The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  It was damp and chilly, and a crowd of 30,278 had gathered to see Yankees ace Red Ruffing versus thirty-nine-year-old Lefty Grove. Ted thought Yankee Stadium was just as he’d seen it in the movie newsreels, its aura perhaps enhanced only by the attendance of Ruth himself. Batting sixth, “butterflies running up and down my spine,” Williams stepped into the box.

  “How tall are you, kid?” asked catcher Bill Dickey as he flashed the sign to Ruffing.

  “Six foot three,” said Ted, glancing back at Dickey nervously.

  “Gee,” said Dickey, who was six two.

  “Strike one!” said the umpire.27

  Two more pitches and Ted was on his way back to the dugout, an ignominious strikeout victim in his first major-league at bat. When he returned to the bench, angry and embarrassed, veteran Sox pitcher John “Black Jack” Wilson came and sat down next to him. They’d been needling each other all spring, and Ted had assured Wilson that he would wear Ruffing out. “Whattaya think of this league now, Bush?” Wilson chirped.28

  “Screw you!” said Ted. “This is one guy I know I’m going to hit, and if he puts it in the same place again, I’m riding it out of here.”

  Next time, Ruffing left a pitch up, and Ted drilled it about four hundred feet off the right-center-field fence, just a foot from being a home run. After he reached second base, Joe Gordon came over, smiling. They’d played against each other in 1937 in the Coast League. “You nervous?” asked Gordon. “Boy, am I,” said Ted. “Nervous as hell.”

  Ted struck out again and popped up on his next at bats, but he handled several chances in right field cleanly, his first putout a line drive by Gehrig. The Sox lost, 2–0.

  When the team returned to Boston for its home opener against Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s on April 21, Ted’s stack of fan mail was the largest of any player’s. When he was introduced on his first at bat, he got the loudest ovation, and the fans in the right-field bleachers quickly adopted him as their own, chanting “Slugger! Slugger!” each time he came up.29 Ted went 1–5 as the Red Sox won, 9–2. He said he was surprised that the home opener was considered so important that the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Leverett Saltonstall, would throw out the first ball.

  In his third game, Ted had a double and a single, but it was his fourth game, on Sunday, April 23, that served as his true Fenway Park coming-out party. In his first time up against Philadelphia’s LeRoy “Tarzan” Parmelee, Ted scorched a ball into the right-center-field bleachers, just to the right of the outfield triangle, about 430 feet away, for his first home run. Burt Whitman of the Boston Herald called it “as harshly hit a line drive as anybody ever sent into that sector, not excepting even Babe Ruth and the ever-present Jimmie Foxx.”

  On his second time up, Ted hit a long fly off the wall in left-center that missed being another home run by inches. The blow came off Cotton Pippen, the pitcher who had struck Williams out on three pitches in his first at bat for the San Diego Padres, when he was too scared to swing. In the fifth inning, he scalded a line-drive single to right, again off Pippen. In the sixth, he singled to center, knocking in a run, to make it 8–6 Red Sox.

  In the eighth, Ted actually flashed some leather, making a nice running catch of a short fly to right-center. In the ninth, with Boston now losing 12–8 and all twelve thousand fans staying in their seats only to await Ted’s final at bat, to see if he could go 5–5, the Kid lined a ball to left field into a stiff east wind, but it was caught at the wall by Bob Johnson. As he ran back into the dugout, the crowd accorded Ted a grand ovation—and then promptly left the park, in a display that would be emblematic of much of Williams’s career: in the eyes of the fans, his performance was often considered more important than the game itself.

  “Those present yesterday unquestionably saw the official unveiling of a new major league star,” wrote Whitman in the Herald, adding that Ted “won the customers to him as a strong magnet attracts wee pieces of steel.”30

  After watching Williams slug for three games, Connie Mack was awed: “My goodness gracious, how that boy can hit,” Mack told Arthur Sampson of the Herald. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he becomes another Babe Ruth. I never saw anything like it. It doesn’t seem to make any difference where you pitch him. We gave him all sorts of stuff—high balls, low balls, inside pitches, outside pitches, fast balls, curve balls and slow balls. He hit them all as if each one was just what the doctor ordered. Goodness gracious, I never have seen such a good-looking young boy.”

  Ted basked in the early rave reviews, and, assessing his first week in the majors a few days later, said he saw no reason he couldn’t hit as well as he did in Minneapolis the previous year. “I promise you you’ll see plenty of homers over the left centerfield fence at Fenway Park,” he boasted.31

  In Boston, Ted initially lived at the Canterbury Hotel, a small, inexpensive establishment near Fenway Park and Kenmore Square. But his room was near a rail line, and when trains went by, the whole building shook, so he moved nearby to the better-appointed Shelton Hotel, still reasonable at $6 or $7 a night. The hotel would remain his in-season home, off and on, until it closed in 1954.

  Jimmie Foxx also lived at the Shelton. Occasionally, pitcher Elden Auker would invite Ted and Foxx out to his apartment in nearby Brookline for one of the fried chicken dinners prepared by his wife, Mildred. “Ted would eat everything in sight,” Auker remembered. “He never put on weight, not until he left baseball. We’d just talk about things. Maybe the game, just laughing, having dinner together. Ted loved that chicken. He was always asking about it.”32

  While Ted reached out and forged some relationships in Boston, he mostly stayed to himself. “I have never cultivated ‘important’ people, perhaps because I did not feel comfortable in a necktie crowd,” he wrote in his book.33 “My friends were the guys who delivered the magazines, the highway cop, the guy who took care of my car and wanted a ticket now and then, the clubhouse boy, the guy who ran the theater.”

  And the theater guy saw plenty of Ted. Williams was a serious movie buff. He’d clip the schedule from the newspaper and sometimes see two or three films a day, baseball permitting. John Wayne westerns were his staple, and they were often featured at a theater in the Allston section of Boston. Ted would usually sit in the back row and drape his legs over the seat in front of him. One day, the manager of the theater, John Buckley, tapped him on his shoulder and said: “Where the hell you think you are, home? Take your feet down.”34 As the movie ended and the patrons were filing out, Buckley recognized the customer he’d challenged as Ted. They ended up going out for a milk shake and becoming lifelong friends.

  Williams had strong likes and dislikes that effectively made him a loner. He wanted to see a certain type of movie when he wanted to see it, get it over with, get home early, and go to bed. Unlike most of his teammates, he didn’t drink or smoke; he couldn’t stand even the smell of tobacco. He liked to hunt and fish, the individualist’s recreation.

  “Eating is a real sore spot with me,” Ted said.35 “I don’t want to hear, ‘Let’s wait awhile,’ because all of a sudden it’s nine o’clock, and when I eat late, I can’t sleep well and I don’t feel well the next day. I don’t believe there was ever a ballplayer who ate in his room as often as Ted Williams.”

  And he had little desire to socialize beyond his small circle—or even within it. “I’d ten times rather sit home and watch a good TV program than go out to some phony-baloney cocktail party and listen to a lot of bull. I think a lot of people are like that but are afraid to admit it.”

  If Williams did go out to eat during his first season, it was usually at Jimmy O’Keefe’s, a hangout for politicians and athletes in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. There he became friendly with the manager, Bill Greeley. One night, Greeley suggested they go eat at a place he knew called the Lafayette House in Foxborough, about thirty miles south of Boston. It was quiet there, and they served big portions of beef. On the way home, a state policeman pulled Ted over for speeding
. Greeley piped up, trying to defuse the situation: “This is the new man with the Red Sox.”36 The trooper gave Ted a lecture but let him off with a warning.

  A few days later, Ted was driving back to the Lafayette House by himself when the same cop stopped him. This time it was just a social call. John Blake was the officer’s name. He recognized the Red Sox rookie’s shiny Buick with the California plates. “We got to talking and I got to thinking what a lonely job he had, so I invited him to have dinner with me,” Ted said.37 Blake thought Ted was just being polite and never expected anything to come of the invitation, but a few days later, Williams did follow up, and the two met for another meal.38 It wasn’t long before they were fishing together, and Ted was invited to the state police shooting range for target practice. He scored 295 out of 300 possible points from twenty-five yards, Blake said. The two men also started boxing together. They became “friends for life,” Ted wrote.39

  Looking for a travel roommate during spring training, Ted had gone to Cronin and asked him who didn’t drink or smoke. Cronin pointed to Charlie Wagner. A right-handed pitcher, he was known as Broadway Charlie because he dressed stylishly and liked the bright lights.

  “We were good roommates,” Wagner said. “We both got to bed early and got up early. After the games we separated. He went his way. I didn’t ask him where he was going, and he didn’t ask me. That’s why we got along.”

  One night in their room at the Chase Hotel in Saint Louis, Ted was swinging a bat in front of the mirror. He had two bats and, unsatisfied with both, was shaving their handles down, then swinging each one, trying to get them just so. After one mighty swing, Ted’s bat crashed into Wagner’s bedpost, the bed collapsed, and Wagner was sent sprawling to the floor. “Boy, what power!” Ted said.

  He stayed close with Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse attendant who had watched over him that first spring in Sarasota and had spotted him five bucks on his way down to the minors. On an off day early in the 1939 season, Ted chartered a boat in Gloucester, north of Boston, and went fishing with Orlando and the clubhouse kids who worked for him. They caught a couple of tuna, and everyone had a swell time, except for Orlando, who got seasick.40

  Williams also nurtured his new fans, patiently signing autographs after the game and spending extra time with kids. Sometimes after a game he’d take a gaggle of them off to the amusement park at nearby Revere Beach, where they’d ride the roller coaster and eat hot dogs and ice cream.

  As the month of May began, Ted was in bed with what was reported as a “heavy grippe.” This was his third bout with illness since being waylaid in New Orleans on the way to Sarasota in early March. After spring training, as the Red Sox barnstormed their way north with the Cincinnati Reds, the feverish Williams had been ordered to bed by trainer Win Green. Green and Cronin had lectured him as though he were a child on the basic need to take care of himself and guard against a chill in the cold northern climes. Now Globe columnist Victor Jones weighed in and essentially told Ted to grow up: “It’s all right to be a kid when you’re young,” Jones wrote, “but Ted Williams ought to realize he’s got the responsibilities that go with membership on a pennant challenging club and stay out of bed, even if it means wearing a hat during New England’s spring.”41

  By May 4, Ted was out of sick bay and ready to make his debut in what would become his favorite park to hit in, Briggs Stadium in Detroit. He arrived early to check out its friendly right-field dimensions—325 feet to the base of the triple-tiered grandstand—and to watch some of the Tigers stars—such as Hank Greenberg, Charlie Gehringer, and Rudy York—take batting practice.

  They hit some pretty fair shots, but none approaching the scale of what Williams was about to hit in the game itself. Coming to bat in the second inning against Roxie Lawson, Ted limbered up by lacing the first pitch over the right-field roof, 120 feet high, but just foul. No player had ever hit a ball over the roof at Briggs Stadium, so that display got Tigers historians, press-box graybeards, and many in the small Thursday afternoon crowd of 5,550 stirring.

  Then Jim Bagby, the Red Sox pitcher with a harelip who was also an active bench jockey, began yelling out to Greenberg that he was playing Williams too close in at first base. “Hank, you had better get back!” Bagby shouted.42 “You don’t know this guy, you better get back!” Greenberg paid no attention. Finally, Bagby called out: “All right, Hank, if you want to look like me and talk like me, stand right where you are!” Ted, who then lined out to center fielder Barney McCosky, delighted in telling that story over the years.

  On his next time up, in the fourth inning, with Joe Cronin on base, York tried to get the rookie off balance by asking him how many home runs he’d hit for Minneapolis the previous year. Ted respectfully said it didn’t matter because York must have hit more when he played for Toledo, the Tigers farm team in the American Association. He worked the count to three and two, then unloaded on a high fastball and drove it on top of the roof in right-center. Gerry Moore reported in the Globe that “the most dependable Detroit historians immediately tabbed that blow as the longest homer ever hit here, surpassing previous granddaddies propelled by Lou Gehrig and Sunny Jim Bottomley.”

  In the fifth, with one out and Foxx and Cronin aboard, Ted dug in against Bob Harris, a rookie just up from Toledo. Harris’s first three pitches were balls. Now York piped up again.

  “You’re not hitting, are you Kid?” the catcher asked.43

  “I sure as hell am,” Ted replied, having just been flashed the green light by Cronin.

  The pitch came, and Williams crushed a rising line drive. The ball screamed out to right field in a heartbeat, flew over the roof, fair by a dozen feet, and landed across adjoining Trumbull Avenue, bouncing against a taxi garage on one hop.

  “The reaction of the Detroit writers, fans and players alike was almost indescribable,” Gerry Moore wrote. “Greenberg looked with positive awe and admiration at the smiling Ted as he rounded first base. York just stood at home plate and scratched his head.” As Williams crossed home, the catcher also muttered: “Darned if you weren’t telling the truth.”

  On his last time up, he flied to right after receiving what Moore called “the greatest ovation we have ever heard a visiting athlete receive here.”

  The Kid was making his mark. Before the game, Hank Greenberg, then acknowledged as one of the great hitters in the game, had offered to bet Williams that he wouldn’t hit .320 that year. But afterward he sent word into the Sox dressing room through a Detroit writer that he wanted to take the offer back, and asked Ted to come out early the next day at batting practice to give him a few tips. Foxx put the icing on the cake for Ted, calling out to him as they were leaving the clubhouse: “Hey, Kid, wait for me.… I want to see if I can get inoculated with some of that power.… Yes sir, there goes the Kid that makes us a real pennant contender.”44

  News of Ted’s show in Detroit rippled through the American League, and at least one rival manager decided to change tactics against him. Bobby Doerr recalled that at the team’s next stop in Saint Louis, Browns manager Fred Haney pointedly told Williams directly that he would be knocked down.

  At Sportsman’s Park, visiting players had to walk through the Browns clubhouse to get to theirs. As Doerr and Ted passed through, Haney spotted them. He had managed Doerr in the Coast League, but now he ignored his former player, walked right up to Ted, and said: “I’ve seen how well you hit. Let’s see how you hit sittin’ on your ass.”45

  “When the game started,” Doerr told writer Mike Blake, “the first pitch to Ted was right near his ear and knocked the big guy down. Ted got up, didn’t even dust off his uniform, took his stance and on the next pitch, drove it against the right field screen for a double. The next time up, the first pitch knocked him down and on pitch two, Ted drove it into Grand Boulevard for a home run. That was that.”

  Ted gained confidence each time he faced a pitcher. “The first time around the league, the first western trip we made, he might have struck out ten times in th
e four towns, and his average was pretty low,” recalled Cronin. “But he kept saying, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ll hit these guys.’ He kept his confidence.… He knew what he wanted and he knew he was gonna do it. Wasn’t any doubt about it.”46

  Williams capped an eventful May by hitting a homer in each game of a Memorial Day doubleheader split with the Yankees at Fenway Park before a packed house of thirty-five thousand people, ten thousand more having been turned away. The first blow, off Red Ruffing, was said by Gerry Moore of the Globe to have been the longest home run ever witnessed at Fenway, landing seventy-five feet up in the right-field bleachers, just to the left of the runway separating that section of the park from the grandstand. “Even Ruffing couldn’t conceal his amazement as Teddy loped around the bases in his usual grinning style, and the crowd went entirely nuts.”47 Ted said later: “It was the longest home run I ever hit. I couldn’t even feel the contact, the swing was that sweet.”48

  With June came an extended slump, however, and Ted went into a funk. He told Johnny Orlando that he wished he were back in Minneapolis.

  “So I told him right to his kisser: ‘Kid, you’re gonna be all right,’ ” Orlando said. “ ‘You’ll hit .335 for the year. You keep swinging and you’ll have 35 home runs, and if the guys ahead of you keep getting on base, you’ll drive in 150 runs.’ He said, ‘If I do… I’ll buy you a Cadillac.’ ”49

  By late June, Ted was still only hitting in the .270s, but he was hitting for power. By the July 4 benchmark, he was leading the league in RBIs with sixty-four and was third in home runs with twelve. Meanwhile, a rare five-game sweep of the Yankees by the Red Sox between July 5 and July 9 in Yankee Stadium had Boston buzzing and pushed any talk of individual disappointments aside. Before the series started, Ted spoke up for the team, telling Tommy Henrich of the Yanks: “It’s all right for you guys to think you’re tough, but it’s about time somebody quit agreeing with you.”50