As they left the grounds together, Bart Giamatti was doubly thrilled, first that he had met his hero, and second that his hero was the person he had wanted him to be.
Joe Lelyveld did not grow up to play right field for the New York Yankees. Instead he went to Harvard and from there he went to work for The New York Times, becoming one of that newspaper’s most distinguished foreign correspondents, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book on South Africa. In 1987 he ran into the author of this book at a party. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I was writing a book about the Yankees and the Red Sox in 1949. “Did you know,” he said, “that in that season, before DiMaggio came back from his bad foot, Tommy Henrich hit something like fifteen home runs and almost everyone of them won a ball game.” “I knew that,” I answered, “but how the hell did you know that.” A small smile passed over Lelyveld’s face and for a moment he became the little boy he had been sitting by himself in his room, listening to Mel Allen. “I helped him do it,” he answered.
Ted Williams played for eleven more seasons. His career was interrupted again—the draft board recalled him for service in Korea, for his second tour of duty, though many young Americans of that period had yet to serve one tour. His love/hate affair with the Boston fans continued. In his last time up in 1960, he quite fittingly hit a home run, the 521st of his career. The moment was captured eloquently by the American novelist John Updike in a piece for The New Yorker magazine, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” Of that last home run, Updike wrote, “Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his hat. Though we thumped, wept and chanted ‘We Want Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters.”
Retired, Williams continued to live on his own terms. As he aged, he became even more handsome, his face now leathery. He was crusty, outspoken, and unbending, a frontier man in the modern age, the real John Wayne. “He is not a man for this age,” his old friend and teammate Birdie Tebbetts said of him. “The only place I would put him, the only place he’d be at home, is the Alamo.” In an age where, because of television, fame was regularly confused with accomplishment, and where many of the society’s new instant celebrities seemed cut from plastic, Ted Williams stood in sharp contrast, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, warts and all; whatever else, he was never anything less than real.
He lived in Islamorada, Florida, a tiny village in the Florida Keys where the fishing is among the best in the world. He worked to stay away from the steadily encroaching signs of modern civilization. His best friends were the town’s bonefish guides. Bonefish are a prized quarry of sportsfishermen, and catching them demanded, among other assets, exceptional eyesight. Watching Williams banter with the guides, one had the sense that he had merely changed teammates.
Williams lived simply. His friends complained that if they go fishing with him, lunch is likely to be an apple and a candy bar.
After thirty years in Islamorada, in 1988 he finally pulled up stakes and moved north to the Ocala area. One reason he moved was that he was disheartened by the constant development in the Keys, the growing incursion of fishermen with huge powerboats, and the diminishing quality of the fishing. When he wanted to fish for bone, he went over to the Bahamas.
There was, based on his lingering hatred of the messiness of his childhood home, no one who was neater and more careful of his living space. He was precise about everything. He hated shoddiness of any kind. In his world you either did things well or you did things poorly. If you did things poorly, he wanted no part of you. He had always sought to be the best, and carelessness in any form was a personal affront. When he fished he paid strict attention to details. During the summer he left his home in Florida and went to New Brunswick, where he had a house on the Miramichi. There he fished every day. He knew exactly how far he cast every day—for he knew the length of each cast, roughly ninety feet, how long he fished, and how many casts he made per hour. Two miles of casting each day. A man had to do things right. In the summer of 1988 he had a strike from a monster salmon. While his friends watched from his house above the pool, he deftly fought the fish and finally brought it in. It weighed thirty-five pounds, the largest fish he had ever taken out of the river.
Rather late in life he became an avid tennis player, playing loudly and joyously if somewhat imperfectly. Looking for games was not always easy, since he liked to rise early and play while most people were still asleep. He liked to eat dinner at five P.M. because he liked to go to sleep early so he could rise early. At dinner parties his voice could be heard saying, “All great tennis players go to bed early,” or, “All great fishermen go to bed early.” He wanted people gone by seven-thirty, and usually they were.
He was, in fact, a tall, exuberant, volatile seventy-year-old kid, still boyish in his enthusiasms, still boyish in his anger. When he talked baseball he became passionate; a brief interview could become a long one. He acted out every part of every play. He loved demonstrating the proper swing and how to drive the ball. He remained very much a part of baseball, active in the Red Sox organization, lecturing younger players about the most important thing in the world—hitting, emphasizing the importance of quickness, and of driving the ball up, and thereby getting the ball in the air.
In the spring of 1987 Williams talked with a promising young hitter in the Red Sox camp named Sam Horn. On that day there had been an exhibition game and Horn had gone one-for-four and looked fairly good. “Sam,” Williams asked, “do you know what I want to talk to you about?” “Yeah, Ted, I know,” Horn laughed. “ ‘Get it in the air, Sam, get it in the air.’ ”
In the spring of 1988 Williams was thrilled that his son John Henry was doing well in college and was going to try out for the University of Maine baseball team. He treasures a photo that John Henry had sent him the previous Christmas. On it his son had written, “Merry Christmas, Dad. Be Quick and Swing Slightly Up.”
His loyalty to his former teammates is unflagging. He drops in on Pesky and Dom DiMaggio regularly; he visited Bobby Doerr at his rural place on the Rogue River in Oregon. There they and a bunch of Doerr’s friends went salmon fishing. Inevitably, when they took a break from fishing, the subject swung around to hitting, with, of course, Williams dominating the conversation. Since Williams tends to overwhelm Doerr, the latter instigated a series of ground rules: Each would be able to talk for ten minutes and then the other would be allowed a five-minute rebuttal. Williams and Doerr disagreed somewhat on the philosophy of hitting. Williams insisted that a good hitter had to swing slightly up, because the pitcher’s mound is fifteen inches higher than home plate and a level trajectory is not truly level—it grinds the ball down. Therefore, the batter’s swing should incorporate the angle of the mound. Doerr believed that a level swing was better, but he knew, of course, even as he argued, that no one had ever won an argument on hitting from Theodore S. Williams. Whenever Doerr was talking, Ted Williams managed to interrupt by clattering cooking gear and telling the others that Doerr was crazy and that it was a miracle he was in the Hall of Fame. It must have been like this trying to argue with George Patton, Doerr thought. He marveled at his friend; fifty years later and nothing had changed.
Charlie Keller became a very successful breeder of trotting horses in Maryland, proud of the fact that he was as successful in his postbaseball career as in his career as an athlete. Phil Rizzuto became a broadcaster and still broadcasts Yankee games. Jerry Coleman worked in Yankee management for a time. Then he became a broadcaster in New York before heading to San Diego, where, after a brie
f and not particularly pleasant tour as a manager, he remains a broadcaster. Tommy Henrich stayed in baseball for a time, did not find it easy dealing with a different generation of athletes, and quickly got out. For a while he had a beer franchise, and worked in several other businesses. Now he lives in retirement in Arizona. Bobby Brown became a successful heart surgeon in Texas before becoming president of the American League. His old roommate Yogi Berra became a legendary figure in sports, eventually managed the Yankees and coached with the Mets, and is now a coach with Houston. Berra over the years became something of a cult figure in America. His Yogiisms (“It ain’t over till it’s over”) are frequently quoted by important fellow Americans, including those running for president of the United States. Much to his teammates’ surprise, Berra’s looks and style became career assets. He probably ended up making more money from commercials than any member of that team. There are, even now working on Madison Avenue, a considerable number of highly educated young men and women whose job it is to invent semiauthentic Yogiisms to help with his endorsement of a wide variety of products. His most recent role in the media was as a television film critic. Allie Reynolds went back to Oklahoma and had a successful career in the oil business, helped in no small part by the oil on his family property. Vic Raschi never became the instructor in physical education that he wanted to be. He ran a liquor store in Conesus, New York, for a time. As proud, unbending, and forceful in retirement as he was as a player, he remained angry for a long time because of the way George Weiss had treated him. He was reluctant to go to Yankee old-timers’ games. In the fall of 1988, he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-nine. Tommy Byrne, who had longed for a career in politics, once asked Casey Stengel if Stengel thought he should run for governor. Stengel thought about it overnight and told Byrne the next day that he would make a great governor of North Carolina. Byrne did opt for politics and became, for several terms, the mayor of Wake Forest, North Carolina. Hank Bauer managed, coached, and ran a liquor store for many years. His platoon-mate, Gene Woodling, owned a horse farm in Ohio, and watched his land increase infinitely in value as ex-urban Cleveland reached out to his area. Eddie Lopat remained in baseball, coaching and scouting. He still scouts for the Yankees. Charlie Silvera lived in the Bay Area and scouted for the Yankees. Fred Sanford returned to Utah, where he worked as a deputy sheriff in Salt Lake County and then as a construction inspector in Salt Lake City. Clarence Marshall lived in the greater Los Angeles area, worked for twenty-five years in the financial department for Litton Industries, and was proud that he had mastered a job that often required a college degree and that he had managed to send both his daughters to the University of Southern California. Joe Page had no curve, and so when his fastball went, his career was over. He had a difficult life after baseball, running a tavern in the coal-mining region of Pennsylvania where he grew up. He died a painful death of throat cancer. Spec Shea went back to his hometown of Naugatuck, Connecticut, and was in charge of youth recreation there. John Lindell worked as a traffic cop in California and died of emphysema. Casey Stengel seemed, on reflection, to have been born to manage the Yankees—he was a winning manager in the media capital of the world. Stunningly quotable, he became almost as big an attraction as his star players. Not only did his teams go on to win five World Series in a row, but after losing the pennant in 1954, they won four more pennants in a row. In 1960, after winning the pennant but losing the World Series, he was fired at the age of seventy-one. “I commenced winning pennants as soon as I got here,” he noted at the time, “but I did not commence getting any younger.” Two years later he started managing the new expansion team in New York, the Mets. His teams there always came in last. One of his players was Gene Woodling, who had starred for him with the Yankees. Every once in a while when things were going very badly, Stengel would grin and wink at Woodling. “It wasn’t like this over there,” he would say glancing in the general direction of Yankee Stadium. Curt Gowdy, the rookie broadcaster with the Yankees in 1949, became the lead broadcaster for the Red Sox the following year. He went on to become one of the best known and most popular broadcasters in the country. Mel Allen, who had helped train him, remained the voice of the Yankees, but suffered a terrible moment in the 1963 World Series when the Dodgers swept the Yankees in four games. His voice gave out over the air. Though there were physiological reasons for this, some connected the loss of his voice to the decline of the Yankees. Dick Young wrote that it was a psychosomatic failure. A year later, Dan Topping, the owner of the Yankees, who was irritated by what he believed was Allen’s tendency to talk too much on television, pulled him after the regular season and did not let him broadcast the World Series. It was a traumatic moment for Allen and it took him a long time to get over it. In recent years he has made something of a comeback and his voice is often heard now on different sports shows and in commercials. John Morley, the young man who worked for Harry Stevens while going to college, liked the company and his work there so much that he stayed with Stevens for the rest of his life. He is currently vice-president in charge of operations at Shea Stadium. Ballantine, one of the first beers to understand the value of television advertising, was eventually eaten by the very tiger it was riding; advertising became so critical to beer sales that local beers were systematically crushed by the national brands, which devoted ever-increasing shares of their revenues to national ad campaigns. It closed in 1972.
For the Red Sox, Johnny Pesky, aside from a brief tour with the Minneapolis team, spent the remainder of his life with the Red Sox, as a coach, scout, manager, and broadcaster. “I’m a baseball man, that’s all I’ve ever known, and I’ll probably die in this uniform,” he told friends. In the mid-eighties he became quite sick with a mysterious illness. He lost a great deal of weight and seemed on the verge of death. His illness defied diagnosis for a long time. At the last minute doctors discovered that it was a late-blooming allergy to wheat. His diet was changed accordingly and his health returned. Dom DiMaggio walked away from baseball cold when he felt that Lou Boudreau, the new Boston manager, had treated him with disrespect by opening the 1953 season with the rookie Tom Umphlett in Dominic’s center-field position. He started a company in New Hampshire that made nonwoven carpeting for cars. He became very successful. He was, thought his friend Pesky, even more successful in his life after baseball than he was during it. Even in retirement, Dom DiMaggio would spend his day in front of a television screen watching the stock-market prices change and staying constantly in touch with his broker. When the Yawkey family put the Red Sox up for sale, DiMaggio put together a syndicate to buy it, though it was said by reliable sources that the Yawkey family never took his bid or those of others very seriously. Some fifteen years ago it became clear that he had Paget’s disease, which causes a bone in a given area to grow both larger and softer. DiMaggio experienced problems with his hip and back, suffering considerable pain. He walked as proudly as ever, but he walked bent over at the waist. At the end of the 1951 season Bobby Doerr was playing as well as ever, but he was experiencing terrible pain in his back. Doctors told him that in order to play he would have to undergo a dangerous operation. If he retired, however, the back might heal itself. So, at the age of thirty-three he retired. For a time he ran a cattle ranch in Oregon, but found that too demanding with too little financial remuneration. He went back into baseball, serving as a roving minor-league hitting instructor for the Red Sox, and eventually coaching for Toronto when it was a minor-league and then a major-league team. Eventually he went back to rural Oregon, where he fished and hunted and even for a time in the seventies worked as a fishing guide. More than almost any other player of that era, he remained beloved by contemporaries. Tex Hughson became a wealthy man as the town of San Marcos kept expanding onto the land that had once comprised his cattle ranch. Boo Ferriss, after his career ended at a terribly early age, became a baseball coach in his native Mississippi for the Delta State team there. Mel Parnell did some broadcasting for a time, and now is the co-owner of a pest-re
moval company in New Orleans. Walt Dropo, sent back to the minors in early 1949, was Rookie of the Year in 1950. Now he runs an import-export business dealing primarily in fireworks with Asian companies. At times his old friend and teammate Maurice McDermott worked for him. Joe Dobson worked for the Red Sox in several capacities, including one as groundskeeper of their minor-league field. He retired and lived in Arizona; he feels bad that old-timers’ games seemed to pay too much attention to the very big stars of an era rather than to the everyday ballplayers who held the game together. Birdie Tebbetts managed for eleven years in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Cleveland, and now is a scout for Cleveland. Matt Batts runs a successful printing company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Junior Stephens worked on the periphery of baseball for a time, primarily as a representative of the Louisville Slugger company. Robust, powerful, and seemingly indestructible as a player, he keeled over on a golf course and died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight in November 1968. Dave Egan, the Boston columnist who tormented Ted Williams, died in May 1958 at the age of fifty-seven.
The Record, the paper which had for so long tormented Williams, died as a separate entity in 1961 when it merged with another tabloid, the American. Where there had been seven papers fighting each other for news about him, by 1988 there were only two left in Boston.
Forty years later Williams could still remember that last game of the 1949 pennant race. “Oh, God, that cheap hit, that cheap goddamn hit,” he said. “It’s like it’s yesterday. Coleman is up. Tex makes a good pitch. A damn good pitch. Then Bobby is going back and Zeke is coming in. Oh, Jesus, I can still see it with my eyes closed. Zeke is diving for it, and then I see it squirting to the foul line. It’s funny how you can remember something so painful so clearly. God, the locker room, it was silent. Like we were all dead. McCarthy was graceful. He had to be in terrible pain, but he went over to the Yankee locker room to congratulate them. Managers didn’t always do that. Me, I couldn’t talk. I could not speak at all. I felt as if someone had died. It was the worst thing that had ever happened. That cheap hit. Forty years later I can close my eyes and still see it, still see Zeke diving for it, and the ball squirting to the line ...”
Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Page 31
