The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  After pronouncing Williams a likely candidate to surpass Ty Cobb’s lifetime .366 record—even though Williams was much more of a power hitter than Cobb—Rice said that the most interesting thing about Ted was not his hitting but “his philosophy of competition and life in general.”

  First, Williams pointedly disagreed with Rice’s contention that the greatest hitters were simply born that way and that working hard left room for only marginal improvement. He also passionately preached the power of positive thinking, reiterating his belief that the reason he didn’t win the batting title his rookie year was because he simply didn’t think he was as good as the likes of Joe DiMaggio and Jimmie Foxx, even though he was. That had been a “big mistake.” Now, he said, “it’s my angle you are only going to be as good as you think you are. You’ve got to have that target to aim at.… I can tell you I’m shooting at nothing less than a .400 season. I still tell you I think I’m the greatest hitter baseball has ever known. Why? Because I have to think that way to ever be the greatest hitter. Suppose I’m wrong? Then what? I’ll still hit pretty well and I’ll still keep on thinking I’m the best. They can’t arrest me for that. If you are aiming at a target, why not pick the top one?”6

  Ted’s chutzpah notwithstanding, perhaps the most intriguing story of the spring had been the emergence of a fledgling professional baseball league in Mexico, which by the end of March had successfully staged guerrilla signings of several American major leaguers, notably Vern “Junior” Stephens, the power-hitting St. Louis Browns shortstop, and veteran Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen.

  The Mexican challenge had been brewing since February, when five brothers—all import-export tycoons who claimed to be worth between $30 million and $50 million—began threatening to break up the American professional baseball monopoly. The leaders of this fraternal initiative, Jorge and Bernardo Pasquel, were colorful, gun-toting characters predictably portrayed in the American press as Mexican bandito caricatures. When the Pasquels announced that they intended to make six-figure offers to Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, and Stan Musial, they had the full attention of A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the former Kentucky governor and senator who had become commissioner of baseball in 1945.

  The Pasquels’ timing was good. They knew that the returning major leaguers who had been off at war were thirsting to make up for lost earnings and that Chandler was also confronting baseball’s first stirrings of labor unrest. Dom DiMaggio of the Red Sox, for instance, resentful that Boston had merely tried to renew his contract for his prewar salary of $10,000, consulted a lawyer to determine if he was actually bound to the Red Sox or could become a free agent and sell his services to the highest bidder.7

  Players who were demoted to the minors after serving their country at war sued under the GI Bill of Rights, which required that service personnel had to be rehired at their former jobs for at least a year unless they were physically impaired. And in April, the American Baseball Guild would be formed in Boston, a first attempt at a union that would establish a minimum salary and the right of arbitration.

  It was in this climate that Ted agreed to an early March meeting with Bernardo Pasquel in Cuba, where the Red Sox had gone to play an exhibition game against the Washington Senators. The meeting was brokered by Globe writer Roger Birtwell, who wrote a colorful front-page account of the session, which took place over a rickety wooden table in a Havana barroom.

  Birtwell, who had a ghostly complexion and spoke with a fey, aristocratic accent, described Pasquel as “a mustached Mexican out of the pages of O. Henry.” The meeting came about when Pasquel told Birtwell he was prepared to pay Williams $500,000 for three years if he jumped to Mexico. After some more conversation about the brothers’ grandiose plans, which included building a fifty-thousand-seat stadium in Mexico City, Birtwell went down to the hotel lobby and staked out Ted, hoping to arrange a meeting for him with Pasquel, which he would then witness and have the scoop on.

  When Ted appeared, shortly after 11:00 p.m., Birtwell was waiting and told him of Pasquel’s offer. “Ted,” the writer said, “you’re going to meet this chap eventually. You might as well meet him now.”

  “Where is he?” Williams bellowed, whereupon Pasquel materialized and, speaking broken English, engaged the Kid in some preliminary small talk. Ted noticed that Pasquel wore several diamond rings and sprayed out saliva as he spoke.

  “Have you signed Bob Feller?” Williams asked.

  “Why not?” replied Pasquel cryptically.

  “Well, if you’ve got Feller, I’m going to stay in the American League,” Williams cracked.

  Birtwell wasn’t sure either man was understanding the other, so he hustled them off to a bar, where he would snag an interpreter. But to Birtwell’s and Pasquel’s dismay, Joe Cronin and clubhouse man Johnny Orlando were there having a drink. Williams tried to introduce Pasquel to Cronin, but the manager wanted no part of the Mexican entrepreneur and refused to shake his hand.

  Pasquel secured the services of an interpreter and led Williams off to a corner table. Birtwell sat down with Cronin and Orlando. “Oblivious of dark-eyed senoritas who frolicked about the vicinity of the table, Pasquel went to work on Williams with great vim,” wrote Birtwell. “He talked earnestly and rapidly, constantly grabbing Williams by the shoulders and arms.”

  Cronin watched this scene unfold while plotting to disrupt it. He ordered Orlando to crash the meeting and just tell Pasquel that he was Williams’s interpreter. Orlando walked over, but Pasquel refused to let him sit down. Then Cronin himself got up and, waving off a flurry of protests from Pasquel, sat down grimly.

  “I am having private talk!” Pasquel shouted. Cronin said nothing. “I will talk to you any time you wish but this talk he is [sic] private.”

  “What’s so secret about it?” Cronin asked. When Pasquel lodged another volley of complaints, Cronin tried a different tack. “How many teams you got in your league?” The Mexican was dead silent for a few seconds, whereupon Cronin finally gave up and left.

  Pasquel and Ted continued their conversation, talking earnestly for another ten minutes. Back at the hotel, Williams told Birtwell that Pasquel had said, “I could name my own figure and my own terms. He said that since I was under a contract for this year he would not make me an offer for this season but he wants me next year. He invited me and my wife to come down to Mexico as his guests in the fall. He promised me short right-field fences and said they’ve got winds down there that always blow toward the outfield.”8

  When news of the approaches to Williams, Feller, and Musial surfaced, Commissioner Chandler reacted harshly. He called the Mexican League an “outlaw” venture and threatened that anyone in organized baseball who jumped his contract and was not back with his club by opening day would be barred from returning for five years. The Pasquels countered that Chandler was running an illegal monopoly that effectively placed his players in peonage.

  Baseball survived the legal skirmish that ensued, though not before the major leagues’ antitrust exemption and its foundational reserve clause were given an uncomfortable vetting. The Pasquels continued to court Ted through much of 1946, but neither he nor any other superstar ever assented to their pitch, and the Mexican League would fade as a threat.

  The Pasquel overture and a slew of other postwar offers to get involved in various endorsement deals or get-rich-quick schemes had persuaded Williams that he needed a business manager. He had fired James Silin after Silin leaked to the press his advice in 1942 that the Kid drop his 3A claim and enlist promptly for service in World War II. Ted consulted a friend, John Corcoran, who ran a Ford dealership outside Boston. Corcoran said he had just the man for the job: his brother Fred, who was promotional manager of the Professional Golfers’ Association.

  Ted met Fred Corcoran in Chicago and explained his problem. He had a lot of people pestering him with offers to do this and that. He didn’t want to be bothered, and he needed a reliable agent to sift through the offers. He would continue to negotiate h
is contract with the Red Sox himself. The two men talked for a while and hit it off. Finally, Ted asked Corcoran what his fee would be.

  “I’ll take fifteen percent,” said Corcoran.

  Williams thought he heard “fifty” and agreed, betraying his naïveté.

  “Not fifty,” Corcoran said, correcting him. “Fifteen.”

  Ted laughed. “Whatever you say. If you want to make it fifty, that’s all right with me.”9

  Corcoran assured him that 15 percent was satisfactory, and they shook hands on the arrangement. By that evening, Corcoran had secured an endorsement deal for Ted with Wilson Sporting Goods, and he soon would form Ted Williams Enterprises to obtain stakes in car dealerships and other ventures.

  Williams and the Red Sox broke fast. On opening day in Washington, April 16, in front of President Harry Truman, Ted hit a 430-foot missile into the center-field bleachers that Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich called the hardest-hit ball at Griffith Stadium in a decade. Truman and his military retinue rose from their box to follow the flight of the ball, the president applauding, then tipping his hat and even bowing to Williams in appreciation as the Kid, head down, trotted around third and approached home plate. The homer, which followed three batting-practice shots over the right-field fence, paced the Sox to a 6–3 win over the Senators.10

  Boston won its first five, lost three out of four, then began building another winning streak in Philadelphia. The fan schizophrenia that often attended Ted both at home and away was on full display at a doubleheader in Shibe Park on April 28. Left-field wolves were in good voice, calling him DP for having hit into three double plays against the Yankees at home on the twenty-fourth and “Mr. Williams, sir,” mocking his officer rank during the war. But when the Red Sox had completed a sweep and were leaving the field after the second game, quite a different spectacle unfolded: some twenty-five hundred adoring, frenzied fans, mostly kids, ran onto the field and surrounded Williams as he reached the pitcher’s mound on his way to the dugout from left field. They began pawing at him, reaching for his hat and glove, ripping his shirt open. Ted tried to escape but couldn’t, engulfed in a scrum that gradually pushed its way back out to left field. Finally, a burly policeman saw what was happening, bulled his way through the crowd, and cut a path for Ted to flee. Emerging from the clubhouse later and hopping into the car of a friend, Williams was mobbed again.

  It was Sinatraesque ball-field bobby-soxer treatment. “I honestly thought they were going to tear me in shreds,” Ted said afterward, his body bruised from the pummeling he took. “They were tearing away at my uniform when the cop saved me. I had visions of doing a nudist race into the clubhouse. Somehow I managed to save my glove. But boy, I had to fight for it.”11

  Ted stayed in a groove, blasting his second home run of the season four days later in Boston to give the Red Sox a ten-inning win against the Tigers, 5–4. While nearly everyone at Fenway stood and cheered the homer, one up-and-coming politician in attendance sat on his hands, brooding. John F. Kennedy, then a gaunt, twenty-eight-year-old World War II veteran running for Congress in Boston, had just lost a bet that Williams would not hit a home run.*

  Ted and his team continued on a tear. Over the first nine games in May, Williams hit four home runs and his average on the season stood at .427. The Globe began running a daily box called “Williams vs. Williams,” comparing his batting pace in 1941, the .406 year, with the current season’s. The Red Sox, meanwhile, were flying high in first place and took a fourteen-game winning streak to New York for a big three-game series against the Yankees.

  The Sox won the first game, 5–4, before a Ladies Day crowd of 64,183, but dropped the second, 2–0, ending their streak at fifteen. Ted did not distinguish himself in the loss, and again put his petulance on display for all to see. After taking a called third strike that he felt was outside, Williams pouted in left field, kicking several divots, and then lost a routine fly ball in the sun after forgetting to bring out his sunglasses. The Yankees fans unloaded on him, as did Dave Egan, who had ventured down to New York for the series.

  After chiding Williams for taking the third strike and for his “amateurish outfielding,” the Colonel proclaimed that despite the current standings, “the Yankees are the team to beat and I furthermore tell you that the Red Sox are not the team to beat them.” That was because Ted’s “fads, foibles and fancy fandangoes” created too many divisive distractions. The Red Sox, Egan asserted, were “divided into two detachments. The one consists of eight fellows mostly named Joe, whose hearts are bursting with the desire to win a pennant. The other consists of Ted Williams, who will rack up a nice, fat batting average for Ted Williams, and drive in a large total of runs for Ted Williams and, meanwhile, undermine the spirit of a team which deserves better.”12

  Ted must have seethed at that bit of Egan bile, especially since there was no indication it was true. A month later, the Red Sox, having ripped off another long winning streak, stood at 41–9, leading the Yankees by ten games. Ted hit over .500 for the first nine games in June, and on June 9, he capped the surge with a titanic blow off the Tigers’ Fred Hutchinson that landed thirty-seven rows up in the right-field bleachers at Fenway.*

  On July 9, the All-Star Game came to Fenway Park for the first time. That seemed appropriate in 1946, since the Red Sox had placed eight men on the American League squad, including four starters, and were still comfortably in first place. Bob Feller was to start for the Americans; for the Nationals, it was Claude Passeau, the Cubs right-hander whom Ted had taken deep to glory in the 1941 game.

  There was unusually high interest in the first postwar All-Star Game, now that the real stars were back. (The powers that be had decided to skip the game altogether in 1945.) Williams always looked forward to the showcase, especially this year, his first since 1942. He put on a grand exhibition in batting practice, bantering happily with friend and foe alike.

  He spotted Truett “Rip” Sewell, the puckish Pirates pitcher, who had rejuvenated his career in recent years by throwing a blooper ball, or “eephus” pitch. Sewell threw the pitch overhand in a twenty-foot arc, the way a softball pitcher might throw one underhand in a game of slow-pitch. Fans delighted in watching batters flail away at the bloopers, mostly ineffectively, as they had to supply all their own power. Reveling in the enchanted reaction to his eephus pitch from the crowds, who behaved as if they were watching a circus act, Sewell had come to see himself as a showman as much as a pitcher.

  “Hey, Rip!” Ted yelled at Sewell. “You wouldn’t throw that damn crazy pitch in a game like this, would you?”

  “Sure, I’m gonna throw it to you,” Rip replied.

  “Man, don’t throw that ball in a game like this.”

  “I’m gonna throw it to you, Ted. So look out.”13

  Passeau walked Ted in the first inning, undoubtedly not wanting to get burned again, but Charlie Keller of the Yankees followed with a home run to give the Americans an early 2–0 lead. Leading off the fourth against Kirby Higbe of the Dodgers, Williams hit a laser that took about three seconds to reach the center-field bleachers, some 420 feet away. As he rounded second, Ted caught a glimpse of slick-fielding Marty Marion, the Cardinals shortstop, winked at him, and said: “Don’t you wish you could hit like that, kid?” Marion, who was nine months older than Williams, just smiled.14

  The game devolved into a laugher for the American League. As for Williams, he put on a hitting clinic: he followed his fourth-inning homer with two sharp singles, one of which drove in a run. By the bottom of the eighth, the AL was up 8–0, and National League manager Charlie Grimm decided it was showtime—he called for Rip Sewell.

  Sewell was greeted rudely with three singles and a sacrifice fly, then Williams came to the plate with two men on. Sewell smiled at Ted, recalling their pregame dialogue. Ted shook his head, as if to say no, don’t do it. But Sewell nodded yes, he would.

  Rip went into his full windup, as if he were going to throw his fastball, such as it was, but came with
the blooper. Ted, bug-eyed, swung from his heels but fouled it off. He stepped out of the box, got back in, and stared out at Sewell, who again nodded at him. Once more came the blooper, but this time Ted let it drift outside for a ball. Then with Williams sitting on another blooper, Sewell snuck a fastball down the middle for a strike. The count was one and two.

  Now Sewell thought he had the advantage because Ted wouldn’t know what to expect. He wound up and let the blooper fly. It rose high, then dropped right down the chute for what would have been a strike. Williams was ready. As the ball floated down, Ted, acting on a pregame tip from Yankees catcher Bill Dickey, skipped forward with two short hops, propelling himself slightly out of the batter’s box to get almost a running start. He uncoiled a fierce uppercut swing—from his waist up through his shoulders—and drove the ball high and deep to right field in a splendid arc. It landed in the American League bull pen.

  In the six years that Sewell had been throwing the blooper, no one had come close to hitting a home run off him. As the 34,906 fans rose to cheer Ted’s blow, they also erupted “into a paroxysm of laughter,” the New York Times’s John Drebinger reported, underscoring the carnival atmosphere that attended Sewell and his blooper pitch.15 Ted also laughed in sheer delight as he rounded the bases, but again found time to ask Marty Marion at shortstop if he didn’t wish he could hit like that. Sewell, ringmaster of his own burlesque, savored the moment, too, laughing along with the crowd, following Williams around the bases and talking to him.