The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Kemmerer’s shock and awe were typical of the way Williams’s teammates viewed him. Most were much younger than he, the product of a youth movement begun by manager Lou Boudreau in 1952, when Ted went off to Korea, and now they were getting their first extended time with the Great Man. For his part, Williams, in his first full season back since the war, was still adapting to all the new faces. He missed his old pals Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio. (Doerr had retired after the 1951 season, Pesky had been traded to the Tigers in June of 1952, shortly after Ted went back into the service, and DiMaggio had retired suddenly in 1953.) Instead, there were players like Milt Bolling, who took over the starting shortstop job in 1953 at age twenty-two and stayed with the Red Sox until he was traded in 1957; Billy Consolo, the California bonus baby who came directly to the team in 1953 from high school, at the age of eighteen, and would remain the team’s utility infielder until 1959, when he was traded to Washington; Ted Lepcio, the starting second baseman in 1954 who had debuted in 1952 at age twenty-two; and the talented and voluble Jimmy Piersall, who had become the starting right fielder in 1953 at twenty-three and would move over to center, adjacent to Ted, by 1955.

  Of course Williams gave his young teammates hitting tips. He would always counsel against swinging at the first pitch. Better to let the pitcher show you as much as he was willing to. And look for the fastball, then adjust if you get the curve, Ted would say. The players noticed that Williams was so quick he could do the reverse: look for the curve but catch up to a fastball if it came. “I stayed in baseball for forty-three years,” said Bolling.8 “I saw a lot of players, and he made it seem like the rest of us were Little Leaguers and he was the only major leaguer.”

  Consolo was closely attuned to the clubhouse dynamics surrounding Williams. The players all had a single wire-cage locker, but Ted had a double-width steel locker in addition to his chain-link unit. The players were each issued two white home uniforms and two gray uniforms for the road. One day while Consolo was idling in front of his locker, he noticed an Italian tailor come in and start tending to Ted. He was tailoring the Kid’s uniforms. None of the rest of the players had fitted uniforms. Then there was the matter of leaving Fenway. After the game Ted would go to his car and try to drive out of the parking lot. Inevitably, there would be a sea of people, and it would take him a minute to move barely a foot, so Williams got in the habit of leaving the ballpark early if the game was decided, or if there was basically no chance he’d get up again. Consolo might often be called to pinch-run for him, then Gene Stephens would go in and play left field.

  When he played, Consolo would usually bat leadoff. “When I played and I got out, Ted would be waiting for me. He was going to ask me what pitch I got out on. I was only nineteen and I didn’t know what it was. I was just happy when I hit the ball.” Consolo soon learned another Williams idiosyncrasy after he got on base and Ted hit a home run. “I’m standing at home plate all excited like it was a high school game. I put out my hand and he went right on by me. I didn’t know what to do so I ran back to the dugout. I went to one of the trainers and told him what happened. He said, ‘No, the Kid don’t shake.’ I learned my lesson.”9

  Williams was the team’s de facto hitting coach years before there was any such official position. He would critique a teammate’s swing or a time at bat, try and help someone out of a slump, share information about enemy pitchers, and expect his fellow hitters to give him any morsel they could in return. “I learned to listen to Ted because I might pick up some things that could help me out,” remembered Frank Malzone, the longtime Red Sox third baseman who came up in 1955 and was a starter from 1957 to 1965. “Like being patient at the plate, not being too anxious, or swinging at the first ball you see. When I would swing at the first pitch from a relief pitcher, Ted would say, ‘You dumb dago, how do you know what he’s throwing?’ I was an aggressive hitter, and I couldn’t wait all of the time. He hated that.”10

  Williams would be brutally frank in his assessment of a hitter’s performance. Lepcio, a Red Sox infielder from 1952 to 1959, would be ready for Ted’s comments when he returned to the dugout after making an out. “I used to tell him the truth,” Lepcio said. “If [I’d been] shitty, I’d tell him. And most of the time he’d agree: ‘You’re right, it was a real horseshit swing,’ he’d say.”11

  If Ted was on deck, there wasn’t always time for a full debriefing if the hitter ahead of him had made an out. But he still expected that the hitter, on his way back to the dugout, would give him some sense of what the pitcher was throwing. If Williams then failed at the plate, he sometimes would blame his teammate for inadequate reporting. Once, in 1957, Indians reliever Don Mossi had just struck out Billy Klaus, then the Red Sox starting shortstop. “As I was heading back to the dugout, I told Ted, ‘I don’t have shit today, he’s throwing good and hard,’ ” Klaus recalled. “Ted had a serious look on his face as I went into the dugout. Mossi struck out Ted, too, and he was furious when he came back into the dugout. He said to me, ‘Billy, you little shit, you didn’t tell me he was throwing that hard.’ ”12

  When Ted’s pupils weren’t receiving his tips, they would watch him carefully when he came to the plate, both during batting practice and in games. During one game, Consolo and Lepcio were sitting on the bench next to Mickey Vernon, the longtime Washington Senators first baseman who had come to Boston in 1956 and 1957. They watched as Ted hit a line drive so hard it nearly beheaded the opposing first baseman. When Consolo and Lepcio wondered how it was possible for anyone to hit a ball that hard, Vernon piped up: “Listen, when this guy first came up he used to hit three shots a day like that. I remember when I played first base against him, I used to ask the manager not to let me hold the runners on first because that s.o.b. hit them down there so fast you didn’t have a chance.”13

  Since he was Ted Williams, Ted expected due deference from his teammates, and when he didn’t get it, he might throw a snit. In batting practice before the game, for example, each player was supposed to get two bunts and eight swings, but Ted considered the eight-swings rule elastic. If the Kid wanted nine, ten—or as many swings as he wanted, really—what teammate would dare challenge him?

  One day Don Buddin did. At the start of his rookie year in 1956, when he became the starting shortstop at the age of twenty-one, Buddin was waiting to hit after Williams. “Ted did his two bunts and eight swings, then went for a ninth swing,” said Buddin, who would be tagged with the nickname Bootin because of his penchant for making errors. “I stepped in the cage and said, ‘What are you doing? Eight swings and out!’ He laughed and said, ‘Fuck you, you cocky little son of a bitch.’ I didn’t know any better. But he was a team man. Everybody admired him, and everyone liked him. He always gave a hundred percent and never criticized his teammates. Having my locker next to him was one of the biggest thrills of my life.”14

  Other teammates seemed struck as much by Williams’s panache and presence as by his talent. Pete Daley, a substitute catcher from 1955 to 1959, remembered a scene early in the 1955 season. “A sportswriter came in, and Ted was sitting on a training table. The writer said, sarcastically, ‘Well, what do you think you’ll hit this year?’ He said, ‘If I don’t hit over .350, I’ll kiss your ass.’ [He would hit .356.] I don’t think there was anybody in the clubhouse. He was always quick with that tongue. He had to be one step ahead of them.”15

  One player who had grown up idolizing Williams but who came to have a somewhat contentious relationship with him as a teammate was Jimmy Piersall. Piersall was the starting right fielder in 1953 and 1954 and the center fielder from 1955 to 1958. A better-than-average hitter (.272 over seventeen major-league seasons), Piersall was brilliant defensively. He played a shallow center field, often made seemingly impossible catches, and had a rifle arm. But Piersall, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was best known for the nervous breakdown he had in 1952, when, following a series of meltdowns on and off the field, he was institutionalized and given shock therapy. When he re
turned to baseball in 1953—a time when mental illness and the issues surrounding it were largely ignored—Piersall faced merciless taunts from rival fans and players who would call him cuckoo, gooney-bird, and worse. Courageously, he wrote a book about his experience in 1955, Fear Strikes Out, which later became a movie.

  Piersall noted that Williams took a lot of abuse from the fans, too—for different reasons. “They were tough on him, but you know why? They sort of sensed that when they got on him, he played better,” Piersall told one interviewer. “He hit better. Ted used to say to me when I got mad about something, ‘I’ll take care of it kid. Don’t worry.’ He used to talk through his teeth when he got mad. I said, ‘Ted, why are you getting so mad all the time?’ And he said, ‘You know why? Because I’ve got to be good every day. You don’t have to be.’ ”16

  After his breakdown, Piersall sometimes played to type, seeming to delight in pulling zany stunts. He was traded to Cleveland after the 1958 season, and on a visit to Yankee Stadium with the Indians he hid behind the monuments in center field. In 1960, on a return trip to Fenway Park, Piersall began jumping around in center, trying to distract Ted when he came to the plate. Williams, who couldn’t abide any distraction while hitting, asked home plate umpire Ed Hurley to “put the chains on him.” Hurley walked toward center and gestured at Jimmy to stop, but Piersall merely began imitating Hurley’s gestures, prompting the ump to toss him. Piersall had a fit and had to be escorted off the field by his teammates.17 In 1963, after hitting his hundredth home run while playing for the New York Mets, Piersall ran around the bases backwards. “Probably the best thing that ever happened to me was going nuts,” he once said. “Who ever heard of Jimmy Piersall until that happened?”

  Piersall’s antics made him Ted’s rival for fan and press attention, which was probably one source of the tension between the two men. Ted didn’t like any teammate to challenge him in those departments. Piersall, who liked to flaunt his defensive prowess, also openly bossed Williams around in the field, whistling over to him and positioning him to the right or left, deeper or more shallow. Sometimes Ted would ignore the instructions and tell Jimmy to fuck off, but over time, he came to appreciate Piersall’s skills in the field and deferred to him, letting Jimmy roam as far as he pleased into left-center for fly balls.

  Toward the end of the 1954 season, with the Red Sox floundering well back in the pack, the team decided it would fire Lou Boudreau over the winter and hire a new manager for 1955. Joe Cronin approached Ted and asked if he would be interested in the job.18 Hell, no, Williams replied. He had declared in the Saturday Evening Post in April that this was to be his last year, and as the games wound down he was sticking to that line publicly. But he told Cronin if he did come back it would be as a player, not a manager. He could still hit, after all.

  Cronin persisted, arguing that Ted had the respect of the other players and would make a fine manager. Ted said he didn’t know any of the subtleties, like when to replace a player. He didn’t even know how to make out a lineup card. Cronin assured him he’d get him all the help he needed. Later, Tom Yawkey made the same pitch, but Ted turned him down, too, saying he knew it would be a disaster. He’d get into one kerfuffle after another with the writers, and before long he’d be fired.

  As the season wore on, there were more and more stories in the papers speculating on whether Ted would really retire as he had claimed he would. Harold Kaese reported that fans were mounting petition drives urging Ted to come back.19 The Boston Post took this a step further by printing a blank coupon daily, headlined PLAY NEXT YEAR, TED!,20 in which fans would write down in ten words or less why they thought Ted should return, and mail it back to the paper. The Boston Chamber of Commerce backed the Post’s campaign with a ten-word submission, saying Ted should keep going because “the youth of Greater Boston need him as an inspiration.”

  One ardent Williams fan who was reading accounts of Ted’s imminent retirement with alarm was Ed Mifflin, a thirty-one-year-old sales manager for an upholstery firm in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Mifflin, a forerunner of the statistical geeks now ubiquitous in modern baseball, chanced to run into Williams in mid-September in the rotunda of Baltimore’s train station. The Red Sox had just finished a series with the Orioles, and Williams was reading a newspaper, waiting for a train to take him to Washington for a game against the Senators.

  Mifflin spotted him and walked right up. “Excuse me, Ted,” he said. “But I’ve been bothered by all that talk about your quitting baseball. You were kidding, weren’t you?”

  Ted looked up and saw a short, stocky man holding a bulging briefcase. “Why should I kid about a thing like that?” he said, then went back to reading his paper.

  But Mifflin was on a mission. “Look here, Ted,” he said. “You’re crazy if you think you’re going to quit baseball now. You’re not! You can’t!”

  “What do you mean I can’t?” Ted snapped. “That’s my business.”

  “It’s a lot more than your business. You’re not just an independent operator. You’re public domain. You owe it to baseball, if not to yourself, to reach certain milestones before you quit.” Mifflin proceeded to lecture Williams as if he were a baseball naïf and began citing specifics of his career totals in various key hitting categories.

  “Do you know how close you are to having 2,000 hits, 400 homers, 1,500 runs batted in, and 1,500 runs scored? None of the really great players stopped when they had any of those goals in sight. Do you realize you have 1,400 RBIs, and only twelve men in history have gone over 1,500? In my book, you’re one of the finest hitters the game has ever known. But if you quit now, the record books will never show how great you were. Did you ever stop to consider how you’re going to stack up in baseball history if you call it a day without trying for four thousand total bases? Joe DiMaggio didn’t make it. But you can.”

  “Well, now, listen here—” Ted began to sputter.

  “What do you actually know about your lifetime records, Ted?”

  Williams said he knew how many home runs he had and what his average had been each year.

  “Just as I thought,” Mifflin said. “You really have no idea where you stand. Why, there are sixteen offensive departments in which you’re approaching milestones—and all you’ve kept track of are your home runs. Do you know how many hits you’ve racked up?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got 1,930 in all, including yesterday. It won’t take much to reach two thousand. And in home runs, you’re not even among the first ten in lifetime totals. But if you stick around…”

  Mifflin, who was also a Republican Party leader in his hometown of Swarthmore, had Ted’s attention now. “Who are you, anyway?” he asked. Just then Ted’s train arrived. Mifflin only had time to reply that he was “a helluva fan of yours” before Williams had to board. But Ted had been intrigued by this stranger’s pitch.

  “Get in touch with me!” Williams yelled as the train pulled away.

  Not long afterward, the two met again over dinner in New York, and Mifflin laid out in more detail a series of realistic hitting goals that Ted could attain. “Before our meal was over, Ed Mifflin had given me a reason for playing baseball,” Ted told Leslie Lieber in 1958 for an article in This Week magazine, the now-defunct Sunday newspaper supplement, that disclosed the Mifflin intervention. “By showing me how close I was to bettering my lifetime records, Mifflin had set up goals that made sense to me. He had given me a baseball blueprint for my whole remaining career.”

  By the time the Lieber story appeared, Mifflin had surfaced as the statistician behind a 1957 Look magazine spread entitled “The Case for Ted Williams,” which said Ted had a higher percentage of game-winning home runs than Ruth and ranked second only to the Babe as a slugger and hitter for average.

  During the six more years that Williams played, Mifflin would send him scores of telegrams and postcards alerting him to various “approaching milestones.” He took special care to point out whenever Ted had passed one of DiMaggi
o’s records. In September of 1956, for example, Williams learned he had passed the Clipper’s RBI total and, later, that he had bettered Joe’s total-bases mark.21 But Ted would disclose nothing of his dealings with Mifflin for four years, so as the final game of the 1954 season approached, on September 26, he was giving no public indication that this would not be his final appearance at Fenway Park.

  There were only 14,175 people in attendance for the game against the Senators. The first prolonged ovation the fans gave Ted came when he stepped to the plate in the seventh for what figured to be his last at bat, with the Sox leading 4–2. Washington pitcher Gus Keriazakos refused to take the mound until the applause died down. Ted then swatted a home run into the right-field stands. He trotted around the bases with his eyes fixed to the ground and without tipping his cap, of course. When the Red Sox blew the game open on the way to an 11–2 win, Ted got up again in the eighth and made an out. Boudreau pulled him from left field with two outs in the ninth to give him a curtain call.

  Williams had finished his injury-shortened season with a .345 average, 29 home runs, and 89 RBIs in 117 games. For the eighth time, he led the league in walks with 136, a number that prevented him from getting the requisite four hundred official at bats to qualify for the batting title.* In the clubhouse, Williams insisted he’d just played his last game. “I’ve decided that this is the end,” he said.22 “You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.” He would have his fishing business and plenty of other projects to keep busy, he said. Then Williams shook hands with all the writers, smiled, and declared, “There was only one guy among you I really hated”—presumably Dave Egan. Tom Yawkey, Joe Cronin, and Lou Boudreau all said they hoped Ted would change his mind and return to play next year.