The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Of course dealing with the zany, mercurial Williams would have been enough to tax any manager, and Donie Bush was no exception. At one point, Bush grew so frustrated that he went to Mike Kelley and threatened to resign if Williams wasn’t shipped out. But Kelley, reinforced by the Red Sox, quickly called that bluff and let Bush know that a choice between letting go the greatest hitting talent to come along in years and a highly replaceable manager was no choice at all. Apart from that minicrisis, Bush handled Williams skillfully and shrewdly.

  After one midseason slump, Ted told Bush he was fed up and needed to go home to San Diego to chill out for a while. The manager thought the best way to deal with this outrageous request was by humoring the rookie, so he told him to go ahead and leave.

  “Donie Bush got so he could get to me with a little psychology,” Ted wrote, recalling the incident.55 “When I was having my troubles and packed my trunk one time and told him I was going home, he didn’t blow up at all, he just said, ‘OK, Ted, I’ll line up the transportation and when you’ve had a nice visit you can come back.’ I went right to my room and unpacked that trunk.”

  Ted had a breezy, irreverent relationship with his manager. One day, after hitting a double and getting fed up with Bush’s constant screaming from his third-base coaching perch about how big a lead to take, Ted finally yelled: “Take it easy, Skip. I got here by myself. I’ll get home by myself.”56

  “What a headache he was!” Bush later said of Ted. “He did some daffy things.… But you had to like him.”57

  “If Donie hadn’t put up with me as a raw kid in 1938, I wouldn’t be here today or perhaps even in baseball,” Ted would say twenty years later on a trip back to Minneapolis in the off-season. “He was great to me, and I’ll never forget him for going along with me.”58

  In 1939, Ted’s first year with the Red Sox, Bush was in a Saint Louis hospital recovering from major surgery. Though visitors were barred, every time the Red Sox came to Saint Louis to play the Browns, Ted would come by the hospital and try, unsuccessfully, to visit him. Ted wrote Bush a letter after one failed visit, saying he had tried to see him, then added: “I guess you saw enough of this busher last year, eh?”59

  Overriding all Williams’s bizarre behavior was his astonishing hitting. He finished the season with an average of .366, 43 home runs, and 142 runs batted in to win the American Association’s Triple Crown. He also led the league in runs scored (130) and total bases (370).

  In addition to posting those gaudy numbers and maturing at least a little, Ted thought two other important things had happened that summer to fuel his development as a hitter.

  On August 3, in Milwaukee, he was struck in the head with a ball thrown by the Brewers’ “Wild Bill” Zuber. This was apparently the first time Ted had been beaned. He was knocked out cold, sustained a concussion, and had to be carried off the field. There seemed little doubt it was a purpose pitch, as he had been 2–2 with four RBIs to that point against Zuber.

  After being hospitalized for two days, he returned on August 6 in Kansas City, intent on proving to himself that he could dig in again without fear. Facing Kemp Wicker, who had pitched for the Yankees the year before and was considered one of the best left-handers in the American Association, Ted grounded out his first two times up, then hit a home run and a double, knocking in four runs. “That was when I knew that I would never worry about how I was going to react to a beaning,” Ted said. “I was proud of myself.”60

  Another revelation that season was the value of using a lighter bat. This went against then-conventional wisdom, which held that power hitters by definition always used heavy bats. Williams would pioneer a countertheory: it was not the weight of the bat but the whip and speed at which it collided with the ball that generated power. Using a lighter bat could generate more whip as well as conserve a hitter’s energy and strength in the dog days of summer.

  “It was real hot in Minneapolis, hotter than anything I had been used to on the West Coast,” Ted said. “I was on base all the time, an average of two and a half times a game, just swinging and sweating all the time, and as thin as I was, began to get tired. One muggy hot night in Columbus, I happened to pick up one of Stan Spence’s bats. Geez, I thought. ‘What a toothpick. Lightest bat in the rack…’ ”61 He asked Spence if he could borrow it, then got up with the bases loaded. Behind on the count two strikes, he swung at a pitch low and away and hit it 410 feet over the center-field fence.

  “That really woke me up. From then on, I always used lighter bats, usually 33 or 34 ounces, never more than 34, sometimes as light as 31. In the earlier part of the year I’d go for the heavier ones with better wood. You’re stronger then, the pitchers are still working to get their stuff down, to get their control.”62

  Toward the end of his sensational season, the press was full of speculation about what he would do with the Red Sox the following year, but Ted shocked local reporters with a counterintuitive comment: maybe he wasn’t ready to leave just yet. “I want to stay right here in Minneapolis with the Millers for another year at least,” he said. “I’m not ready for the major leagues. Another year under Donie Bush will do me a lot of good.”63

  The Millers finished the season with a 78–74 record, in sixth place and out of the playoffs. To try and recoup some of the money they would have earned in the postseason, the older players organized a barnstorming tour for two weeks. They would travel to backwoods towns in Minnesota and the Dakotas, following the trail of festivals and carnivals, challenging the top local talent. The veterans asked Ted to join them, knowing he’d be the top draw, and Williams agreed.

  Ted “did that for us,” catcher Otto Denning told Ed Linn. “We made twenty dollars a game, and in those days twenty bucks was like a thousand now. He was one hell of a wonderful person.”

  The first game was in Worthington, Minnesota, and when the Millers arrived, there was a full house screaming for Williams’s head. It seems Ted had told a local sportscaster that the first stop of the barnstorming tour would be “some jerk town called Worthington.”

  “Everybody was booing him,” Denning said. “You know how he quieted them? He hit a home run in his first time at bat that went out of the park and over some cow barns. It must have gone 500 feet. For the rest of the game they cheered every move he made.”64

  Lefty LeFebvre was on the trip, along with Ted’s landlord, pitcher Wally Tauscher, and Stan Spence. They rode with Ted in his red Buick.

  One day as they were traveling to the next stop, LeFebvre remembered, Ted asked Tauscher to drive his car while he sat in the front passenger seat. He’d brought his shotgun on the trip, along with a case of shotgun shells he’d been given by a Millers sponsor. He propped the shotgun up between his legs and rolled the window down. As they sped through the countryside, if Ted saw an animal of some kind that he deemed a suitable target, he’d whip the gun out the window, take aim, and blast away at it.

  “I think we were in South Dakota, way out there, and Ted was firing away out the window,” LeFebvre said. “Boom! Boom! Boom! He’d stop for a while, and then he would see something, and boom again! I thought we were going to get pinched. I think he killed a couple of cats, a dog on a farm, maybe a cow, too. He was a wild man.”65

  At one stop, Ted bet and lost $400 at a carnival wheel game, but the operator of the game was apparently controlling the wheel with his foot. According to Otto Denning, Tauscher insisted that Ted go to the local district attorney and report the sharpie, and he was able to get $200 of his money back.66

  Ted drove home to San Diego for the winter, eager more than anything else to show off his new car to friends. Joe Villarino and the boys were duly impressed, as were the regulars at Ted’s neighborhood fire station, where he’d take the car to hose it down and buff its sheen.

  As for where he’d be playing baseball next season, if there had been any doubts, the Red Sox removed them on December 15, 1938, by announcing that they had traded their starting right fielder, Ben Chapman, to Cleveland for Den
ny Galehouse and Tommy Irwin. Ted was bound for Boston to replace Chapman.

  The Red Sox were grateful to Minneapolis for bringing their young star along. At baseball’s winter meetings, Boston owner Tom Yawkey handed Mike Kelley, his Millers counterpart, an envelope. Inside it was a $10,000 check with a note that read: “Thanks, Mike, for making a ballplayer out of Ted Williams.”67

  4

  Big Time

  On March 1, 1939, Williams set out from his San Diego home in style, climbing into his Buick convertible for the long cross-country drive to Sarasota and the start of his big-league adventure.

  It would be a year in which Ted would establish himself as a singular talent on the field and almost as big an attraction off it, as the press—seduced by the Kid’s refreshing, guileless persona—touted him as an American original. Williams professed to be fresh off the “haystack circuit,” even posing as a Huck Finn–like rube for a Boston newspaper and, in a tableau of innocence, delighting Fenway fans by doffing his cap—lifting it right off his head by the button. But he would back up his showmanship by hitting like a seasoned All-Star, weathering slumps and rebuffing pitchers who tried to test him with baseball’s requisite rite of passage: the knockdown pitch.

  Ted would establish a beachhead in a Boston hotel and forge friendships with a handful of non–big shots, like a state cop and managers of a restaurant and movie theater. But in his first year, he would rely most on his Red Sox family: clubhouse man Johnny Orlando, Bobby Doerr (his link to California), slugger Jimmie Foxx, catcher Moe Berg, and pitchers Charlie Wagner and Elden Auker. Ted’s bosses—player-manager Joe Cronin and Tom Yawkey, the thirty-six-year-old owner—offered him detached guidance.

  Thus far the six-year Yawkey regime had been characterized by failed—and what were then thought to be profligate—attempts to buy a pennant. Yawkey had first purchased two pitchers from the Yankees in 1933 for $100,000: George Pipgras and Bill Werber. Then he acquired Lefty Grove, Rube Walberg, and Max Bishop from the Philadelphia Athletics for $125,000 and two players. Cronin was obtained from the Washington Senators for a staggering $225,000 and an infielder in 1934; then came Foxx in 1935 for $150,000 and a journeyman pitcher.

  In 1934, Yawkey further pampered his players by instituting a bonus system, boosting pay by a certain percentage of their salaries if the club finished third—then double that if it finished second and triple if it won the pennant. Critics called this coddling and noted that the incentives seemed to do little good, as the team finished fourth in 1934, fourth in 1935, sixth in 1936, and fifth in 1937 before improving to second in 1938.

  But inspired by the arrival of Williams, Yawkey had high hopes for 1939, and the owner would cap off the spring training season by exercising a personal prerogative. As the Red Sox headed north for the start of the season, he had his team stop and play an exhibition game against the Cincinnati Reds in an unlikely locale: Florence, South Carolina, where there was no suitable ball field and local officials had to fashion one from scratch.

  The Florence site was a home game of sorts for Yawkey because it was near his twenty-thousand-acre oceanfront former rice plantation in Georgetown, where he spent most of the year. He brought in several carloads of his high-ranking employees and their families to see his club in action. Not invited were the one hundred or so black field hands who comprised the backbone of the estate or the madam who ran the Sunset Lodge, a high-class bordello in Georgetown famed throughout the South, which Yawkey had financed and continued to patronize himself.

  The reclusive Yawkey’s time in Georgetown amounted to a largely secret world in which he lived the life of a gentleman-sportsman perpetually at ease—hunting, fishing, and partaking of the Sunset’s services whenever he wished. Over the years, Yawkey would offer the same pleasures to his guests, including Ted and other favored members of the Red Sox. Yawkey’s hidden life in Georgetown offered a window into the culture of paternalism, generosity, and subtle racism with which he ran his ball club.

  Williams didn’t want to make the trip from San Diego to Florida alone, so he asked one of his surrogate fathers, Les Cassie Sr., if he’d like to come along, then stay on in Sarasota awhile to watch some workouts. It’s doubtful Ted even considered asking his own father. But Cassie, the neighbor who had taught Ted surf casting and given him his only high school graduation present, was delighted, and he arranged to take leave of his job as superintendent of construction for the San Diego schools.

  On the road, Ted picked up a virus, as he was prone to do, and when he reached New Orleans he was running a temperature of 102. A doctor advised him to lay low and rest for a few days. So by the time he arrived in Sarasota, March 7, he was two days late and still looking a bit peaked.

  The Boston press corps, always lusting for good spring training copy, had been on high alert for the Kid’s arrival. This was the second year in a row that he’d come to Sarasota late, and the writers seemed skeptical of his story that Arizona had been cooler than normal this year and that he’d probably picked up the bug there. Couldn’t he have called or wired manager Joe Cronin to let him know he’d be late? That never occurred to him, Ted said. He offered up the avuncular Mr. Cassie as his alibi witness, who corroborated everything, and the writers seemed mollified.

  Ted told a few reporters whom he bumped into while checking in at the Sarasota Terrace Hotel that he was too tired to work out that afternoon. “I’ll be out there tomorrow showing the boys how it should be done,” he said.1

  But Cronin, on learning that Williams had arrived, sent a clubhouse boy to the hotel with instructions for him to get over to the park pronto. So Ted pulled himself together, drove to the field, got in uniform, and made his entrance.

  “Hi, Joe, how’s the old boy?” Ted said brightly, greeting Cronin.2

  “Hello, Theodore; pick up a bat,” replied the manager, disarmed and charmed at the same time.

  Ted got in the cage against pitching coach Herb Pennock in a reprise of the scene a year earlier, when he took his first major-league licks. There was less anticipation this time, given Williams’s epic minor-league season and the fact that he was a known quantity. But there was still plenty of curiosity and interest as players and spectators stopped what they had been doing to watch. Pennock was still nervous about being drilled by a line drive. He reminded Williams to pull the ball, and pitched inside to make sure he did.

  After the session, in which Ted, peaked or not, cracked several long drives, Cronin took him aside for a pep talk: Circumstances were different this year. He was succeeding Ben Chapman as the regular right fielder and, to symbolize that, he would inherit Chapman’s number, 9. He should be aware that he was going to be playing in a wonderful baseball town and for a top owner in Tom Yawkey. It was time to bear down and get serious. According to Jack Malaney, the Boston Post beat writer who retained his closeness to Cronin, the manager’s exact words were: “You’re in a great city and you’re working for the best man in baseball. You’ve got a lot of ability and have had enough schooling. You know what it’s all about now. This is serious business and there is no place in the game for clowning. I hope you take advantage of the chance you’ve got.”3 Ted assured Cronin that he would.

  But there was a fine line between clowning and letting Ted be Ted. It was clear that Williams’s sunny, somewhat daffy persona was central to his emerging stardom, and Cronin found himself criticized by some writers for trying to rein in the color that they craved.

  “Peace is repulsive to Williams,” wrote the Boston Evening American’s Austen Lake.4 What “the 1939 Red Sox need, more than temperance and dull docility, is a couple emotional buckaroos like Ted to keep life constantly at the boil.”

  The writers celebrated color almost as much as ability, and Ted had both. That was a bonanza. One story, headlined TED WILLIAMS REPLICA OF RUTH, cheered the rookie’s off-the-field “Ruthian idiosyncrasies” as much as his potential to succeed the Babe on merit.5

  Reporters lapped up the Kid’s on-field chatter and locker-ro
om banter and worked it into their stories and notes items. One get-acquainted interview gives a good sense of why he made such rich copy:

  WRITER: The roster says your name is Theodore S. Williams.

  TED: That’s right.

  WRITER: What’s the S for?

  [“Screwball; what did you think?” piped up Doc Cramer, the center fielder.]

  TED: It’s for Samuel.

  WRITER: You think you’ll hit up here?

  TED: Who’s going to stop me?6

  Cramer, who had not warmed to Williams, was annoyed by his constant banter when they were in the outfield and threatened to put cotton in his ears.

  Yet Cramer and Williams (who early in the season would get into an unpublicized clubhouse brawl at Fenway Park7) often warmed up together before games and liked to throw the ball as hard as they could. Harold Kaese, then the beat writer for the Boston Evening Transcript and later for the Boston Globe, watched this display with interest and noted that they threw harder than some of the pitchers did. Ever the fledgling pitcher, Ted occasionally liked to mix in his knuckleball.

  Williams gravitated to Jimmie Foxx, “Double X,” whose eye-popping muscles and long home runs now held the rookie spellbound. Foxx, a right-handed-hitting first baseman who had broken in with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in 1925 and was regarded as one of the game’s great sluggers, went out of his way to be kind and generous to Ted. “Right now I’ll promise you that Teddy Williams will hit,” Foxx told reporters a few days into spring training.8

  Knowing that Williams wanted to bulk up and get stronger, clubhouse attendant Johnny Orlando advised him to drink buttermilk. Ted said he couldn’t stand the stuff, but when Orlando told him that Foxx used it, Williams began drinking a pint after every practice.9

  Another early adviser was Moe Berg, the Princeton-educated backup catcher and linguist, who’d needled Ted a year ago but had now been asked by Cronin to watch over him and ease his passage to acceptance by the veterans. Ted peppered Berg with questions about the various pitchers in the league and what they would throw in certain situations. Berg became fond of Ted and looked upon him with wry amusement.