When the din died down a bit, Commissioner Happy Chandler summoned Williams to his office for a private talk, which was kept quiet at the time. Chandler liked Ted and wanted to see if he could help soothe the slugger’s frayed nerves.
“Ted kept saying about the Boston fans, ‘What do they want me to do?’ ” Chandler said years later. “He said, ‘I hit the ball into the stands for them. I hustle. I make the catches. But they boo me. Or those sportswriters blast me.’ He’s a good boy. Trouble with Ted is, he’s got a persecution complex. He can’t understand why people boo him. That’s why I called him in. I thought I’d try to help him. When a fellow needs a friend, a fellow needs a friend. But I just couldn’t reach him.”21
Jimmy Cannon, the prominent New York Post columnist, played off the tantrum story and wrote on June 1 that Ted wanted to be traded—to Detroit. Though Cannon was one of the few writers Ted liked, he panned the story and the next day issued a denial in his own column: “I never said I want to be traded. I don’t want to play baseball anywhere except in Boston, and I don’t want to play for anybody except Tom Yawkey.”
In a seminal piece later that month, Roger Birtwell of the Globe, writing from Chicago on June 20, referred to the Red Sox as “baseball’s Country Club Set” who didn’t seem the least bit upset to have just lost five games in a row in Cleveland and Detroit, or to be idling nine and a half games out of first place. “The Country Club boys, who receive half a million dollars a summer to play ball games, were relieved to escape from Detroit and Cleveland—two towns where the players are simply low-brow roughnecks,” Birtwell wrote. “Besides, they play too hard there.” This listless, fat-and-sassy image of the Boston players as pampered and overpaid by Yawkey would linger and define the team for a generation.
As always, Ted was central. The scene on the train ride from Detroit to Chicago was “the picture of contentment.” There was Junior Stephens asleep on a parlor chair, Mickey McDermott sprawled across six or seven seats, and Williams off by himself, sitting next to a porter in a separate smoking car, reading the sports pages and checking on his investments in the Wall Street Journal. Wrote Birtwell, “One of the players told Williams some time ago, ‘You buy every newspaper you can get, and spend half your time reading them—just to find someone to get mad at, each day.’ ”22
Sure enough, Ted popped off to Birtwell six days later: “Before the war, I hit .400,” he said. “When I hit 50 points lower after the war, the writers say it’s because I can’t hit against teams like the Yankees. But it could be that the Yankees have better pitching, couldn’t it? A guy can’t hit .400 every year.” Then he added this cruel postscript: “I’ll be able to retire in a couple of years or so. I’ll be hitting around .350. And I hope the baseball writers are up in the press box with the temperature at 121.… Men die at 120.”23
The Globe quoted that vicious remark in an article prominently placed on its front page. The piece ran just beneath the lead story, which reported that North Korea had invaded South Korea the previous day. President Harry Truman quickly ordered a Naval blockade of the Korean coast on June 29 and authorized General Douglas MacArthur to send American troops into Korea. By early July, 6,500 Marines set sail from San Diego, bound for Pusan, Korea.
As the ground commitment escalated, the need for tactical air support also grew. The Marine Corps was short on pilots, so it made plans to activate hundreds of its pilots who had served in World War II and who were still carried in the inactive reserve ranks. One of the pilots who stood to be recalled was Williams. After being discharged from World War II, he had remained in the Reserves and now held the rank of first lieutenant, an appointment he’d accepted in writing on June 30, 1949. He had casually signed up for the Reserves while filling out his discharge paperwork in 1946—and would later assert he did so unwittingly. He had agreed to allow the Corps to use his name to promote recruiting, and he’d recorded radio commercials for the same purpose, but he certainly hadn’t given serious credence to the notion that another war could be on the horizon or that becoming a reservist could make him vulnerable to be recalled to fight in it.
On July 12, Brigadier General Clayton C. Jerome, director of public information and recruiting for the Marine Corps, wrote Williams to tell him that since “the recruiting picture has indeed changed completely,” the Corps would be delaying the rollout of a generic poster featuring Ted’s photo to instead focus on a pitch that encouraged volunteers to join the “service which selects its men.”
Meanwhile, manager Joe McCarthy’s drinking had gotten out of control. He would go off on benders and miss a few games, then the writers would cover for him, reporting that he had the flu. Some days, he’d fall asleep in the dugout. Joe Cronin finally warned McCarthy that if he appeared at the ballpark drunk one more time he’d be sacked. When it happened in Detroit in late June, the club announced that McCarthy was resigning for health reasons. Coach Steve O’Neill took over as manager for the rest of the year.
Boston was eight back at the All-Star break. Williams had started slowly, but by that midpoint, he was cooking, at .321 with an impressive 25 homers and 83 RBIs. “I was hitting better in the month before the All Star game than I had ever hit in my life,” Ted later said.24
The other Red Sox joining Williams at Comiskey Park in Chicago for the All-Star Game on July 11 were Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Junior Stephens, and Walt Dropo, the rookie who had emerged as a power-hitting force, batting fifth in the Red Sox order behind Williams and Stephens.
In the top of the first inning, Pirates slugger Ralph Kiner hit a deep drive to left-center. Williams raced back for it and made a spectacular one-handed catch before crashing into the scoreboard, bracing himself for the collision with his left elbow. He rubbed the elbow hard on his way into the dugout, and American League manager Casey Stengel asked him if he was all right. Ted said he was.
In the bottom half of the inning, he laced what appeared to be a single to right field, but Jackie Robinson, playing well out on the grass in the Williams shift, grabbed the ball on one hop and threw Ted out at first. In the third, Kiner again smashed a line drive to left, and Ted made another nice running catch, continuing to belie his reputation as a poor, indifferent defender.
Kiner turned the tables on Ted in the bottom half of the inning, making a leaping catch of a scorcher Williams hit to right. In the fifth, with the score tied 2–2, Williams singled in the go-ahead run for the Americans. Stengel kept asking him how his elbow was. “I kept nodding, ‘OK, OK,’ because I wanted to play… but by now the elbow’s a balloon and I’m in great pain,” Williams recalled in his book.25 Ted struck out in the eighth, whereupon Stengel pulled him from the game, which the NL went on to win in fourteen innings, 4–3.
Williams was in agony on the flight home to Boston, Dropo remembered: “Ted was holding his hand in his shirt, and he said, ‘This goddamn thing, I think it’s broken.’ It was a four-hour flight from Chicago to New York, and all that time Ted was sitting there the heat of his body is going out. We got into LaGuardia—we had about an hour layover—and we went upstairs to the rotunda to have a drink. Ted said, ‘Give me a double Jack Daniel’s.… He kept saying, ‘This son of a bitch is broken. It’s killing me.…’ We landed in Boston, and I went to the hotel where I was living. I got up in the morning and I read the paper: ‘Williams’s Elbow is Broken. He’ll be out two months.’ Imagine.”26
On July 13, Ted was operated on, and seven bone chips were removed from his elbow. Williams was praised in the papers for courageously playing eight innings with a broken elbow—and playing well, at that. It was surprising that he’d violated his own dictum of not crashing into walls in pursuit of a fly ball—they didn’t pay off on fielding, he’d said. Now he wasn’t just out for a few games, he was out for a few months and had placed the balance of his career in jeopardy by breaking his elbow, a key cog in the willowy Williams swing. Ted would later say that the injury was one of his biggest disappointments, and he said that he was never the same hitter again
because he would always have stiffness in the elbow, was never able to get full extension in his left arm, and as a result lost some of his power.
After immobilizing his arm for a period, Williams began an exercise and physical therapy regimen for his elbow. On the sixteenth, he told Joe Cashman from his hospital bed that though the Red Sox were now eight and a half games out, he still thought they could catch up and win the pennant without him. He said he hoped to return in five or six weeks, adding: “I would like to play enough games to drive in seventeen runs to reach the one-hundred-RBI mark,” a plateau he hadn’t missed since his rookie year in 1939. The Kid seemed blithely unaware that the rather crass and baldly stated individual RBI goal might appear at odds with the team goal of winning a pennant.
While he was out, Williams would sometimes appear in the Red Sox dugout for home games, but he didn’t travel with the team. He tried to remain upbeat, but he could not have been cheered by a small item in the August 8 Globe, which reported that he was now eligible to be recalled to active duty by the Marine Corps under its latest reserve mobilization plan. A Corps spokesman was quoted as saying there were no plans to activate Ted “at this time,” but an obviously worried Williams fired off a letter the same day to Major General M. H. Silverthorn, director of the Marine Corps Reserve. “In view of the present situation I believe it important that I have my complete service record at hand,” Ted wrote, using official Red Sox stationery, in case Silverthorn had any doubts that he was receiving a letter from anyone other than the Ted Williams. Ted wanted to see precisely what he’d signed and confirm for himself the extent to which he was still on the hook.
Billy Goodman, his broken leg healed, had replaced Ted in left field and went on to have a career year at the plate, hitting .354 to win the batting title. With Goodman hitting for average and Dropo for serious power (he would hit .322 with 34 homers and 144 RBIs on the year), the loss of Williams was concealed. Starting August 15, the Sox won eleven in a row and sixteen of seventeen at Fenway Park to get back in the race, just two and a half games out of first place.
In the midst of this streak, Williams went up to Maine on a five-day fishing trip. This outing took place during the five-to six-week time frame within which Ted had estimated he would return to playing, so the specter of him fishing leisurely in the wilds of Maine rubbed some the wrong way. Colonel Egan, for one, let him have it: “T. Wms. Esq., who usually is considered part Ruth and part Shakespeare, has chosen the high point of the baseball season to become Izaak Walton and to throw all his energies into bagging a five-pound bass.”27 He went on to write his column from the point of view of a bass terrified at the prospect of being stalked by Ted. HOW THE FISH FEEL AS TED DESERTS SOX, the headline read. Others, including Harold Kaese, wondered if Williams’s teammates were irked by his fishing getaway. If he couldn’t play, could he not at least come to the ballpark and cheer his team on?
In fact, Williams was ambivalent about playing again. When he took his cast off, he couldn’t extend his left arm to within four inches of his right. He still had considerable pain, and wasn’t sure if he would help or hurt the team. Many argued that the club’s recent winning streak was evidence enough that the Red Sox were better off without Ted.28 But Steve O’Neill wanted Williams in the lineup and argued he should test the elbow now rather than wonder all winter what he could have contributed. So Ted was eased back, first with a pinch-hitting appearance against the Yankees at Fenway on September 7. When he bounded out of the dugout in the fifth inning and strode to the plate, making his first appearance in more than eight weeks, the crowd of 29,897 erupted. “No one ever received a greater ovation,” wrote Alex MacLean in the Record. “No appearance was ever more dramatic.”29
There were men on second and third and one out. Yogi Berra walked to the mound and looked into the dugout for instructions as the cheers continued to thunder down from the grandstand and the bleachers beyond. Casey Stengel, predictably, ordered an intentional walk. Ted was lifted for a pinch runner, then he showered and left the park before the writers could get to him. The Sox went on to win, 10–8, and were now within one and a half games of the Yankees and the Tigers, who were tied for first.30
O’Neill held Williams out for another week before pinch-hitting him again on September 14 against the Browns in Saint Louis. Ted doubled in a 6–3 loss. He returned as a starter the following day. It was hot and humid at Sportsman’s Park, so Williams was able to get his elbow good and loose. He hit a long home run over the fence in right and out onto Grand Avenue, as well as three singles, to lead the Sox to a 12–9 win.
But Ted’s barrage of hits amounted to false hope. His elbow still hurt, his timing was off, and he wasn’t in game shape. He could manage only two hits in his next seventeen times to the plate. “At times he seems afraid to swing,” remarked Hank Greenberg after watching the Sox play the Indians at Cleveland.31
By the nineteenth, Boston went back within a game and a half of the top, but then they crashed, losing four in a row in Cleveland and New York despite two homers by Ted in the second Yankees game. They finished third, four games behind the Yankees.
In their postmortems of the season, the press noted that the team had gotten close without Williams and sunk when he returned—to be precise, Boston had been 44–17 without Ted and 8–8 after he came back. Some players were quoted anonymously as saying they “could have won it without Ted” and that he had only created tension when he returned. Such conflict was fuel for the hot-stove season, of course, and soon there were renewed rumors that the Kid might be traded, even though, despite missing sixty-seven games, he’d still hit .317, with 28 homers and 97 RBIs.
Williams retreated to Florida for a winter of bonefishing in the flats of the Florida Keys. He would pole the boat four or five miles each day, stretching his elbow and building it up again in the process.
“In the spring, I began to feel a little strength coming back,” he said.32 But it was still sore and stiff. As a result, Williams, now thirty-two, announced that he would set his own schedule in spring training and play a limited number of Grapefruit League games. That struck Steve O’Neill, who was anxious to put his own stamp on the team in his first full season, as a direct challenge to his authority, and he decided to publicly face Ted down on the issue, declaring that the star would play whenever he, O’Neill, said so. Williams, grumbling all the while, capitulated and played a full exhibition schedule.
O’Neill, fifty-nine, was no naïf. Before being named to succeed Joe McCarthy, he had been a manager for nine years—with the Indians from 1935 to 1937 and the Tigers from 1943 to 1948, compiling an overall record of 708–582. He’d won a World Series with the wartime Tigers in 1945. But O’Neill would turn out to be Williams’s least favorite manager, and they sparred throughout spring training over his playing time. When Ted asked to be let out of a March 18 game in Tampa against the Reds because of a cold, O’Neill refused, whereupon Williams went into his diva routine—pouting, loafing, and generally going through the motions, earning boos and jeers from the crowd as a result. He responded by spitting at the fans on three different occasions, the last time as he crossed home plate after belting a homer. Assessing Ted’s new nadir, John Gillooly of the Record gave him a new name: the Splendid Spitter.33
The Red Sox started slowly, per usual, and Williams slower still. On May 20, Ted was hitting only .226, prompting alarmist whispering from the press box and elsewhere that he was done. Naturally, that kind of talk was just the motivational tonic he needed to go off on one of his tears. In the last ten games of May, Williams went 26–53, including 4 homers and 22 RBIs, to raise his average to .321. The Sox won ten in a row and by mid-July were in first place. Ted was hitting to all fields, fielding well, and hustling—even scoring from second on a bunt in a game against New York. Boston stayed competitive through August, but collapsed again in September as the Yankees surged to another pennant. Boston finished third, eleven games out, and Williams slumped at the end to post what for him were subpar fi
nal numbers: a .318 average, with 30 home runs and 126 RBIs. The punctuation mark came in his final at bat of the ’51 season, when his two-out pop-up in the ninth gave Yankees pitcher Allie Reynolds his second no-hitter of the season.
For the Red Sox, the 1951 season marked the end of what many prognosticators, starting in 1946, had thought would be a dynasty in the making. Key pitching injuries had derailed the 1947 season, but pennants were lost on the final days of 1948 and 1949, while the ’50 and ’51 teams contended into September and could have won. Now the nucleus was aging, with Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Pesky, Stephens, Doerr, and Kinder all in their thirties.34 Doerr, bothered by a chronic bad back, announced his retirement following the ’51 season, and DiMaggio followed in early 1953. The team wouldn’t be a pennant contender for the rest of the ’50s, a decade in which Williams was virtually the only reason to come to the ballpark. These would be years in which Ted, lacking even the semblance of a supporting cast, no longer bothered to eschew the role of individualist, the role that his critics had long cast him in.
12
Ted and Joe
On December 11, 1951, Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement in New York.
The fabled Yankee Clipper, who had just turned thirty-seven, said his decision was prompted by advancing years, a spate of physical ailments, and the simple realization that as a player, “I no longer have it.”
Addressing a gaggle of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameras at the Yankees offices in Manhattan’s Squibb Tower, Joe said that “when baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game. And so I’ve played my last game of ball.”
Responding to questions, he said his greatest thrills had been the fifty-six-game hitting streak of 1941 and his smashing return to baseball in Boston that summer of 1949, when he’d missed the first sixty-five games of the season because of a heel injury. Asked who he considered to be the greatest of present-day hitters, Joe replied: “Ted Williams. He is by far the greatest natural hitter I ever saw.”1
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 42
