Ron Bellamy / Eugene 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.

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