16
Late Innings
If his .406 season stands today as the young Williams’s historic masterpiece—a grand achievement of callow youth—then 1957 would become his classic in the gloaming, a dazzling reassertion of pure hitting skill that was in many ways more remarkable than his 1941 feat.
Given the physical and emotional rigors of the previous three seasons, Ted had reported to Sarasota for spring training thinking that 1957 would be his last year. He was in good shape and relatively fine fettle.1
But his affability didn’t last long. In late March, the Red Sox were on their way back to Florida from an exhibition swing to the West Coast and stopped in New Orleans on a layover. The Globe’s Hy Hurwitz introduced Ted to Crozet Duplantier, sports editor of the New Orleans States, who, like Ted and Hurwitz, was an ex-Marine. Though he perhaps thought the Marine connection would save him from being quoted, Ted was soon blasting the Corps, President Truman, and other “gutless politicians” for allowing him to be recalled to serve in Korea after he’d already interrupted his career for three years of service in World War II. In the ensuing furor, Ted was forced to apologize for his remarks.
Still angry at Hurwitz for his role in the Duplantier affair, Ted threatened the writer several weeks later during a confrontation in the Fenway clubhouse. Hurwitz and another writer were minding their own business, commiserating with catcher Haywood Sullivan after learning that Sullivan had been demoted to the minors.
“Be careful what you say to those cocksuckers,” Ted told Sullivan as he passed by. “They’ll twist it around and fuck you up.”
Hurwitz had had enough. “You’re nothing but a cocksucker yourself,” he said to Williams.
Ted seethed. “If you were a foot taller I’d knock your block off!”
“If I were a foot taller, you wouldn’t try,” Hurwitz replied.
“I started the season mad and I finished mad,” Ted said later.2 “I didn’t say two words to the Boston writers all year, and in between, I probably had the most amazing season any near-forty-year-old athlete ever had.”
Traditionally a slow starter in the cold weather, Ted busted out early that year, and after two weeks was batting .474, with nine home runs. Three of the homers had come on May 8 in Chicago off Bob Keegan, the first time in a decade Williams had hit three such clouts in one game. On June 13, Ted cracked three more home runs against the Indians—off Early Wynn and Bob Lemon yet—in Cleveland. That left him with seventeen homers on the season and a still-scalding .392 average.
There had been minor setbacks and routine controversy for Williams to that point. On May 16 at Fenway, for example, Ted struck out three times against Jim Bunning of the Tigers. Enraged on returning to the dugout after one of the whiffs, Williams punched out the bat rack, bloodying his hand. After another plate appearance in which he popped out, Ted flung his bat high into the air in disgust and was fined a paltry $25.
Then on May 24, during an off day, Ted went to empty Fenway Park for some target practice against pigeons. This time he took his shotgun and set up camp on a chair in front of the bull pen in right-center field. There he proceeded to pick off between thirty and forty of the birds over the next few hours. One writer chided Williams for carrying out a “slaughter” at his “sit-still safari,” and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was predictably outraged.3 But the rest of the press, chastened by the fact that Ted now seemed immune to its darts, largely gave him a pass, and the episode quickly faded. Furthermore, the Red Sox’s other leading sportsman, owner Tom Yawkey, had participated in the hunt, a mitigating circumstance for Williams.
Ted stayed focused. His engagement with Hurwitz was an aberration, and he adhered to his pledge to avoid the Boston writers. The one exception was his pal Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor, who once had thrown batting practice for the Sox and was a confidant of Yawkey’s as well. Whenever the writers tried to get a quote from Ted on his 1957 surge, Williams would dismiss them, saying, “You know I’m not talking to you guys.” So the reporters relied heavily on Rumill to be their interlocutor with number 9. Rumill would interview Ted and then distribute the quotes to his colleagues.
Williams withheld from Ed Rumill and everyone else a key adjustment he had made that spring that had paved the way for his success in 1957. It would not be for another twelve years, with the publication of his autobiography, My Turn at Bat, in 1969, that Ted revealed he had been using a heavier bat, which enabled him to beat—and, finally, effectively end—the vexing Boudreau shift. He’d experimented with a 34.5-ounce bat in Sarasota, which was an ounce and a half heavier than he normally used. He choked up a quarter inch and noticed that the balls seemed to be ringing off his bat and going to all fields. As the team headed north after spring training, Williams went to the rack one day, ready to switch back to his usual lighter bat, but decided to stay with the heavier one since he was hitting so well with it.
On opening day at Fenway against the Yankees, Ted got two hits to left field. As most teams continued to use the shift against him, he noticed that the heavier bat slowed his swing just enough to enable him to naturally hit line drives to the left of second base into vacated zones. Unaware he was using the heavier bat, the rest of the league concluded that Williams was simply aging and could not turn on a fastball the way he used to. So gradually, most American League teams began abandoning the shift. The most dramatic example of this came in late April, when the Red Sox went to Kansas City to play the Athletics. Lou Boudreau, the architect of the shift, had moved on to be the manager of the A’s, and when Williams came to bat, Boudreau played his defense straight.
As the weather warmed—traditionally, the time when Ted got loose and began to hit in earnest—he switched back to his lighter bat and started to pull the ball like the Williams of old. But now there were plenty of holes, since the defenses were no longer packed onto the right side of the diamond.4
After his second three-homer outburst, on June 13, Williams cooled down and went into the All-Star break in July in a certified 1–16 slump. Yet he had hit so well in the chilly months of April and May, when he historically had fared poorly, that his average stood at .340, with twenty-two home runs. Williams went hitless at the All-Star Game in Saint Louis, then flew off to Detroit to await the Red Sox and the second half of the season. Tired, he remained in his hotel room for nearly two days and got plenty of sleep. When he went to Briggs Stadium on July 11, he felt reinvigorated.
Then he learned of an ill-considered column in the Globe that morning written by Bob Holbrook, headlined TED’S BATTING BAROMETER DECLINES and accompanied by a subhead that posed the question: “Nearing End of Trail?” Holbrook was playing off the undeniable fact that Williams’s average had dropped more than fifty points in June (albeit from .392), and he wrote that “observers are looking for those tell-tale signs that Number 9 is reaching the end of the trail.… Will it happen fast? Or will there be a gradual deterioration in his productiveness[?]” Holbrook tried to cover himself by noting that no one “is foolish enough to come right out and say” that Ted is nearing the end, and that he “has a way of coming back to make such statements look ridiculous.”5 But the cheap shot had been taken, and it was just the added motivational fodder Ted needed to go off on one of his hot streaks.
In his first game back, Ted cracked two doubles, and on the following day he took his revenge against Jim Bunning for the May 16 humiliation at Fenway, when Bunning had fanned him three times. His first time up, Williams blasted a home run off the top of the third deck, and the second time up he cracked another rocket, this time into the second deck.
Ted stayed hot. When the Cleveland Indians came to Fenway for four games in late July, Williams went 8–12, and he finished the month with a 3–4 night at home against the Tigers. He was hitting .550 since the All-Star break, and his average on the year now stood at .384. Approaching his thirty-ninth birthday and with two months left in the season, Williams was again flirting with the .400 mi
lestone.
Fan interest in each one of Ted’s at bats was now intense, as was keenly evident in the July 31 game against Detroit, when he got three hits. But one of those hits was initially deemed an error on the part of Tigers shortstop Harvey Kuenn by the official scorer, old friend Hy Hurwitz. Ted had scorched a line drive slightly to the right of second base, and Kuenn, playing there in the shift, couldn’t handle the ball and dropped it. When an error was announced, the crowd roared its displeasure. “Never before had Boston come so close to a baseball riot,” wrote the American’s Mike Gillooly in Sport magazine. “Fans glared at the press box. They shouted insults and made threatening gestures. It was an unprecedented display of anger, and it seemed to refuse to subside. The earmarks of a mob riot were all there. An hour after the game ended, people were still lingering around the exit from the press box, jeering at the writers as they came out.”6
Hurwitz changed his ruling and gave Williams a hit after interviewing Kuenn in the clubhouse afterward.7
Ted’s average was up to .391 by August 9, when Boston’s newspapers went on strike for three weeks. During this information blackout, the papers were flooded with calls each day asking what Ted had done. The Red Sox were more than twelve games out, and few seemed to care about the team’s fortunes.
At the end of the month, Williams’s average had come down to .377, one point ahead of Mickey Mantle, who was having another monster season, though he led Ted by only one home run—thirty-four to thirty-three. Then Williams came down with another one of the acute viruses that had plagued him throughout his career, and he was forced out of the lineup for two weeks. At the same time, Mantle went down with shin splints.
Ted actually had pneumonia. While he was recovering, Hy Hurwitz obtained Williams’s medical records and reported that he had a “chronic lung condition.”8 On September 14, Hurwitz wrote that it was “quite possible” Williams would miss the rest of the year.
Ted read the story and went ballistic. “I’ll get back now even if they have to carry me out there on a stretcher,” he promised. “I’ll get back there just to show that little so-and-so up.”9
Three days later, with the Red Sox at home against Kansas City, Williams told Mike Higgins he was available to pinch-hit. Higgins called on his star in the eighth, and as the crowd roared, Ted popped out of the dugout and strode to the plate for his first at bat in seventeen days. Facing Tom Morgan, Williams promptly crushed a ball four hundred feet through a stiff wind ten rows up in the right-field bleachers to tie the score at 8–8, and the Sox went on to win the game, 9–8.10
It was another dramatic moment in a career laced with dramatic moments. Ted basked and thrived in the limelight and proceeded to prove it again and again for the rest of the season. He pinch-hit the next day and walked. Then the Red Sox were off to Yankee Stadium for a series, and in another pinch-hitting appearance, Ted homered in the ninth inning off Whitey Ford in the first game of a doubleheader. Williams started the second game, hit a grand slam off Bob Turley (the fifteenth of his career), then walked three times. In the final game of the series, Williams walked, homered, singled, and walked again.
On September 23 in Washington, Ted singled, was walked three times, and was struck by a pitch. When he grounded out his first time up on September 24, it was the first out he had made in a week. He had hit four home runs in four official times at bat since returning on the seventeenth, and he had reached base safely his first sixteen times up. After grounding out to end the streak, he homered his next time up, giving him five home runs in his eight official at bats since the seventeenth.
Ted finished the season with a luminous .388 average and thirty-eight home runs, a number he had only surpassed in 1949, when he hit forty-three. But it was the .388 figure that astonished the baseball world and marked what Williams himself considered the grandest achievement of his career, surpassing his .406 in 1941. After all, he was now thirty-nine years old, increasingly prone to injury and illness, and still slow. With just five more hits, he would have reached the .400 mark, and if he’d had half of Mantle’s speed, those could have been measly infield, or “leg,” hits. Of course there were no such hits among Ted’s 163 in 420 official times at bat, making his .388 all the more remarkable. The .388 figure was a full forty-eight points higher than the .340 mark, which stood as the average winning number for the previous five American League batting title holders.
From his return in mid-September until the end of the year, Williams hit .647, and after the All-Star break, he hit .453. Yet the writers snubbed him again for the Most Valuable Player award and voted it to Mantle by a tally of 233–209, even though he had four fewer home runs than Williams and a final average of .365—impressive, but twenty-three points lower than Ted’s. Mantle did have ten more RBIs than Williams, and the Yankees won the pennant, as usual, but Mickey said he was shocked by his selection. “I thought Ted Williams would have made it easily,” he said.11
The culprits were two unidentified out-of-town writers who mischievously slotted Williams ninth and tenth on their ballots. The Boston writers spoke out against the vote, and even Ted’s archenemy Dave Egan called it disgraceful. But while his teammates, Tom Yawkey, and others criticized the decision, Williams took the slight in stride and held his tongue.
“All the American League’s got is me and the Yankees,” Ted quipped, not incorrectly. “When I leave this league, it’s going to be pretty damn dull.”12 Examining the Red Sox’s final season attendance figure—1,181,087—Harold Kaese wrote that the Sox drew 181,087 and Williams the million.13
Ted’s brilliance in 1957 reverberated well into 1958, producing a burst of glowing press and national recognition. The Associated Press named Ted its 1957 Male Athlete of the Year, and the influential New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voted him its Player of the Year. Both awards, especially the latter, served to somewhat mitigate the injustice of the American League MVP award going to Mantle. And there were fresh assessments of Williams as an all-time hitting great. Besides the eight-page “The Case for Ted Williams,” a statistical analysis published by Look magazine,14 other statisticians poring through the detritus of the ’57 season found more nuggets: Ted’s three pinch-hit home runs in September, for example, gave him seven for his career, which was an American League record. And his thirty-three intentional walks for the year were the most ever recorded in a season.15
All this was further evidence that the tide of public opinion—which had begun to shift in favor of Williams in late 1956, after his deft, self-deprecating mime following his spate of spits—was now surging in his direction, buoyed both by the brilliance of his ’57 season and by a popular backlash against the MVP vote for Mantle. What had long been portrayed in the press as Ted’s ill-mannered, crude, and self-centered behavior now mostly came to be seen as principled nonconformity, a willingness to take unpopular positions and stand up for what he believed. People came to appreciate his assertion of independence—his insistence on flouting convention and going without a tie, his daring to give the writers and even the Marine Corps what for.
Seemingly bulletproof now, Ted drew 150,000 people to his annual fly-casting exhibition at the sportsmen’s show in Boston during the first week of February. On the sixth, Williams popped over to Fenway for his annual contract signing and joust with the now-cowed writers. His salary for 1958 was described in all the papers as the largest sum ever given to a professional baseball player. The amount was not officially revealed, of course, but the writers colluded and set the figure at “an estimated” $125,000. If true, then $65,000 of it was deferred, since the team reported to Major League Baseball that it was paying Ted just $60,000 for the season.
Speaking to a horde of reporters and flashbulb-popping photographers, Williams offered détente on his terms. “I’m looking forward to a great summer and I’m going to be as fair as possible with you fellows,” he said. “But the first time I read one of those stinking, detrimental, dishonest, prejudicial stories, then
don’t come around me. You know what I mean. Those stories which disrupt my playing or disrupt the club. Just keep out of my way. And don’t be yelling to have me benched if I’m only hitting .280 in May.”16
Then Ted picked a bone with the New York writers who had given him their Player of the Year award for 1957. He’d been unable to go to New York to pick up the prize because he had a conflict, which he’d explained in a telegram while expressing his appreciation for the honor. But the writers had put the blast on him for being a no-show and hadn’t bothered to read his telegram at the banquet, which featured Vice President Richard Nixon as a headliner. “Strictly bush,” said Ted. “I have confirmation that the telegram was delivered to the chairman at 5:30 p.m. the day of the dinner. It wasn’t even read. Bush, bush, bush.”
As for his physical condition, Williams allowed that he was ten pounds overweight but said he’d sweat it off in spring training without any problem. He planned to take up tennis to help get his legs in shape before reporting. He’d slipped on a rock while fishing up in Labrador the previous fall, and his ankle was sore, but it was responding to diathermy treatments, he said. Joe Cronin broke up the press conference by echoing Williams’s own words about his news-making prowess. “It’ll be damned dull when you’re not here, Ted,” Cronin said.17
Williams’s stellar 1957 performance hardly carried over to the early part of the 1958 season. He would turn forty later that summer and was feeling his age: he’d hurt his side in spring training, and swinging the bat was painful; his off-season ankle injury lingered and nagged; every ache and pain seemed magnified. He found batting helmets, newly mandated by the league for protection, bothersome.
Ted had missed opening day in Washington because he’d eaten a bad batch of oysters and come down with food poisoning.18 When he returned to the lineup, nothing seemed to click, and his hitting was anemic. On May 20 he was batting .225, the worst start of his career. The next day, Ted’s longtime bête noire, Dave Egan of the Record, died at the age of fifty-seven, succumbing to heart trouble, the accumulated ravages of the bottle, and related ailments. The Red Sox were on the road in the Midwest at the time, so Ted was spared the tributes for his harshest critic as well as the pomp and circumstance of the funeral, which were considerable. Boston archbishop Richard Cushing (who would be elevated to cardinal the following year) presided over the service. Pallbearers included Joe Cronin, star Boston Celtics guard Bob Cousy, former world welterweight boxing champion Tony DeMarco, former Massachusetts governor Robert Bradford, and former Notre Dame football coach Frank Leahy.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 56
