The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams
Page 26
It was a stunning performance. Having eschewed a rounded .400, Williams had bravely put everything on the line and knocked out six clean hits in eight trips to the plate to finish at .4057, officially .406. It was a day that would define his playing career and shape his legacy.
The press raved. Burt Whitman in the Herald called it “one of the most spectacular last-day batting splurges in the history of major league baseball.”48 “All hail Thumping Theodore Samuel Williams,” wrote Malaney in the Post.49
One of the happiest people in the clubhouse afterward was Cronin. “Imagine that Kid getting four singles, a double and a homer the closing day of the season when the chips are down,” he said. “I tell you, I never came closer to bawling right out loud on a baseball diamond [than] when Ted got that third hit. I really filled right up. I was so happy that the Kid had done the trick without asking or being given any favors. I guess I was no different from the whole rest of the club. For if ever a ballplayer deserved to hit .400, it’s that same Ted. A dozen times in the last three weeks he has refused to protect his average by dropping down a bunt. He just kept swinging up there to the very finish.”
Bill McGowan, the home plate umpire who’d given Ted the sotto voce advice to stay loose, also sung Williams’s praises unabashedly and wanted to dispel any notion that the A’s pitchers had been going easy on him. “Don’t let anyone tell you that those kid pitchers weren’t bearing down on Ted,” said McGowan. “For instance, that single Ted hit in the seventh inning against that young left hander, Porter Vaughan, was as beautiful a curveball as I’ve ever seen.”50
After the game, Ted seemed restrained in his joy, almost subdued, but it was obvious he was swelled with pride at his accomplishment. Before the writers arrived in the clubhouse, he took Johnny Orlando aside and said simply: “I’m a good hitter.”
“He said it just like he had proved something to himself,” Orlando said.51 Then he kissed the bat he’d used in the two games. An AP photographer saw that and asked him to do it again for posterity, and Ted obliged. To his roommate, Charlie Wagner, who had pitched in the first game, Williams expressed satisfied surprise: “Geez,” he said. “I hit .406.”52
A reporter asked Ted if he thought he had a chance at being elected MVP. “Gee,” he replied with a wide smile, “do you think there’s any chance? Even if I don’t, I’ll be satisfied with that thrill out there today. I wasn’t saying much about it, but I never wanted anything more in my life.”53
Outside, at least two thousand Philadelphians waited near the Red Sox clubhouse and spilled out onto 21st Street to honor the visiting hero.54 Ted was pinned against a wall and happily signed hundreds of autographs until police finally shoved him into a cab, which drove him to the train station.
Besides Ted’s illustrious .406 batting average, he led the league in home runs (37), runs scored (135), walks (147), on-base percentage (.553), and slugging percentage (.735). His 120 RBIs were five short of DiMaggio’s leading 125, so that narrowly cost him the Triple Crown.
His average had been remarkably consistent, falling below .400 only from April 30 to May 24 and from July 11 to July 24. Ted had a substantially higher average at home, where he hit .428, than on the road (.380). Williams liked Fenway for its good green background, its lack of shadows, and the short left-field wall, which enabled him to wait longer on a pitch and still hit it. “I always said to myself: ‘If you swing a little late it won’t be the worst thing in the world, because there’s that short fence, the defense isn’t there, and slices or balls hit late can still go out,’ ” Ted wrote in his book.55
Williams is the only .400 hitter, at least in the modern era, not to get the benefit of the sacrifice fly rule, which does not charge a batter with a time at bat if he hits a fly ball that scores a runner from third base. The rule was on the books from 1908 until 1931, on again in 1939, and off from 1940 to 1954. While no one at the time kept track of the number of sacrifice flies Williams hit in 1941, statisticians would determine years later that he hit six. So if those six at bats had been deducted from his total, he would have had an average of .411.
Another hurdle that Ted had to overcome was his lack of speed. Only five of his 185 hits were infield hits, or so-called leg hits.
But fueling Williams’s road to .406, on the other hand, were his 147 walks—far more than any of his twentieth-century predecessors in the .400 club—which enabled him to be charged with many fewer times at bat. With just 456 official plate appearances, Williams was the only .400 hitter in the modern era to have fewer than 500 at bats and the only one to have fewer than 200 hits.
YEAR PLAYER AB H BB BA
1901 Nap Lajoie 544 232 24 .426
1911 Joe Jackson 571 233 56 .408
1911 Ty Cobb 591 248 44 .420
1912 Ty Cobb 553 226 43 .409
1920 George Sisler 631 257 46 .407
1922 George Sisler 586 246 49 .420
1922 Ty Cobb 526 211 55 .401
1922 Rogers Hornsby 623 250 65 .401
1923 Harry Heilmann 524 211 74 .403
1924 Rogers Hornsby 536 227 89 .424
1925 Rogers Hornsby 504 203 83 .403
1930 Bill Terry 633 254 57 .401
1941 Ted Williams 456 185 147 .406
Another factor was his average relative to that of the rest of the league. When Bill Terry—the last .400 hitter before Williams—posted his .401 mark in 1930, the league batting average was .303, meaning that Terry’s average was 32 percent higher than the norm. When Ted hit .406, the league average was down to .266, meaning that Williams hit 53 percent higher—a much greater feat than Terry’s in a far more competitive era.56
The late Stephen Jay Gould—renowned Harvard University evolutionary biologist, science historian, baseball statistics maven, and ardent Yankees fan—crunched Williams’s 1941 numbers against those of the previous .400 hitters and concluded that Ted’s feat was “the greatest achievement in twentieth-century hitting… a beacon in the history of excellence, a lesson to all who value the best in human possibility.”57
Several days later, Ted and Jimmie Foxx flew to San Diego to join a team of major leaguers and Pacific Coast League players on a brief barnstorming tour through Southern California.*
Several thousand people and a brass band turned out at Lindbergh Field on October 3 to greet their hometown hero. As a city official launched into a windy speech, Ted shifted his feet nervously, scanned the crowd for familiar faces, and spotted Rod Luscomb, his mentor at the University Heights playground.
“Hi, Rod!” Ted yelled as the city official droned on. “Come the hell up here!”58 Williams walked over to the rope line and escorted Luscomb up to the platform.
Ted was embarrassed at all the fuss and said only a few words. Foxx assured the crowd that “you will find that Ted still wears the same size hat despite his success. The only thing that’s bigger is the bat that he waves in front of opposing pitchers.”59 Then there was a parade to the civic center downtown, followed by another program at Williams’s old playground in University Heights.
That night there was a reception at Ted’s house, and Luscomb wanted to talk hitting with his former pupil. Had he changed his swing at all?
“Wait a minute, I’ll get a bat and show you,” replied Ted eagerly. “Hey, Ma, got a bat for me?” May Williams could come up with nothing. “A helluva house,” Ted said. “Haven’t even got a bat here.” So Ted proceeded to shadow-hit, taking full imaginary cuts to demonstrate how his swing had evolved, the throw rug gathering under his feet as he swung and as May’s guests watched, transfixed.
Before the first game the following day at Lane Field, Ted put on a show in batting practice, smashing four over the right-field fence onto Pacific Highway. Ted and Foxx each hit homers for their team, the San Diego All-Stars, who were managed by Cedric Durst, Williams’s old teammate from the Padres.
On November 11, Joe DiMaggio was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player. The sportswriters had voted, and DiMaggio garnered 291 poi
nts compared to Ted’s 254. Colonel Egan called the decision a “crying sin and shame,” and a Sporting News fan poll concluded, by a margin of 55 to 26, that the award should have gone to Williams.
But Ted didn’t squawk. He acknowledged that the streak was a singular accomplishment—and besides, the Yankees had won the World Series. In any event, he was keeping his head down in Minnesota, back for another winter of hunting and romance. The activities took place in that order, if Doris Soule’s plaintive poem of November 28, commemorating the first anniversary of their meeting, was any indication:
It’s just a year ago today
That Ted and I first met,
And yet I cannot think of it
Unless my eyes are wet
For here I sit just drinking Cokes
And waiting for the phone,
While Ted sits on some blasted lake,
I sit here all alone.
I think of Ted—Ted thinks of ducks
Oh—vicious life I lead!!!
Sometimes I wish that I could be
A “Mallard” in the weeds.
For then attention I would get
If only with a gun
For as it is now everyday
I just see him on the run
But after all an anniversary
Doesn’t mean so much
Especially when there’s such a thing
As an open season on ducks!!
Nine days later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and shortly thereafter, the United States declared war against Japan. Three days after that, the United States declared war upon Germany and Italy. World War II was on. Doris suddenly had a new worry about her man, and Ted geared up for a vastly different 1942.
7
3A
On the morning of Pearl Harbor, Ted had been out hunting ducks. When he returned to his room at the Gagen Hotel in Princeton, Minnesota, he heard the news on the radio.
“Frankly, none of this war talk had meant a damn to me up to then,” Williams later wrote.1 “I had read where some admiral had said if the Japanese got too frisky we could take them in six months, so I’d pretty much dismissed them as a threat. Hitler had been giving Europe fits, and things were looking bad all over, but it hadn’t sunk in on me yet. All I was interested in was playing ball, hitting the baseball, being able to hunt, making some money.”
In other words, he was self-absorbed. He certainly didn’t react to Pearl Harbor the way Bob Feller did, which was to enlist in the Navy two days later.
With the notable exception of Hank Greenberg, few pro ballplayers had been called up in 1941, when the US role in the war was confined to financial and logistical support of Great Britain and the Allies under the Lend-Lease program. Greenberg had been drafted into the Army in May and released two days before Pearl Harbor. After the bombing, he signed back up and would serve until mid-1945.
But Feller and Greenberg were baseball anomalies. Among major leaguers, there was no mass rush to enlist following Pearl Harbor, especially after President Roosevelt told Commissioner Landis that baseball should carry on with its schedule for the sake of the nation’s morale and sense of normalcy.
Williams thus felt he had been granted at least some latitude to savor the grandeur of his luminous 1941 season.
“All right,” he told the writer Cleveland Amory in a piece for the Saturday Evening Post, “so I think I’m one helluva hitter. Well, all I’m asking is, suppose I stop thinking it, then who do you suggest is going to?”
Amory, fresh out of Harvard and five years away from publishing his seminal satire, The Proper Bostonians, was charmed and disarmed by Ted as he watched him prance around the room where they met, a suite at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, swinging a wet towel as he spoke. At one point, Williams stopped, gazed down at the hotel guests gathered by the swimming pool, and said, “How would you like to be really rich?”
Amory was struck by Ted’s naked ambition, his rebelliousness, his disdain for mediocrity, and by what Bob Feller told him when the writer called to ask how good Williams really was: “The pitcher never lived who could throw it by him.”
Among the many stories Ted told Amory, one stood out as particularly delightful. A few years earlier, following the dedication of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and apparently soon after the contretemps over his throwaway line about wanting to be a fireman, Ted had secretly visited the new shrine to baseball.
“As soon as he got the chance, the Kid stole away all by himself and wandered into the little building where he longs someday to be remembered,” Amory wrote. “For a long time he stood in awe among the various busts, plaques, records and bats. He read every line. After he had gone out he thought no one had seen him. He was even sure of it. But a few days later, back in Boston, he received a letter at his hotel. On the head of the envelope was a name and after it the words, ‘Chairman, Cooperstown Committee, Cooperstown, N.Y.’ The Kid could not believe it—it was sooner than even he had expected. He tore it open.” But a town father was merely writing to inform Ted that he had been named Cooperstown’s honorary fire chief.
In 1941, Williams’s draft board in Minneapolis had classified him 3A because he was the sole supporter of his mother. Though May and Sam Williams would not be officially divorced until May 14, 1942, they had been separated since April of 1939, when Sam had run off with Minnie Dickson and settled in the San Francisco area. Ted’s father had not seen fit to send May any money since then, and Danny Williams was of no help to his mother. Moreover, Danny was preparing to enlist, so the responsibility for May’s support—the Salvation Army paid her little or nothing, and she was in poor health—had fallen totally on Ted. He’d been giving her money since he first joined the Red Sox and often had the team send her his payroll checks directly.
In November of 1941, Ted’s draft board had asked him to have his mother submit affidavits attesting to her financial and medical condition. This apparently prompted May to conclude that Ted either would be or had already been reclassified 1A: eligible for induction. When a San Diego paper quoted her as saying that Ted had, in fact, been called up, a spokesman for Hennepin County Draft Board 6, in Minneapolis, denied the report, saying Ted was still 3A.
But Pearl Harbor changed the military and political calculus for the Hennepin County board and hundreds of others across the country. About four weeks later, after Pearl Harbor, Ted was notified that he was 1A. He was ordered to report for a physical in Minneapolis on January 8.
In his initial public comments about his reclassification, Williams was chipper and seemingly enthused about going off to war, cracking that it would be fun to serve with Hank Greenberg. “If they can’t put me in Hank’s company, I hope they put me in Company B,” said Ted. “You know old Company B: ‘B there when they go and B there when they come back.’ ”2
But that quote was just for public consumption. Privately, Ted was miffed, and he couldn’t understand why his draft status had been changed. He plainly was the sole supporter of his mother and could easily document that. She depended on him, Pearl Harbor or no Pearl Harbor, so on the same day that he told the writers he hoped he could be in Company B, Williams consulted a lawyer.
The lawyer, Wendell Rogers, was a Selective Service adviser appointed by the governor of Minnesota. Rogers was supposed to serve as an honest broker between draftees and the government regarding the circumstances of individual cases. Williams asked Rogers if the draft laws had changed as a result of Pearl Harbor. Rogers said he didn’t think so. They discussed his situation, and Rogers asked Ted if he wanted him to appeal the 1A classification to a state appeals board. Williams said yes.
On January 8, Ted appeared before his draft board and passed an initial Army physical as a scrum of reporters and photographers recorded the event. The Record of the ninth ran a front-page picture of Ted getting his eyes examined. “I guess they need more men,” a more subdued Williams remarked.
Within a week, the Red Sox announced they had received written word from Ted that he would have hi
s final Army physical at Fort Snelling in Saint Paul on January 25 and probably be inducted into the service soon after that. Ted added that it was doubtful he’d be able to make the January 28 dinner given by the Boston baseball writers, who had voted to give him their MVP award for 1941.
So as far as the public and the Red Sox knew, Williams was bound for the Army. His appeal effort was a secret. That changed on January 23, two days before the final physical at Fort Snelling was to have taken place, when local draft board spokesman William Price announced that Williams’s case had been successfully appealed and his induction postponed indefinitely. Price said a board agent had asked the state appeals panel to consider whether May Williams would be left without support if Ted was drafted. “Williams did not appeal the case himself,” said Price, charitably.3
The press made little of Price’s announcement, treating it as a pro forma exercise by Williams that had little chance of success, and despite the hyperpatriotic milieu, refrained at this stage from any suggestion that Ted was a slacker. Then on January 28, Williams called Eddie Collins to let the Red Sox know that the state appeals board had turned him down, voting 5–0 to keep his 1A classification intact.4 The reasons for this reversal would soon be made clear, but neither the draft officials nor the Red Sox made the decision public. As far as the fans knew, Ted was still 3A.
Ted went back to confer with Wendell Rogers to see if he was at the end of the line or whether any other options remained. Rogers introduced Williams to John Fagre, another Selective Service lawyer. Like Rogers, Fagre concluded that Ted deserved to be 3A, so they went to their boss, Minnesota Selective Service director Colonel J. E. Nelson, to discuss the case.
After the meeting, as Williams recounted it later, Rogers and Fagre told him they were informed by Nelson that “ordinarily this would be a 3A case, but this case is an exception.”5 When asked why, Nelson didn’t explain. The colonel did say that Williams had a final recourse, which would be to appeal his case to Washington, where it would be heard by a national Selective Service board that reported to the president. Nelson would authorize this step if Williams could convince the appeals agent in Minnesota, Herbert Estrem, of the merits of his case, and if Estrem would then agree to file the appeal on his behalf. When Estrem looked into May Williams’s situation, he learned that she was officially considered disabled, that she’d undergone a recent operation (paid for by Ted) and needed more medical attention, and furthermore, that Ted had invested in annuities for his mother and paid to have her house remodeled. Correspondence with relevant authorities convinced him she had no means of support besides Ted.