America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  (Photo source: Ted Williams kissing bat. From the Daily Boston Globe, September 29, 1941.)

  7.

  Sports: Ted Williams

  “Show Me Your Swing”

  I…insist that regardless of physical assets, I would never have gained a headline for hitting if I [had not] kept everlastingly at it and thought of nothing else the year round…. Then [in childhood] as now, I only lived for my next time at bat.

  —Ted Williams, July 1941 interview with the Boston Evening American

  TED WILLIAMS SMACKS SMACKER.

  Thus ran the caption on the front page of the Boston Globe on September 29, 1941, below the AP photo of “the Kid” kissing his bat after the season-ending doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics. Entering the day’s action hitting .39955, which rounds off to .400, the twenty-three-year-old Red Sox left fielder could have sat out and still etched his name into the record books. While players often quit while they are ahead rather than risk losing a milestone, for Williams, that was not an option. Choosing to “play it all the way,” the six-foot-four, 175-pound John Wayne look-alike collected six hits in eight times at bat, raising his average to .406, the highest in the major leagues since 1924 (and 47 points higher than the second-place finisher). Baseball is a game of numbers, and during his annus mirabilis he racked up some of the best ever. In addition to his ninth-inning walk-off homer in the All-Star Game, Williams hit 37 home runs and drove in 120 runs; he also finished with 145 walks, while striking out a paltry 27 times. His on-base percentage—bases on balls plus hits divided by at bats—came to a staggering .551, a mark that went unmatched for more than sixty years (when it was broken by Barry Bonds who, as critics charge, may well have had some biochemical assistance). No batter has hit .400 since. Analyzing and contextualizing these stats, the late Harvard biologist and baseball aficionado Stephen Jay Gould has called Williams’s accomplishment on the diamond that year “a beacon in the history of excellence, a lesson to all who value the best in human possibility.”

  On that early autumn day, a jubilant Williams was clearly mugging for the cameraman stationed in the visitors’ locker room in Philadelphia, but his lust for lumber was no passing fancy. That year, his Play Ball baseball card described him as “an enthusiastic ball player who would rather wield a bat than eat.” The bat was to him what the machine was to Lindbergh—his emotional anchor, his most profound connection. “It was,” he wrote in his bestselling 1969 memoir, My Turn at Bat, “the center of my heart, hitting a baseball.” Like the security blanket tethered to the fingers of Charles Schulz’s Linus, his bat was a transitional object, to which he repeatedly turned for comfort. Speculating about the thoughts that shaped the perennial All-Star’s inner world, sportswriter Roger Kahn wrote in 1959, a year before Williams’s retirement from the Red Sox, “I never needed anybody. I always had my bat.”

  His love affair with the bat began in boyhood, when home plate substituted for a real home. “[Hitting] was my whole life,” he told Harper’s in 1969. “It was the only thing I wanted to do.” Like Lindbergh, Williams grew up in a tense and severely dysfunctional family. His parents, too, could not stand each other and were mired in a perpetual cold war. During Ted’s grammar school days in San Diego, rarely was any adult present in the family’s small frame house at 4121 Utah Street until 10 p.m. His father, a sometime photographer, was typically out carousing; and his mother, a Salvation Army zealot, was busy trying to save the town’s drunks and prostitutes. After school, Ted would go straight to the nearby diamond at North Park to practice his hitting until 9 p.m., when the lights went out. He would continue swinging his bat in his backyard until one of his parents finally showed up. He would imagine himself at the plate in various situations, something he would continue to do as a Red Sox star. (“We’re in Detroit. [Hal] Newhouser is on the mound. The count is two and one. Here he comes,” Williams would bark out to a Sox teammate during batting practice a couple of decades later.) The next day at dawn, he would be in his backyard, going at it again. “When I wasn’t sleeping or eating,” Williams later noted, “I was practicing swinging.” He got to school just as the janitor opened the building so that he could squeeze in some hitting before class. And if the janitor happened to be late, he climbed through a window to grab the bat himself. “By the time the other kids showed,” he recalled for Time in 1950, “I’d have the bat in my hand, to be the first up.” When he couldn’t get hold of a bona fide bat, he would make one out of paper and swing at anything in his midst, including berries and stones. At Hoover High, he would bring his beloved bat to class. “I always took subjects [like shop] that wouldn’t have much homework,” he later stated, “because I wanted more time for hitting.” The only course, besides phys ed, in which he excelled was typing, for which the perfectionist won an award by cranking out thirty-two words a minute without error.

  And the bat for Williams, like the machine for Lindbergh, was also the primary means by which he drew other people into his life. His baseball coaches would become his surrogate parents. As an adult, his standard conversation starter was “Show me your swing.” It’s a request that Williams would ask not just of fellow ballplayers, but also of kids, sportswriters, old men in wheelchairs, and even nubile women, for whom it sometimes did double duty as a pickup line. He could not imagine that anyone might not share his pressing preoccupation. And once he got a response, Williams relished the chance to help his interlocutor tweak his or her stroke to get in a little more hip action—a necessity for hitting the ball with power. At the Fenway Park memorial celebration held after his death in July 2002, former senator John Glenn, who served in the Marines with Williams during the Korean War, recalled how a half century earlier in Kyoto, the Sox outfielder had befriended a Japanese boy whom he spotted taking phantom swings with an imaginary bat. “The boy hitter swung again,” stated Glenn, “but this time Ted scowled at him. He went over to where the boy was standing, put him in a batting position and proceeded to correct his form!” Stepping away, Williams then threw an imaginary baseball toward the boy who demonstrated his newly tailored swing. Williams immediately ducked, as if a searing line drive were coming straight for his head—a gesture that led the batter and his young companions standing next to him to jump for joy. After his retirement from baseball, the bat would still cement connections, though it would not be quite as central to his social life as its successor, the fishing rod. Casting both spinning and fly rods with the same precision as he swung a bat, in 1999, Williams would be inducted into the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame.

  For Williams, bats were not just the tools of his trade, but holy relics. During his Red Sox career, he would make a pilgrimage every winter to Kentucky to speak with those responsible for creating his favorite companions. “He was one of our best clients; he loved us and was loyal to us,” said Nathan Stalvey in a phone interview. Stalvey is the curator of the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, the bat company that still supplies about 70 percent of major leaguers with their lumber. When Bud Hillerich, the CEO of batmaker Hillerich and Bradsby, died in 1946, Williams was the only player in all of baseball to wire condolences to the exec’s loved ones. “As far as our family is concerned,” an appreciative John Hillerich, who was Bud’s son and successor, told the Boston Globe the following year, “Ted can have the best in bats.” Williams would not settle for anything less. He would often slip the Louisville Slugger lathe operator, Fritz Bickel, a twenty spot, in order to ensure that his bats had more grain lines per inch—the closer the grain lines, the higher quality the wood—than those sent to other players. Whenever he got a shipment of bats, he would dash over to the post office to weigh them; he wanted to make sure that they were exactly as advertised. Toward the end of summer, he would do a retest, as his bats often gained a half ounce due to the humidity. In the mid-1950s, Williams sent back to Louisville a box of twenty bats, complaining that they did not feel right. Upon examination, the company realized that he was correct; the bat handles were fiv
e-thousandths of an inch off. And he was constantly providing lots of tender loving care. “I always worked with my bats,” he later wrote, “boning them down, putting a shine on them, forcing the fibers together.…I treated them like babies.” In the Red Sox clubhouse, his bats were assigned their own locker, adjacent to his.

  Williams was not just an expert practitioner; he was also a hitting savant. He was one of the first players to switch to a lighter bat to increase bat speed. In contrast to Babe Ruth, who used a forty-ounce bat to slug sixty homers in 1927, Williams used a thirty-two-ounce bat in 1941. Today most players still heed his wisdom. “Lord knows I wasn’t much of a student,” the intellectually curious autodidact, who once described why as “a wonderful word,” later recalled. “But baseballically, I was a cum laude.” More than a generation before stats geeks such as Bill James launched the field of sabermetrics, Williams was already compiling data. Soon after arriving in Florida for his first spring training with the Red Sox—for moral support, he toted his own bat to camp—he began gathering info on opposing pitchers, which he kept in a little black book. Like a dogged investigative journalist, he would dig and dig and dig. To get the full scoop on a given pitcher’s habits, he would quiz not only any veteran who would listen to his flood of questions but also umpires. Blessed with a phenomenal memory, he could remember the sequences of pitches in a given at bat for decades after the fact. “Ted didn’t need a computer to track pitchers. He was his own computer,” Frank Malzone, the Sox All-Star third baseman in the late 1950s, told me. Williams also did a systematic study of every big-league park, learning about the slope of the batter’s box—in Fenway, it was a tad higher in the back, enabling him to plant his back foot more firmly—and the prevailing wind currents. His fieldwork also included a visit to the physics lab at Cambridge’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he learned about the trajectory of baseballs upon impact. “Some people called it monomania,” Richard Ben Cramer observed in his landmark 1986 Esquire article, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” of the thoroughness with which Williams studied hitting, “but with Ted it was serial (multimania?) in eager furtherance of everything he loved.”

  A master of his craft, Williams continued to excel even as injuries and advancing age slowed him down. In 1957, at thirty-nine, the left-handed slugger stunned the baseball world by making another go at .400, finishing at a robust .388. The following year, he won his seventh batting title; he remains the oldest man ever to win a batting crown. In his last at bat, in September of 1960, he slammed his 521st home run. (If he had not lost nearly five full seasons in his prime due to military service, most experts agree that he might have challenged Babe Ruth’s longstanding record of 714.) For his career, Williams hit .344, higher than any other power hitter, including Ruth, and his lifetime slugging percentage (total bases divided by at bats) is second only to Ruth’s. Moreover, his lifetime on-base percentage (OBP) of .483 is tops. While an OBP anywhere north of .400 is indicative of a stand-out season, only three times in nineteen seasons did Williams’s OBP dip below .450. At the plate, this perfectionist came closer to perfection than any other hitter in history, reaching base nearly one out of every two times he ever came to bat. The adolescent who vowed to become “the greatest hitter who ever lived” remained true to his word.

  At the center of Williams’s methodology was a simple concept: “Get a good pitch to hit.” This was the advice that he received from Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby (the only man besides Williams ever to win the Triple Crown—to lead the league in batting, home runs, and RBIs—twice), his batting instructor during his stint with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association in 1938. In The Science of Hitting, the influential manual Williams wrote after his playing days were over, he divided home plate into seventy-seven baseballs. As he explained, he strove to hit at pitches in “his happy zone”—the fifteen baseballs in the middle—where he could expect to hit .400. In contrast, he could hope to hit only .230 when he swung at pitches in the low-outside corner. Approximately 95 percent of the time, he took the first pitch so that he could study how the pitcher was throwing. He would do his best to avoid anything outside the strike zone. And in the late innings, with the game on the line, he might try to hit the bottom half of the ball in order to increase his chances of hitting a home run. He ended up with a higher percentage of game-winning home runs than any other player, including Ruth.

  While Williams was convinced that he knew best, he made some allowances for individual differences. As he told numerous players, including his successor in left field at Fenway Park, Carl Yastrzemski, “Don’t let anyone change your swing.” Though he was horrified by the approach of the Yankee Hall of Famer Yogi Berra (“The son of a bitch got his bat on the ball” was how Williams described his rival’s style), he conceded that the Berra Method might work, but only for a select few. In direct contrast to the Splinter, Berra was a “bad-ball hitter,” meaning that he wouldn’t hesitate to swing at high or inside pitches off the plate. “As I always said,” Berra explained to me, “if I could see it, I could hit it. Ted wouldn’t swing at too many pitches I would. But we had one thing in common. Neither of us struck out much.” But Berra’s OBP was never above .400 in any season—it was just .348 over the course of his career—and his lifetime average was a not-quite-majestic .285.

  In the batter’s box during a game, Williams, unlike Berra, was a paragon of rationality, precision, and patience. “No other player,” John Updike mused in the famous New Yorker profile published after Williams’s final game, “so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.” The same was true in those two other places to which he later transferred his exceptional hitting prowess—the airplane where he became a decorated fighter pilot and the boat where he evolved into one of the world’s best fly-fisherman. However, just about everywhere else, even on other parts of the baseball field, he was more a disorganized jumble of raw nerve endings than an apotheosis of anything.

  Rarely could he sit still, as his attention easily wandered. Early in his career, he would infuriate managers by turning his back to the action in right field—he did not move to left field until his second season with the Sox—in order to practice his swing with an imaginary bat. He remained a lackadaisical fielder who looked, as Time reported in 1950, “like a tired and slightly bored businessman” while standing in front of Fenway Park’s Green Monster. Impulsive by nature, he often let his emotions hijack his brain. A notorious F-bomb hurler, “he was,” wrote Leigh Montville, author of the definitive Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero (2004), “the best curser in the history of the human race.” Before the fans got to the park, to get himself psyched for that day’s game, he was prone to yell at the batting practice pitcher, “I’m Ted fucking Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball.” His actions could be as crude as his adjectives. Too thin-skinned to tolerate any booing, he would vent his rage with the Fenway Park faithful by performing obscene gestures and spitting in their direction. For one of his legendary “great expectorations,” in 1956, an exasperated Sox general manager Joe Cronin fined him $5,000, which was 5 percent of his annual salary (the equivalent of about a million bucks today, since stars of his magnitude now make upward of $20 million).

  Like other obsessives, Williams did not do intimacy. He rarely hung out with teammates, preferring the company of sycophants such as clubhouse attendants who were in awe of him and would agree to do as he pleased such as consume the evening meal in the late afternoon. “Bing, bang boom, get it the hell over with” was how the slugger approached the dinner plate. He could not handle the give-and-take of real relationships. “With women, he had a reputation for being a pig,” veteran Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy told me.

  Scouting out for company for the night (or the afternoon), the playboy, who would quickly alienate all three wives with his constant barrage of vicious epithets, would blurt out to unsuspecting strangers, “Do you fuck?” (Given that
he was Ted Williams, his boorishness didn’t doom him to a microscopic batting average.) Wife number two, Lee Howard, a statuesque blonde whom he married in 1961, threw him out after just a couple of years. “If we went fishing,” the former model recalled, “he would scream at me, call me dumb, and kick the tackle box.” When asked by the judge at her divorce hearing whether there was any chance of reconciling with her husband, a startled Howard responded, “Are you kidding?”

  And like his parents before him, Williams neglected his three children—his daughter Bobby-Jo, from his first marriage to Doris Soule; and his son, John Henry, and daughter Claudia from his third marriage to Dolores Wettach. He was not present for any of their births, and for long stretches of time he pretended as if they did not exist. Late in life, as he found love in the arms of an older woman, Louise Kaufman, he recognized and tried to make amends for his wayward ways. “I was,” he would confess to anyone who would listen, “horseshit as a father.”

  But though “Terrible Ted,” a nickname that emerged shortly after his major-league debut, often mistreated his nearest and dearest, he could be a charmer and a lively conversationalist. With his booming voice—his hearing soured after his service in Korea—he entranced interlocutors on many subjects besides hittingology. “He was a student of everything,” stated John Underwood in a phone interview. Underwood, his coauthor on My Turn at Bat, added that Williams would spend hours burying his head in his World Book Encyclopedia. After devouring William Manchester’s critical volume on his hero, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the lifelong conservative with the photographic memory got into a friendly argument with Doris Kearns Goodwin. “I didn’t agree,” the armchair historian told the bestselling author, whom he liked to needle by calling her Pinko, “with [the biographer] in certain things.” Williams was also capable of nearly otherworldly empathy and generosity.