Next was a book I had been looking forward to for some time. It’s a mixture of two of my favorite subjects (which you can probably guess by what I’ve read this year): World War II and baseball. It was Anne R. Keene’s The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team that Helped Win World War II.
The Cloudbuster
Nine was the clever name of a baseball team made up of Navy pilots going
through intensive training in North Carolina during WWII. At various points, it included Ted Williams, his
friend and teammate Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Sain, among other baseball
players. They traveled to different
parts of the country to play charity games, as well as part of an actual league
of teams from the Carolinas. All the
while, they were also going through perhaps the most difficult training yet
composed for pilots.
All of that
sounds fascinating, and like there’s a lot to uncover. And there is.
Unfortunately, in my mind at least, the author does not spend enough
time talking about either the baseball or the training. It is somewhat glossed over. I certainly don’t see how, as the title says,
this team “helped win WWII,” outside of the training that saved lives. For much of this book, the author focuses on
her dad, who was a batboy for the team, and his disappointment later in life
for failing to reach the Majors. In that
way, it’s kind of depressing.
It's not a bad book. But, for me, it doesn’t really deliver on either the war side or the baseball side. It’s a “human interest” story, but not the human (Ted Williams) who is teased to be the focus of the story.
