The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Three nights later, Williams continued his waterworks and other antics, spoiling a night in which general manager Joe Cronin was honored in advance of his induction into the Hall of Fame the following week. Ted participated in the pregame ceremonies honoring Cronin, then retreated into his own inner world of festering sores. The show started at the end of the top of the seventh, when Williams, after initially misjudging a line drive hit toward him in left field, backpedaled and made a nice leaping catch. Running in toward the dugout, he flung the ball high in the air toward second base, then as he came into the infield, he tossed his glove skyward to the Red Sox batboy. With the boobirds now in full voice, Ted, who happened to be leading off the inning, grabbed his bat and appeared ready to spit at the press box again, but the wind was blowing in his face, so he turned and spat downwind, toward the right-field stands.

  Baseball commissioner Ford Frick, who had come to the game to honor Cronin, watched the entire spectacle, but quickly ducked out to avoid commenting to reporters and took a cab to the airport to return to New York. As for Cronin, he was furious that the man he had nurtured since he was a brash rookie had marred an evening held in his honor. (Cronin hadn’t actually seen any of the spitting. He’d been entertaining friends and family in his box. It was George Sullivan who came in and told him, looking for a comment.)

  In the clubhouse after the game, Williams ranted and raved incoherently, vowing to continue to spit to show his contempt for Boston writers and those fans who booed him unjustly. “I’m going to continue to give it to those characters,” he said. “Nobody’s going to make me stop spitting. The newspaper guys in this town are bush. And some of those fans are the worst in the world. What do they want from a guy? I’ve hit over .340 for 17 years in this league, and every time I walk up there, they give me the business. What do they expect me to do, smile at them?”37

  The writers, in deference to Cronin, largely held their fire, but Ted was not done with his spitting jag yet. He was saving his most outrageous display for a few weeks later.

  On August 7, the Red Sox played an afternoon game against the Yankees that drew a post–World War II record crowd of 36,350. Boston was in third place, eight and a half games behind New York, and showing few signs they could mount any sort of meaningful run. But the Yankees always drew a large crowd, and Mantle was having his Triple Crown season, which would ultimately include a prodigious fifty-two home runs.

  Despite Mantle’s presence, the game was a gripping pitchers’ duel between the Yankees’ Don Larsen and Willard Nixon of the Sox. After ten innings, the score was 0–0. With two outs in the top of the eleventh, Mantle lifted a routine fly ball to short left field. Williams ran in to catch it, but the ball popped out of his glove, and Mantle reached second. The crowd let Ted have it. Then Yogi Berra hit a drive to left-center, which off the bat looked like it would at least be off the wall, but the wind was blowing in and knocked the ball down enough to allow Ted to reach up and spear it at the scoreboard. It was a nice catch in a key situation, and the boos moments earlier now turned to ringing cheers. But Williams hated this fickle fan behavior—front-running, he called it—and he seethed as he trotted in for the bottom of the eleventh.

  After crossing the first-base line, Williams spat contemptuously at the fans behind the dugout. Just before entering the dugout, he turned his head toward the press box and let fly with another glob. While he was in the dugout and the crowd howled, Ted picked up his glove and waved it toward the Yankee bench and the area between home and third, then he hopped out of the dugout and spat a third time in that direction. “Oh, no, this is a bad scene!” said Red Sox announcer Curt Gowdy on the radio.38

  For all the furor, the Red Sox still had to hit. Pitcher Nixon led off and reached on an error. Billy Goodman laid down a bunt toward first. Moose Skowron fielded it, but his throw to second sailed wide, and the runners were safe. Billy Klaus worked a walk to load the bases for… none other. As Williams strode to the plate, the crowd was in a fully lathered frenzy, with boos dominating the cheers. Those booing seemed to want to provoke Ted into another outburst.

  Casey Stengel lifted Don Larsen and brought in left-hander Tommy Byrne to face Ted. Figuring Williams would be overeager to paste one, Byrne pitched around him and got behind in the count. But Ted, disciplined as ever, refused to offer. Byrne kept nibbling, then lost him—ball four. The winning run was forced in.

  It was such an anticlimax. Ted had lusted to hit and cared not a bit that the Red Sox had won the game. Frustrated, he took a few steps toward first base and flipped his bat fifty feet high in disgust.39

  Done for the day, Williams continued to vent out of sight. On the way to the clubhouse, he attacked a watercooler and ripped it off the wall, causing a flood in the tunnel leading from the dugout to the locker room. The deluge meant that the players had to go through the stands to get to the clubhouse, and when they arrived, they made sure to give Ted a wide berth. Billy Consolo remembered the silence being broken by the clomping of Mike Higgins’s cleats as he walked over to Ted’s locker. “Kid, that wasn’t a good thing to do,” the manager said. (He probably meant the spitting, but he could have been including the bat throw and the watercooler assault as well.) Higgins walked away. Ted pointed to Gene Stephens, his substitute, and said, “Bush, you’re the left fielder tomorrow.”

  The players continued to sit there in silence, stunned at what they’d witnessed earlier. No one took a uniform off or was in any hurry to get to the showers. “You could hear a pin drop,” said Consolo.

  Tom Yawkey was in New York in his suite at the Pierre hotel, but had listened to Mel Allen’s call of the game on the radio for the Yankees, so he knew of the entire fiasco and was appalled. After the game ended, he quickly called Joe Cronin and ordered that Williams be fined $5,000—a huge sum at the time.

  Cronin called Ted at the Somerset and gave him the news, then announced it to the writers. Cronin said the fine was just for the spitting, not the bat throwing, and the watercooler incident was not addressed. “We cannot condone such actions,” Cronin said, adding that Ted could not explain his behavior. “Ted was sorry he did it. He told me he didn’t know why he did it.”

  But Williams sounded a totally different tune to a few writers who ventured to the Somerset. Ted was still so mad he refused to leave his room, and he conducted the interview from behind a closed door. One of the writers outside the door was the Globe’s Bob Holbrook. Five days earlier he had been sitting in the Red Sox dugout talking with a Detroit writer before a game at Fenway against the Tigers. After finishing batting practice, Ted flung his bat toward the dugout. It hit the dirt in front, bounced off a girder near where Holbrook and the Detroit writer were sitting, and broke off at the handle. Williams apologized to Holbrook, saying he wasn’t trying to hit him.40

  Now, inside his room, Ted was defiant.

  “I’d spit again at the same people who booed me today,” he said.

  “Why do the boos bother you?” Holbrook asked.

  “I just can’t help it.”

  “Don’t you think you are a little bit to blame for this situation?”

  “Not a damned bit! You writers are responsible for this whole thing. I’m no rock head, you know. If it didn’t bother me, I wouldn’t be as fired up as I am right now.”

  Williams wanted to be sure they had taken down what he said correctly. “Now you got that quote? Two things. First, I’d spit at the same people who booed me today. Second, I wouldn’t be at the ballpark tomorrow if I could afford a… $5,000 fine every day. Got it? Read it back to me.”41

  If the writers had largely given Ted a pass on his spitting episodes in July, there was no holding back now. The papers played the story with unrestrained zeal. The Record featured Ted on its cover in midspit, while the Globe showed Williams’s bat throw and ran four front-page stories under a screaming banner headline. The headline even eclipsed coverage of the trial of eight members of the gang accused of robbing the Brink’s Building in Boston six years ear
lier of more than $2.7 million—the largest heist in US history at the time.

  Williams’s case came to be called the Great Expectoration, and the press excoriated him. “Ted Williams should do himself a favor,” Harold Kaese wrote. “He should quit baseball before baseball quits on him.” The spitting incidents of the last several weeks had been “displays of unrestrained rage. What he may do the next time he blows up is not pleasant to contemplate. It could be more than embarrassing. He should quit before it happens.”42 Dave Egan was even blunter in the Record. “Williams is sick.”43

  Prompted by the latest explosion, some sought to plumb his psyche, looking to explain the inner rage. Austen Lake of the American called Ted a psychotic personality who, as he grew up, erected a defensive wall and developed “ingrown animosities toward grownup society, suspicion for adult motives, so that now, at the age of 38, he still turtles into his shell or foams up in tantrums.… Ted is a divided personality, two distinct people, little child, big man. Nothing malicious! Just confused in his emotional standards, a small lad’s yearning to be liked and a grown man’s fear of ridicule!”44

  On the one hand, Williams was self-reliant, authentic, and liked to chart his own course. Yet at the same time he craved—and, based on his record of excellence, thought he deserved—the cheers and adulation of society, as represented by the fans and the writers. When he did not get that approval, he would regress to childlike behavior and throw tantrums. He felt remorse for his outbursts, and knew they were infantile and outrageous, but rarely could express regret, because to do so might have been seen as a sign of weakness, and that would be another humiliation.

  At his essence, Williams was a performer, one who cared almost as much about looking good as about performing well. “The one thing I want to do when I’m out there is look good,” Ted told Sports Illustrated writer Joan Flynn Dreyspool for a 1955 profile in the magazine. “I hope I do the best I can, and I hope I don’t look lousy doing it. I hope I don’t boot a ball or look bad swinging. You hope to hell you’re gonna win the game, but the thing I worry about is that I don’t look bad. If I do, it makes me mad and I’m a little better the next day.”45

  Yet he was used to being the center of attention, to having all eyes on him, and felt most comfortable in that place. If his hitting was off, and thus was not reason enough to keep him in the headlines, he would look for other ways to get back in the news—maybe stir up a spat with the writers, get aggrieved, or go on a tear.

  But the root of his problem was not the writers. Rather, it was the slings and arrows he’d endured in his youth, which festered still. “You know, I was born on the wrong side of the tracks,” Ted told a friend in the late ’40s. “Everybody was always against me. The other kids used to throw rocks at me and I’d throw rocks at them. Well, it’s the same way now. I keep thinking everybody is against me.”46

  On August 8, the day after Ted’s tirade, the Red Sox were playing the Baltimore Orioles at Fenway, and of course there was enormous interest in what might happen next with Williams. Would he even come to the ballpark? Or would he stay at the Somerset in a snit? If he showed up, would he play? And if he played, what other pyrotechnics might he be contemplating? As it happened, it was Family Night, so the Red Sox were especially worried that their X-rated star might offend the sensibilities of the G-rated crowd.

  As a precaution, the team decided not to sell tickets to a section of the left-field grandstand where the worst Williams wolves usually congregated, and extra cops were deployed with instructions to toss out any rowdies. Anticipating trouble nonetheless, several of the writers covering the game decided to do so from the left-field seats so they could have a bird’s-eye view of any heckling contretemps that might break out. One writer, Bill Liston of the Traveler, even decided to heckle Williams himself and report on how the fans reacted to him.

  When Williams appeared in the clubhouse before the game, he seemed in a good mood. His teammates kidded him about his shenanigans the day before, and he smiled broadly, and wisecracked with Johnny Orlando. Harold Kaese witnessed the scene and wrote: “Williams was grinning because his name was back in the headlines, and his [name] was on everyone’s lips. For a few hours, at least, he had made people forget about Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth’s home run record. He was the center of attraction once more, and he was happy.”

  When Williams went up to the dugout and poked his head out to look around, the fans cheered. Billy Loes, an Orioles pitcher, happened to be walking by and said to Williams: “They’re cheering me, Ted, not you.”

  When Ted’s name was announced in the starting lineup, he received a loud ovation from the 30,338 fans with only a smattering of boos. Tom Yawkey, who had rushed back to Boston from New York, looked on nervously from his box.

  The reception was the same after he came to bat in the first and grounded out. A nice running catch in left-center in the second off a line drive by Tito Francona won him more applause. Williams didn’t look at the crowd directly, particularly the left-field section, but all eyes were on him, even when he took a stroll to the wall to chat with the scoreboard operator, who told him Mantle had hit another homer, in Washington against the Senators.

  Soon Ted had them all out of their seats. Leading off the sixth inning with the game tied 2–2, he unloaded a bomb twenty rows back into the right-field pavilion. The crowd screamed its approval as he circled the bases, then quieted as he crossed the plate and approached the dugout, his preferred venue for spitting. Then, with the timing of a skilled showman, and knowing that sixty thousand–odd eyes were riveted upon him to see what he would do at that moment, Williams extended his right arm and covered his mouth with his hand, self-mockingly, to confirm that he wouldn’t be spitting this time.47 The cheers turned to empathetic laughter. It was a disarming, self-deprecating gesture that had the effect of turning even some of Ted’s harshest critics among the fans to his corner. A new, more rounded and appreciative view of the thin-skinned hero began to emerge. Sure he was too sensitive, temperamental, outrageous, and prone to fly off the handle—if not his rocker—at times. But who among the fans, after all, had his skills? Who among them had been in the pressure-filled arena for more than seventeen years, and how would they react to the acerbic attacks of abusive patrons and nettlesome sportswriters?

  This shift in public opinion manifested itself in different ways. Grassroots fund-raising drives sprang up around Boston and Massachusetts to raise money to pay Ted’s $5,000 fine. A state representative, James Condon of South Boston, filed a bill in the legislature barring spectators at sporting events from making profane or obscene remarks to participants. The Globe ran a full page of letters to the editor, all of them either pro-Ted, antipress, or anti–loudmouth fan. “A non-understanding, cruel press has gone the limit in crucifying a brave man,” wrote one resident of the West Roxbury section of Boston. “Ted had two hitches on combat missions. Ted had marital trouble. Ted had several severe injuries. Ted received a continuous barrage of abuse in the papers. Ted was booed while hitting .372. If the above facts aren’t enough to ruin anyone’s ‘nerves,’ I’ll eat a regulation bat, ball and catcher’s equipment. In my opinion, Ted deserves a rest, a good doctor and a little help, not censure.”48 And the Sun newspaper of suburban Lowell, north of Boston, editorialized that “the verdict is that the Boston typewriter jockeys in the press box—not one of whom could carry Williams’s bat—ought to leave the guy alone, stop tormenting him and start behaving like decent human beings instead of literary jackals seizing each and every opportunity to pounce on him and tear him to shreds.”49 Even Happy Chandler, the former baseball commissioner who then was serving a second term as governor of Kentucky, jumped into the fray, telling syndicated columnist Bob Considine that Ted was “a good boy,” and that the Boston writers would “hit their grandmothers with the bases loaded.”

  Those writers, slow to detect the new mood, continued to pound away at Ted for a few days, but when the breadth of criticism emerged, they got defensive. Privatel
y, many of the newspapermen thought Ted was a churlish lout and that the public had no idea of the raw abuse he subjected them to in the clubhouse. But the die was cast. The fans had crossed the Rubicon in their warts-and-all acceptance of Williams as a tormented talent, and their appreciation of him would only grow with time. Gradually, the writers would reflect this shift in their own coverage. As for the $5,000 fine, Tom Yawkey apparently never bothered to collect it.

  The Red Sox coasted to a fourth-place finish, thirteen games behind the pennant-winning Yankees. The only interesting factor in the final days of the season was the race that developed between Mantle and Williams for the batting title, but since Ted had missed so much time at the beginning of the season because of his foot injury, there was again the question of whether he would have the necessary four hundred official at bats.

  Mantle idolized Williams. “I was like everybody else—when he took batting practice, I got up and watched,” Mantle told the writer Ed Linn. “He was the best hitter I ever saw.” When they were in the clubhouse together at All-Star Games, Mantle could barely bring himself to speak to Williams, he was so awestruck. After Mickey retired, he was vacationing in Florida one year and decided to drop in on Ted in Islamorada. He found the house but didn’t dare ring the bell. He knew Ted guarded his privacy and feared he would resent the intrusion.50

  Mantle wanted the Triple Crown desperately, and knew that to get it, he had to beat Williams for the batting title. The two teams closed the season with another series in New York, and Williams, forced to chase bad pitches and minimize walks so he could make his four hundred at bats, continued to struggle. Ted finished with four hundred official appearances exactly and a formidable .345 mark, but well behind Mantle’s .353. “If I could run like that son of a bitch, I’d hit .400 every year,” Williams said of the Mick, admiringly.51