In 1941, the notion of hitting .400 was not considered the exalted accomplishment that it is today. Between the start of baseball’s modern era, in 1900, and the beginning of the 1941 season, seven players had achieved .400 or higher twelve times. In the 1800s, nineteen players had done it twenty-two times.
Baseball historians informally place nineteenth-century players in a different category because the rules of the game were far different then. For example, hitters could use bats that had a flat side; they could call for low or high pitches; and a strike zone was not defined until 1887. In the 1887 season, walks were counted as hits, a rule that helped fully ten players reach the .400 mark or higher that year. In the modern era, Nap Lajoie’s .426 average in 1901 came with an asterisk because there was no foul strike rule. Until 1903 in the American League, foul balls that were not caught did not count as strikes, giving the hitter a significant advantage. Between Bill Terry’s .401 in 1930 and the beginning of the 1941 season, only four players had made serious runs at .400: Al Simmons of the A’s (.390 in 1931), Arky Vaughan of the Pirates (.385 in 1935), Luke Appling (.388 in 1936), and Joe DiMaggio (.381 in 1939).
On June 7, the Associated Press did a feature on Williams for its national audience, noting the .436 tear he was on while proclaiming that “the Kid has grown up.” Ted reflected on his bitterness of the previous year and said he was through feuding with writers and fans. He said both he and the fans got sore that he didn’t hit as many homers as they thought he would in a smaller Fenway. “Everyone thought I’d hit 80 homers and I guess I thought I would too.… Boy, it got so I hated to go out and meet people.… But that’s all over now. I’m just trying to get along. It’s a dream I’ve always had—the way I’m hitting now. Boy, I’m just busting the cover off that ball.”19
At the end of June, Babe Ruth himself weighed in to tout Ted. “When I first saw Ted Williams swinging a bat I knew he would be one of the best,” the Babe told Grantland Rice. “He’s loose and easy, with a great pair of wrists. Just a natural. Williams ought to be one of the first hitters in many years to pass .400.”20
On July 1, DiMaggio hit in his forty-fourth straight game, tying the record that had been established by Wee Willie Keeler in 1897. This sent the press into overdrive and would eclipse any attention given to Ted over the next three weeks or so—except for July 8, when the elite players from the American and National Leagues gathered in Detroit for the annual All-Star Game. Ted, who was batting .405, took the train out from Boston along with his teammates Doerr, Foxx, Cronin, and Dominic DiMaggio—all of whom had also been selected to play in what was only the major leagues’ ninth midsummer showcase. The game was bigger then, with a far more intense feel and rivalry than today’s languid exhibitions have.
Williams loved the All-Star Game, and that year’s venue, Briggs Stadium, was his favorite park to hit in. He’d bought a new 8mm movie camera for the occasion and used it to pan across the crowd of 54,674—and to film some of the ballplayers, too, including Dominic’s older brother Joe. “I want to study his style,” Ted told the writers, giving the Yankee Clipper his due at the height of his streak. “DiMaggio is the greatest hitter I ever saw and probably will see during my career.… I have to tie into a pitch to get power. DiMaggio is stronger. He hits the ball hard in any direction. And then there’s the matter of temperament. I’ve been down on myself, but I never heard of Joe getting unsettled.”21
In the starting lineup, Williams was to bat cleanup behind DiMaggio. In the fourth inning, Ted laced a line drive to right field, which Bob Elliott of the Pittsburgh Pirates misjudged, and the ball went sailing over his head for a double, driving in a run that gave the American League an early lead. But by the ninth inning, the Nationals were ahead 5–3, thanks to Pirates shortstop Arky Vaughan belting successive two-run homers, first in the seventh and then in the eighth.
Frankie Hayes of the Athletics opened the last of the ninth for the Americans against right-hander Claude Passeau of the Cubs by popping up to second base for the first out. Ken Keltner of the Indians followed with a smash to shortstop, which Eddie Miller, who had entered the game for Vaughan, couldn’t handle cleanly, giving Keltner time to reach first safely. The Yankees’ Joe Gordon then stroked a clean single to right, and Cecil Travis walked to load the bases for the great DiMaggio.
The crowd roared with anticipation, as Joltin’ Joe, who by then had hit in forty-eight straight games, stepped to the plate. DiMaggio fouled the first pitch off, swung and missed at the second, then hit a tailor-made double-play ball to short. Miller fielded the ball cleanly, and flipped it to Dodgers second baseman Billy Herman for the force-out, but Herman’s relay to first was wide, enabling DiMaggio to reach safely. Keltner scored.
So with the AL now trailing 5–4, Ted was up. National League manager “Deacon” Bill McKechnie of the Reds came out to the mound to talk with Passeau and summoned the catcher and infielders in as well. Famed broadcaster Red Barber gave the moment a little more of a drumroll for his national radio audience: “How do you like this for a setting? Two out. The tying run at third, the winning run at first, last half of the ninth inning, and the .400 hitter of today at the plate, Ted Williams.… I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”
Rather than go to a left-hander, or walk Williams to get to the on-deck batter, Dom DiMaggio, McKechnie decided to allow Passeau to pitch to Ted, no doubt mindful of the fact that in the eighth inning the Cubs right-hander had struck Williams out. Ted had thought that called third strike was low. As the conference at the mound continued, Williams asked home plate umpire Babe Pinelli where the pitch had been. At the knees, Pinelli replied.
“Then I stood back and sort of gave myself a fight talk,” Ted told J. G. Taylor Spink of the Sporting News after the game. “I said, ‘Listen you big lug. He outguessed you last time and you got caught with your bat on your shoulder for a called third strike. You were swinging late when you fouled one off, too. Let’s swing, and swing a little earlier this time, and see if we can connect.’ ”22
Passeau’s first pitch was high and outside. Williams fouled off the second, straight back. Then came another ball, high and tight. With the count two and one, Passeau threw a slider, letter high, and Ted was sitting on it. He swung with all his might—“no cut-down protection swing, an all-out home run swing, probably with my eyes shut,” he said later—and smashed a towering drive to right field. The only question was whether it would be fair or foul. There was a brisk wind blowing across the field from left to right, but the ball was crushed so hard the breeze couldn’t alter its path much before it struck the facing of the third tier, about twenty feet fair. The ball bounced back to right fielder Enos Slaughter, who picked it up and stuffed it in his back pocket as a souvenir.23
Of course, hitting a game-winning home run in such a circumstance “was the kind of thing a kid dreams about and imagines himself doing when he’s playing those little playground games we used to play in San Diego,” Ted wrote in his book. “Half way down to first, I stopped running and started leaping and jumping and clapping my hands, and I was just so happy I laughed out loud. I’ve never been so happy and I’ve never seen so many happy guys.… I had hit what remains to this day the most thrilling hit of my life.”24
After he finished skipping around the bases, Ted was mobbed at the plate by delirious teammates, including both DiMaggio brothers and starting pitcher Bob Feller of the Indians, who raced out of the dugout dressed in his street clothes. The bedlam moved to the clubhouse, where the American League manager, Del Baker of the Tigers, planted a big kiss on Ted’s left cheek, and the photographers made him do it again. The Red Sox brass—Tom Yawkey, Eddie Collins, and Joe Cronin—glad-handed their star, as did Will Harridge, the American League president. Bill McKechnie, the rival manager, also stopped by to pay homage. “Ted, you’re just not human,” he said.
The writers demanded more detail from Ted, of course. “I had a funny feeling after I struck out in the eighth that I was going to get up there at least o
ne more time and hit one,” he said. “And when that one came up fast and about elbow high, I said to myself, ‘This is it.’
“Confidence is a great thing. You have to have it in our game and that’s how it was with me that last trip to the plate.… There ain’t nothing like hitting a homer.… Wasn’t it a pip?”
Then Ted paused and added: “I know one thing. The happiest woman in America right now is my mother.”25
May Williams had been listening to the game on the radio and had sent Ted a telegram before the game, which he did not receive until afterward. “Congratulations on being on All Star team,” it said. “We’re pulling for American League and thinking of you, my wonderful son.” It was signed “Mother.”
Little more than an hour after his All-Star Game heroics, Ted was not out painting the town but back in his hotel room alone, writing a letter to Doris Soule. A reporter, Gerry Moore of the Globe, decided to take a chance and knock on the door of room 1812 of the Book Cadillac Hotel. “Come in, the door’s open,” Ted called out cheerfully.
Moore found the Kid ebullient, eager for company, and talking in staccato bursts—mostly about his mother. “Do you know the biggest kick I get out of this whole thing? I’m tickled for my mom’s sake because she was listening.” He showed Moore the telegram she had sent him, then read from a letter May had written, which he’d received just the day before. “Dear Son,” it began. She hoped he was well. She’d bought a schedule of his games but was having problems deciphering it to know where he was when. But she was pleased he was hitting so brilliantly. “San Diego is thrilled.… There have been some lovely articles about your hitting.” She added in a postscript that she was “glad you’re getting along so well with the sports writers.”
The All-Star Game served as a loud exclamation point in that summer of ’41, a season long regarded by many baseball historians as the sport’s greatest ever. There was DiMaggio, whose streak would extend for another eight games—until July 17—ending a two-month run of drama that riveted the nation, fan and nonfan alike. There was Ted, who in the second half of the season dug in to prove that his All-Star heroism was no fluke. He eagerly reclaimed the national spotlight later in the summer as DiMaggio’s acclaim receded and his own march to .400 showed no signs of abating. Lefty Grove finally won his three hundredth career game, for the Red Sox, at the same time as the leader of a new pitching generation, Bob Feller, won twenty-five games for the Cleveland Indians. And the Brooklyn Dodgers emerged as baseball’s Cinderella team, edging out the St. Louis Cardinals for the National League pennant only to be heartbroken by Mickey Owen’s dropped third strike, which paved the way for the Yankees to win the World Series.
Baseball was a generation removed from the Field of Dreams era but was still bathing in its halcyon days and in the aura of Ruth, who had retired in 1935. A few concessions were starting to be made to the future, such as the beginning of night play, but expansion was more than a decade away, and this was still old-time hardball.
“School kids grew up learning their geography by knowing the ten cities and sixteen teams in the American and National Leagues,” Dom DiMaggio wrote in his memoir of the 1941 season, Real Grass, Real Heroes. “It was that wonderful sameness, year in and year out. We could always count on baseball to be the same warm and sunny game, on the same fields, in the same cities. We loved baseball not only for itself but for the secure feeling of community it gave you. We felt a loyalty to baseball, because it was loyal to us.”26
Players were still leaving their gloves on the field at the end of an inning, before they came in to bat. They’d be tossed in the shallowest part of the outfield, just beyond the infield, and when play resumed, the gloves were obstacles that the players had to contend with while ranging under pop-ups.
All travel was still done by train, and teams could take between ten days and two weeks to go only as far west as Saint Louis and only as far south as Washington, just below the Mason-Dixon Line. The major-league teams would lease three cars on a train, and the hierarchy of the players was evident in who was assigned to be in what car. Rookies were assigned to the third car, the one that swayed the most when the train went around a bend.
“If you were assigned an upper berth in the third car, you knew you had a long way to go before you acquired any seniority on that ball club,” wrote Dominic. “Your goal was to progress to the point where you could be assigned to Lower 7, Car A. Car A was the front car, the one that remained the steadiest of the three. A lower berth was always preferable to an upper, and the seventh Pullman berth was in the middle of the car, the smoothest riding part of the car because it wasn’t over the wheels. When you were assigned Lower 7, Car A, you knew you had established yourself as an important member of the team.”27
Generally, the players loved train travel. “Ballplayers from the 1940s will tell you to a man that when baseball teams started flying, a certain bonding that held teams together went out of major league baseball,” Dominic added. “We got to know each other as only you can when you’re on a train together for 24 hours, or 36 or more. You came together as a group, and when you went out onto that field, you came together as a team.… We were heroes on those trains. We’d roll into a station and look out the window and see kids yelling up to us and pointing out to their buddies, ‘There’s Williams!’ Who wouldn’t be happy to sign autographs in that kind of enthusiasm?”28
Most of the trains would leave around midnight. The dining cars were formal: tables for four were set with white tablecloths and a centerpiece of fresh flowers; waiters wearing white jackets served fine food. Air-conditioning was just being introduced, so more often than not a large block of ice was stationed at one end of a car in front of a fan.
The trips strengthened the bond between Dominic and Ted, the precursor to what would become an even stronger lifelong friendship when their playing days were over. During Joe’s streak, when the Red Sox were playing at home, Ted would get updates from the Fenway scoreboard operator, Bill Daley, on whether the Clipper had gotten his hit yet, then he would shout out the news to Dominic over in center field.
Even in the absence of Joe DiMaggio news, Ted would usually keep up a running repartee throughout the game with Daley, who would poke his head through an opening in the scoreboard. The Fenway telegraph operator, Hartwell McIsaac, knew that the Kid liked to keep up on who was doing what around the majors, so when something of interest happened, McIsaac would call Daley, who would then relay it to Williams. Williams would chatter with delight after he hit a home run or mutter in frustration if a pitcher had good stuff and he was having a hard time handling it. If Daley posted a number showing how many runs the Yankees or some other team had scored in an inning, Ted would ask him how they’d increased their tally.
Dominic became a keen observer of Ted. He noticed, for instance, that when a relief pitcher was brought in and Williams was next up, he would—against the rules—inch in as close as he could to the batter’s box while the reliever was warming up, the better to size up his stuff.
And Williams was always quizzing Dominic about what the opposing pitcher was throwing. “If I led off the game by making an out, I would be headed past Ted on my way back to the dugout while he was on his way to the on-deck circle. As Johnny Pesky stepped into the batter’s box, Ted would be giving me the third degree: ‘Where was that last pitch, Dommie? What’s he throwing? What did you hit?’
“His timing was always the worst in that situation. I was fed up with myself and in no mood to talk about it, so I’d tell him in my disgust, ‘I don’t know.’ To Williams, ignorance was worse than not getting a hit. ‘How the hell can you not know?’ he’d bark. ‘What kind of a dummy are you? No wonder you didn’t get a hit. Don’t be so damned dumb!’ ”29
Williams probably spent more time that summer with his roommate, pitcher Charlie Wagner, than with anyone else—which meant that no one else had as intimate a sense of Ted’s obsessions. “Ted was a very intense guy and he used to psych himself up for games,” W
agner recalled. “The better he hit the moodier he’d get because he was psyching himself. In the room the morning before a game he’d walk around talking out loud about the pitcher and what he was going to do to the guy. He loved to stand in front of a mirror like he was swinging a bat.”30 He’d get up early, listen to the radio, then get the papers and study the box scores. Williams would pay special attention to what the pitchers did, how long they lasted, how many runs and walks they gave up. Then he would do fingertip push-ups, telling Wagner that he could do twenty-five more than however many Broadway Charlie could do. Some days, Wagner and Ted would go fishing together at a lake in Framingham, about twenty miles west of Boston, a relaxing way for Ted to contemplate the contest to come before getting to the park at noon for a three o’clock game.
As it happened, the Red Sox began the second half of their season in Detroit, so Ted, still dining out on his All-Star heroics, didn’t have far to report for duty. But on July 12, he reinjured his right ankle sliding back into first base. X-rays showed no new chip or break. Still, it was sore, so Williams was confined to pinch-hitting duty for the next ten days.
When he returned to the lineup on July 22, his ankle heavily taped and his average down to .393, Ted learned that Joe Cronin had shifted him from batting third in the order to cleanup. Williams was happy with the change—hitting fourth figured to boost his RBI chances. Batting third with Cronin and then Foxx behind him, he’d seen good pitches. But at cleanup, with Foxx in decline as a power hitter batting fifth, pitchers opted to be more selective with the pitches they threw Ted. This was a mixed bag in his quest for .400—he got fewer chances for hits but more walks, thus keeping his total number of official at bats down.
The next day, July 23, at Fenway Park, White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes unveiled the first-ever shift against Williams to try to plug holes on the right side of the field, where the pull-hitting Ted smacked the ball most often. The outfield tilted way right: the third baseman played where the shortstop normally played, the shortstop swung around to the right side of second base, the second baseman moved deep in the hole onto the outfield grass, and the first baseman hugged the line. Ted saw the new alignment and started laughing. “Dykes, you crazy son of a bitch, what the hell are you doing?” he yelled.31 Ted hit one down the left-field line and went 4–10 in two games against the shift, and Dykes abandoned it.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 24
