“Doerr was easily the most popular player of the Red Sox and possibly the most popular baseball player of his era,” David Halberstam wrote in “Summer of ’49” (1989), an account of a memorable pennant race between the Red Sox and the Yankees. “He was so modest and his disposition so gentle that his colleagues often described him as ‘sweet.’ He was the kind of man other men might have envied had they not liked him so much.”