The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Williams stayed hot, and by August 13 he was hitting .413. He was full of confidence when he held court with a group of writers around the batting cage at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. “I’ll tell you why I’m hitting .400,” Ted said. “It’s a cinch. I got confidence this year for the first time. When I came up two years ago, I thought it would be swell if I could have a pretty fair season. You know, hit around .300 and get a homer now and then. Before I knew it, I was hitting .330, but I really didn’t think I was that good. I finished that first year at .327, I led the league in runs batted in and I hit more homers than DiMaggio, but I still did not feel sure of myself. Last year I missed the batting title by six or eight points, and I found myself wondering if I was as good as DiMaggio, Appling, Greenberg and those other guys. I told myself I was a sap for thinking that way, and I guess it worked. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a natural hitter. If that’s all there was to it, a guy could lay off all winter and come back in the spring as good as he was the previous midseason. Nobody can do that. Natural hitter, my ass.”32

  It was the kind of stark, introspective quote that made Williams such good copy, and it was something that the painfully shy, inarticulate DiMaggio would never say.

  Ted held steady for the rest of August, dipping only slightly to .407 at the end of the month, when he celebrated his twenty-third birthday.

  As the final month of the season began, and the excitement built over whether Ted could maintain the .400 plateau, there was a spate of national attention on Williams. He appeared on the cover of Life magazine and was featured in a photo spread inside that amounted to a baseball cheesecake layout. He was pictured bare-chested, in undershorts, doing a frame-by-frame breakdown of his famous swing as his washboard abs and long, rawboned arms strained.

  The Boston papers began running house ads requesting readers not to call in asking how Williams did that day, because the switchboards were getting jammed. “We’ll give you all you can possibly read… and more!” said the Post. The Globe ran a daily feature showing day-by-day comparisons between Ted that year and Bill Terry in 1930, when the latter had hit .401.

  Feisty and having fun, on September 1, Ted appeared at Fenway early, showing off a new .22 revolver and a Zipper rifle to his teammates.33 When the park was empty, he walked out to the field and, standing in front of the Red Sox dugout, took aim at one of the red lights under the word strike on the scoreboard, which was positioned on the left-field wall about 350 feet away. He fired, and the glass shattered. He went on to hit three home runs against Washington that day in a Labor Day doubleheader to take over the American League home-run lead with thirty-four.

  In a back-to-reality moment that same day, President Roosevelt announced that the United States was prepared to join the Allies at war.

  Momentous events that summer, such as Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the sinking of the Bismarck, had even penetrated baseball’s cocoon to become a prime topic of clubhouse conversation. Throughout that month, FDR made more strident denunciations of Hitler and his “insane forces of violence,” but the country wasn’t at war yet, and many remained absorbed by baseball and Ted’s chase for .400.

  The day after the Washington doubleheader, a fourteen-year-old from South Brewer, Maine, Billy Kane, hitchhiked 250 miles to Fenway Park to see Williams play only to find that there was no game scheduled. He was found sleeping in an aisle of the park by police officers. Back at the station, when the kid told his story, a few cops went over to the Shelton Hotel and got the almost-ready-for-bed Ted to come down to the station and meet the boy. The next day, Billy was Ted’s guest for a game against the Yankees. The papers loved the story and played it big.

  When the Yankees clinched the American League pennant early, on September 4, it only focused more attention on Williams as the fortunes of the Red Sox and other AL teams became irrelevant. And as the Sox came into Yankee Stadium on the sixth for their final series of the year, Ted was again baldly honest about his goals and ambitions, speaking in a manner that would be unusual for a player today.

  “I’ll be the happiest fellow in the world if I hit .400,” he told the writers. “I want to be talked about. I want to be remembered when I leave baseball. Who are the players they talk about and remember: Babe Ruth because he hit 60 home runs, Rogers Hornsby because he hit .424. Hack Wilson because he batted in 190 runs, and DiMaggio because he hit in 56 straight games. Those are the best, top performances in baseball. They’re what I’m aiming at.”34

  The following day, Yankee Stadium fans gave Ted a standing ovation after he came to bat for the four hundredth time of the season, thereby qualifying for the batting title. By now it seemed like fans of every team—including the most intense haters of the Red Sox—were rooting for the Kid to break the barrier. Indeed, the previous month, when Ted singled and then was walked four times by Yankees pitchers, they had booed the home team lustily.

  On an off day, September 11, Williams drove down to Providence, Rhode Island, from Boston for a batting exhibition, and four thousand people turned out to cheer him on. The night before, the retired Babe Ruth had attracted twelve hundred. Yet occasionally the bad-Ted persona from last year slipped out.

  Asked by the Globe’s Louis Lyons how he felt about Boston fans now, Ted said: “They’re like any other fans. They follow what the baseball writers say.”

  Williams was not just leading the league with his average but contending for the Triple Crown as well. On September 15, he smacked a three-run homer at Fenway off John Rigney, his thirty-fifth of the year, giving him 116 RBIs—tied for second with Joe DiMaggio and six behind the leader, Charlie Keller of the Yankees.

  The next day, Ted flew off to New York to appear on the nationally syndicated We the People radio program. On Ted’s arm when he appeared at the airport for the afternoon American Airlines flight was Doris Soule, who had spent the summer under the radar, working as a cashier at Boston’s Parker House hotel, but now was making her public debut. The writers and photographers on hand to record Ted’s every move swarmed around Doris, the first girl to be seen accompanying the Kid, but the couple flew off before anyone could determine who she was.

  Doris was initially described as an “oh-so-beautiful brunette,” part of “an intriguing romantic mystery,” until she flew back the next day, alone, and identified herself for the pack of reporters staked out awaiting her arrival after midnight.35 Was Ted in love with her? Doris was asked. “Just say we are good friends,” she replied with a smile. Well, did she love Ted? At that, her eyes closed and she declined to answer. Did she realize she was the envy of “many girls”? No she didn’t, said Doris. She refused to say where she was from or how they’d met, but said she’d known Ted for about a year.

  The shocker for the writers came when Doris allowed that she “hated” baseball. “I like practically all sports except baseball,” she said. “I have seen only two games this season. The reason was to see Ted.” She liked fishing a lot better, and noted that she was with Ted earlier in the summer when he’d caught a 374-pound tuna off Plum Island, north of Boston.

  As for Ted and the radio show in New York, he’d been “wonnnderful,” Doris said. Asked by We the People announcer, Harry von Zell, to account for his success that year, Williams had replied: “I am not popping off anymore. I am just popping everything out of the ballpark.”

  On September 21, following the last home game of the year, Ted’s average stood at .406. There was an off day on the twenty-second and then six more games, three in Washington and three in Philadelphia. Williams vowed to play in all six. “If you hit .400, it’s got to be because you played a whole season,” he said.

  Joe Cronin announced that after a doubleheader in Washington on the twenty-fourth, the Red Sox would go right to Philadelphia so that Williams could get all the batting practice he needed during two off days on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth before the final series against the Athletics. There had originally been a game scheduled for the twenty-sixth, but A’s
owner and manager Connie Mack decided to play it on Sunday as part of a doubleheader finale that he hoped would draw a large crowd for the Williams denouement.

  “We all want to see Ted stay right up there and it ought to help him to get in some batting practice on the off days at Shibe Park Thursday and Friday,” Cronin told Burt Whitman of the Herald. Whitman figured Ted needed five hits in the last six games to stay above .400, provided he got his usual complement of walks.36

  In the first Washington game, Williams went 1–3 with a walk, and his average dropped a point, to .405. The hit came on a 420-foot fly ball to left-center that old friend Doc Cramer dropped while on the run. The official scorer ruled it a double, though the Globe called the hit “tainted.”*

  In the first game of the next day’s doubleheader, Williams faced knuckleballer Dutch Leonard, who was going after his nineteenth win. Williams was never able to hit the knuckler as well as he felt he should have, and he went 0–3, walking twice, fouling out, grounding out, and flying out; his average dropped three more points, to .402.37

  In the second game, the Nationals’ starter was Dick Mulligan, a left-handed rookie who was pitching in his first major-league game. Ted felt at a disadvantage going up against late-season call-ups he knew nothing about. First time up, a dazzling curve buckled Williams for a called third strike. Next, Ted drilled a grounder that gave second baseman Jimmy Bloodworth enough trouble to allow Williams to make it to first safely, according to umpire Bill Grieve. Grieve first started to raise his thumb in the out call, then signaled safe, drawing boos from the crowd. Ted failed his last two times up, thus submitting a 1–7 line for the day, the one hit plainly a gift. As the team left for the final series in Philadelphia, his average was down to .401.

  The two off days before the first game, on Saturday, September 27, gave Ted ample time to brood and fret. The lighting was a complicating factor for Williams at this time of year at Shibe Park. Early in the afternoon, the sun was on the pitcher’s mound while the plate was in shadow, making it hard to follow the flight of a pitch. Ted continued to vow that he would play all three games—“A batting record’s no good unless it’s made in all the games of the season”38—but Cronin, citing the shadow problem, said he would reserve the right to pull Williams for the second game of the doubleheader, on Sunday, if the .400 mark was assured.

  “You got to admire the Kid for being so courageous about it, but I can tell you one thing: I may yank him in that second game Sunday if he’s got his hits,” Cronin told the writers. “We go on the new time Sunday and with the first game starting at 1:30, it’ll be pretty dark when that second game gets underway. I feel that I have obligations, and I may decide to take him out of that second game, even if he doesn’t like it.”39

  In the Saturday game, the A’s Connie Mack started Roger Wolff, a rookie pitching only his second big-league game. Mack, the dignified owner-manager who directed the game from the dugout while dressed in a business suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a fedora, knew Ted disliked going up against pitchers he hadn’t faced before. To make it worse for Williams, Wolff was a right-handed knuckleballer.

  His first time up against Wolff, in the second inning, Ted walked on a three-and-two pitch. In the fourth, he doubled to deep right-center. But after that he flied to right, popped up to first, and struck out swinging. The 1–4 dipped his average below .400, to .39955, the first time he’d dropped under .400 since July 24.

  Though the statisticians would have rounded his .39955 average up to .400, and though he could have sat out the last two games, Ted knew that history wouldn’t look kindly on that option, so it was really no option at all. As he’d said, he would play the doubleheader and achieve the mark by getting his hits—or he wouldn’t achieve the mark at all.

  That night, Williams tried to quiet his nerves by walking the streets of Philadelphia with Johnny Orlando at his side to offer encouragement.

  “We walked for over three hours, and my feet were burning,” Orlando recalled. “Ted didn’t drink, so from time to time I’d run into a barroom to get a drink, and he’d wait outside until I got finished.… During the whole conversation all he kept repeating over and over was how determined he was to hit .400.”40 Williams stopped twice for ice cream.41

  When they returned to the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, it was 10:30 p.m., half an hour past Ted’s normal bedtime. He ran into Joe Cronin, who was sitting on a couch in the lobby with Tom Daly, a coach. Williams sat down and talked with his manager. Cronin again gave Ted an out, saying he could sit it out tomorrow if he wished, but Williams dismissed the suggestion out of hand.

  Ted went to his room, where Charlie Wagner was waiting up for him. They talked about which pitchers he might face the next day. In those days managers did not announce their starters in advance—an effort to minimize any edge that gamblers might try to gain. Williams was “sky high emotionally,” Wagner recalled.

  The next morning they got up early, ate breakfast in the hotel, and went out to the park in a cab together. “The ride out was quiet,” Wagner said. “I remember thinking how fast the cabbie was driving and that we’d probably get killed before we got there, the way he was flying through intersections.”42

  By the start of the game, at 1:30 p.m., 10,268 fans were on hand at Shibe Park, where the capacity at the time was about thirty-three thousand. It was eighty-two degrees, mostly cloudy, and the wind was blowing mildly from the southwest at thirteen miles per hour, a nonfactor.43

  Hoping to keep Williams off balance, Connie Mack again decided to start two rookies who’d been called up earlier that month: Dick Fowler in the first game and Fred Caligiuri in the second. Both were right-handers.

  “I remember Connie Mack saying, ‘Don’t do him any favors. Try to get him out,’ ” recalled Caligiuri.44 “I was just a wide-eyed rookie, so I listened to him. I was more nervous because I’d just got married, and my wife was there. I had bigger things to worry about than Williams and .400. We tried to pitch him outside. We tried to change up speeds on him. You keep throwing him the fastball, and he’ll make you pay.”

  In eight previous games against the Red Sox, A’s pitchers had walked Ted fourteen times.45 But now Mack had decided to pitch to him. As Williams stepped into the box for his first time up, leading off the second inning, A’s catcher Frankie Hayes let him know of his manager’s decision directly.

  “Ted, Mr. Mack told us if we let up on you he’ll run us out of baseball,” Hayes said. “I wish you all the luck in the world, but we’re not giving you a damn thing.”

  As the crowd gave Ted a loud, prolonged cheer, home plate umpire Bill McGowan called time, walked around the plate, bent over, and began dusting it off. Without looking up, he said to Williams: “To hit .400, a batter has got to be loose. He has got to be loose.”46

  That was a highly unusual remark for a nominally neutral umpire to make to a player, but the umps plainly liked Ted. They respected his great skill, his keen batting eye, his obvious command of the strike zone, and, perhaps most of all, the fact that he virtually never argued with them or tried to show them up. Williams liked to leverage his good relationships with the umpires and would often pump them for information about how rival pitchers were doing: Who had they seen in the previous series they’d worked? And what pitches were being thrown to what hitters in what situations? “It was like having a personal scouting system,” said Vince Orlando, Johnny’s brother.47 “The league got wind of this later and made the umpires stop it.”

  The first two pitches from Fowler were balls. Then Ted scorched a grounder to the right of first baseman Bob Johnson into right field for a single. He was back up to .4008.

  His second time up, in the fifth, Williams drove a 1–0 pitch over the right-field wall and onto the street, about 440 feet away, for his thirty-seventh home run of the season. His average now stood at .4022. In the sixth, facing lefty Porter Vaughan, Ted again lashed a grounder past Johnson for his third straight hit to creep up to .4035. In the seventh, Ted smacke
d a line drive over the head of Johnson, who by then was like a target in a shooting gallery. Four for four, and up to .4048. His final time up, Williams hit a hard grounder to second baseman Crash Davis, which Davis bobbled for an error. So at the end of the two-hour-and-two-minute game, which the Red Sox won 12–11, Ted stood at .4039.

  Between games, his teammates all congratulated him, knowing that no matter what happened in the second game he was virtually assured of reaching his goal. Jack Malaney of the Boston Post came down to the clubhouse to update Cronin on what Ted’s average was, in case the manager wanted to pull him. But Williams, as he’d promised, said he would finish, though the suspense was largely gone. Even if he went 0–4 in the final, he’d still be over .400.

  The crowd gave him a standing ovation when he dug in against Caligiuri to lead off the second inning of the second game, and they cheered him again when he spanked a grounder in the hole between first and second (.4052). His next time up, in the fourth, Williams absolutely crushed Caligiuri’s 2–0 pitch, and years later he would call it the hardest-hit ball of his career. It was a wicked, rising line drive that reached the top of the right-field wall in a heartbeat before slamming into a loudspeaker mounted on the wall, knocking a hole in it, and dropping back to the playing field for a ground-rule double.

  Ted got one more at bat, in the seventh (the game was called after eight innings because of darkness), and improbably lofted a routine fly to left fielder Elmer Valo, the only ball of the day that he did not hit hard.