to the Yankees, "Summer of '49."

In quest of reasons for the Red Sox's annual disappointment, Halberstam interviewed Mel Parnell, the former Red Sox pitcher, because pitching had been Boston's downfall.

As they talked, Parnell reminded Halberstam that when he was a rookie, Doerr was already an established star. "I was a kid, and I thought he was about the nicest teammate a person could ever have" Parnell told Halberstam. "And now more than fifty years later I've thought more and I know more about the world, and I've decided he's just about the nicest person I've ever met."

If there are a few reasons that "The Teammates" is a memorable book, Doerr's values are among them.

"I was a good competitor," he said. "I battled to try to win ball games, and take guys out on double plays, but I don't think I was ever arrogant about anything or would do anything to show anybody up.

"I had the feeling that any time you thought you were pretty good, especially in baseball, that somehow you got knocked off your pedestal. As soon as you think you can coast, well, watch out, something's going to happen. I never had the feeling that I was good. I always had the feeling that I had to do a little bit better all the time."

In 1936, Doerr had heard about the fly fishing on Southern Oregon's Rogue River and came to the wild, rugged country near Illahe, about 40 miles from the coast. There were no roads in there then; the place wasn't much different than it had been a century before, and Doerr fell in love with the land and ultimately with the local schoolteacher, Monica Terpin.

"She didn't know a football from a baseball," Doerr said. "Baseball wasn't impressive to her."

They have been married since 1938. Together, they built a house on the Rogue, with a spectacular view of a bend in the river; after baseball, Doerr worked as a fishing guide there, though whenever Williams came out the weather invariably turned ugly. Fifty years ago, the Doerrs built their other home, near Junction City. Monica Doerr has battled health problems – multiple sclerosis that appeared in 1947, went into remission and appeared again in '67, causing her to be confined to a wheelchair since the 1980s, and a pair of strokes four years ago.

When Doerr and Williams would talk by phone, as they did every 10 days or so for years, Williams always would ask first about Moni, and when Halberstam sat in the Doerrs' living room while working on "The Teammates" he would see, in Monica's emphatic reactions, that a telling point had been made. While Williams went through marriages, the Doerrs, Peskys and DiMaggios had classic, loyal marriages that Halberstam clearly admires.

"She's got the makeup of determination, and she's busy doing something all the time," Doerr said of his wife, fondly. "I call her a real hard-head."

Doerr himself said he's feeling well these days, though the couple won't make their customary trip to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony this summer. "My legs are getting a little weak," he said.

Dating to his playing days, Doerr has many mementoes. A letter from Ty Cobb in 1951, in green ink, describing the bat Cobb used, with a postscript in which Cobb said he'd scouted the young Bobby Doerr and rated him a can't-miss major leaguer. A bat that Babe Ruth signed in 1948, the year of his death. Doerr's uniform shirt from Boston, with its No. 1, retired by the Red Sox. A signed photograph of Joe DiMaggio, from the 1940s. Many baseballs.

And yet the richness of Doerr's career is measured in memories and friendships – he still talks regularly with Pesky and Dom DiMaggio – and in the life lived afterward, and in the view of the Rogue River from the place Bobby and Monica Doerr built near Illahe.

"We sit and look at that," he said, "And we think, 'Gosh, how lucky can you be?'"