Ted finally got his stroke going and by late June had raised his average to nearly .300, but that was not enough to make the All-Star team. Über–Williams fan Casey Stengel later chose him for the American League squad anyway.
In July, Williams regressed on the spitting front, this time in Kansas City. After failing to run out a routine ground ball, Ted was roundly booed, and he spat at fans along the first-base line. The league fined him just $250, and Ted issued a tepid apology. (“I am principally sorry about the $250,” he said.) The writers, inured to such flare-ups and by then thinking it futile to take Ted on, made little of the episode.
By September, the Red Sox were twelve and a half games out and going nowhere, but Williams was again keeping things interesting, this time by competing for a batting title with a teammate, banjo-hitting second baseman Pete Runnels, who had been traded to the Sox over the winter by the Washington Senators. Runnels, an affable Texan, benefited from batting second in the order, in front of Williams. “To tell you the truth, I was pulling for Runnels,” Williams said later. “But I wasn’t about to give it to him. Baseball isn’t charity.”19 Runnels credited Williams with teaching him how to be a good hitter, especially mentally: “Ted taught me how to be a successful hitter, a thinking hitter. And batting in front of him certainly didn’t hurt, either. Pitchers gave me plenty of good balls to hit. They couldn’t afford to walk me and have to face Ted.… He’d show me which umpires called strikes on high pitches and which umpires called strikes on low pitches. What kinds of pitches to expect from certain pitchers, and what kinds of pitches to expect on different ball-and-strike counts. He was masterful.”20
Williams slumped a bit in the middle of the month, and by the time the Red Sox hosted Washington on September 21, he was 0 for his last 7. Facing pitcher Bill Fischer, Ted made an out his first time up, and on his second trip was called out on strikes by umpire Bill Summers. That almost never happened, and Williams flung his bat in frustration. He had meant to throw it toward the Red Sox dugout, but because of the sticky pine tar he’d begun rubbing on his hands to get a better grip while hitting, Ted lost control of the bat and it sailed seventy-five feet into the box seats just to the left of the dugout, striking a sixty-year-old woman named Gladys Heffernan in the head.
The papers had dramatic photos of Williams’s immediate reaction to this sickening spectacle: first he raised both arms, clenched his teeth, and raised his left leg, as if he were preparing to break an imaginary bat across his knee in a fit of pique; then he hung his head, arms at his side, knees bent forward in utter despair; then he raced over to the seats to check on Mrs. Heffernan and express his sorrow for what he’d done. He could see that his bat had struck her on the left side of the forehead and that she was bleeding.
“Don’t worry about me, Ted,” Mrs. Heffernan said. “I’m all right. I know you didn’t mean it.”
The lady was taken off to a first-aid room under the stands to be bandaged before leaving for the hospital. A shaken Williams followed her down and spent a few minutes with her while his teammates continued to bat.
When it was time for the Red Sox to take the field again, Ted remained in the dugout, crying. Bill Summers, the umpire who had called Ted out on strikes, walked over to the dugout and urged him to resume play. Williams finally took the field to a chorus of boos.
“I told Ted to get out to the outfield and play ball and to forget it,” Summers said after the game. “I don’t think he wanted to play because he felt so badly about it.”
Williams faced the writers in the clubhouse. “I just almost died,” he said. “I was almost sick when I went out to the outfield. I’m very thankful it wasn’t a serious injury. I was mad and threw the bat, but I didn’t mean to throw it that way.… I started to flip the bat along the ground, but the sticky stuff kept it in my grip just long enough so the bat left my hands on the fly instead.”
Mrs. Heffernan, who happened to be Joe Cronin’s housekeeper, had her own press conference from her room at Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge as a smiling Cronin sat by her bedside. “Why did the crowd boo Ted Williams?” she asked. “I don’t see why they had to boo him. I felt awfully sorry for him after it happened. He came right into the first-aid room to see me, and you could tell by the look on his face how badly he felt. It was an accident. It all happened so fast I don’t actually know what happened.” Cronin seemed to enjoy his housekeeper getting the star treatment. “Gladys,” he said, “you’re going to feel like Liz Taylor before this is over.”21 Mrs. Heffernan laughed and gave the photographers permission to take her picture. Ted later sent the lady a $500 wristwatch, likely endearing himself to her further.
As for the batting race, Ted did rip a double to center field his next time up, but Runnels had three hits on the day and led Williams .323 to .314 with six games left. Then Ted went on a spurt, and the two entered the final game of the season in Washington with Williams ahead .327 to .324.
They bantered around the batting cage an hour before the game as if nothing were on the line that day. “I’m getting me some land-locked salmon in Canada tomorrow,” Ted told Runnels. “They’ll run to 25 pounds, almost as big as those deer you shoot.”
“I’ll have me a buck deer before you get your first bite and start yelling about the big one that got away,” Pete replied.22
Williams stayed nice and loose, popping a double and a home run off Pedro Ramos to finish at .328, while Runnels went hitless in four trips and ended at .322. It was Ted’s sixth—and last—batting championship.
One day over the winter, at his house in Islamorada, Williams was sitting outside in the shade of a coconut tree talking to a friend about the upcoming 1959 season. He spoke broadly of his goals and said he felt rested and healthy. As if to prove it, Williams got up, grabbed a bat, and began swinging it easily. After several swings, he felt a twinge in the back of his neck, but thought nothing of it, assuming it would pass or be just another kink to work out in spring training.
That year the Red Sox were to leave Sarasota and train in Scottsdale, Arizona. Tom Yawkey thought his team could draw more fans out west, and one of the economic highlights of the spring, the team hoped, was to be three exhibition games against the Cleveland Indians in Ted’s hometown of San Diego. It would be the first time Williams returned to play ball in the city where he grew up since his barnstorming tour with Jimmie Foxx eighteen years earlier.
Ted reported to Scottsdale on March 1, three days late, causing his usual stir among writers and teammates and delighting the locals, who weren’t used to such star wattage. He put on a show when he took his first licks of the year in the batting cage, casually swatting two homers.
Williams settled into his Cactus League routine and before long pronounced himself happy with Arizona. “This place is better than Florida for a training site,” he said. “The weather is great, really great.… The people here are wonderful too. Why, they’re the most friendly and hospitable group I’ve seen in years.”23
The fans in Scottsdale soon learned that if they wanted to see Williams in action, they would mostly have to come and see him practice, for the Kid followed the same spring training regimen he’d established in recent years, which was to play as few exhibition games as he could get away with. Mike Higgins and the front office were fine with this approach, saying that Ted knew his own body best and concluding that it was an acceptable trade-off for the team to hold back their star from Cactus League games in the interest of saving wear and tear and maximizing his availability for the regular season.
The Arizona writers questioned this philosophy and complained that local fans who had bought tickets to spring games expecting to see the Great Man were getting stiffed. One fan in nearby Mesa voiced this very complaint to Harold Kaese of the Globe when Williams failed to appear with his teammates for a game against the Chicago Cubs. “He should have come with all these people here,” said the local retiree, none other than Ty Cobb himself.24
Cobb and Williams had a prickly relations
hip. The Georgia Peach had been critical of Ted earlier in his career for failing to hit to left field more often to beat the shift, and he’d written him private letters offering to counsel him on his hitting technique. In addition, Cobb had been outspoken in arguing that the players of his era were superior to those in Ted’s time, a contention Williams considered ridiculous.
But Ted and Ty seemed to patch things up at a pleasant photo op around the batting cage in Scottsdale. Cobb, then seventy-two, leaned on his cane, wrapped his left arm around Ted’s right shoulder, and both men beamed. The photographers, in their captions, wrote that the two legends “discussed hitting.”
Williams had a pal out for spring training whom he knew would be thrilled to meet Cobb. Joe Lindia owned a restaurant in Cranston, Rhode Island. In the winter of 1955, Lindia’s brother and his wife had been vacationing in Islamorada and chanced to meet Ted, who invited them out fishing with him. That night back in Cranston, Joe, a huge Williams fan, received this news in a phone call from his brother. Beside himself with jealousy, Joe said he would beat it down to Islamorada as quickly as he could. Williams was waiting for him in good cheer: “So you want to go fishing, Bush?” A friendship developed, and before long Joe was hosting annual fund-raisers for the Jimmy Fund at his restaurant with Ted as the star attraction. Sometimes, Ted would invite Joe to go on a road trip with the Red Sox, and the two men would room together at various hotels. Joe was thrilled.
Back in Scottsdale, Ted and Joe were walking one evening when Ted said he had someone he wanted Joe to meet. They got in the car and drove to a seedy motel nearby. Then they knocked on a door to one of the rooms, and Ty Cobb appeared—dressed only in his boxer shorts. He seemed happy to have some company, and within minutes, Cobb and Williams were talking baseball, arguing about which era was better, and debating the relative merits of this pitcher or that hitter. Invariably they disagreed, and frequently they would turn to Lindia and ask him what he thought. Joe thought he was in heaven.25
There was a new face on the Red Sox that spring—a very different face: Elijah Jerry “Pumpsie” Green, a switch-hitting infielder from California who also happened to be the first black player ever to play for Boston, the last major-league team to integrate. Tom Yawkey and Joe Cronin, who had left the team earlier that year to become president of the American League, had long denied any racist intent and weakly insisted they had been unable to find a suitable black player.
Green was still being forced to live in different quarters from the white players in Scottsdale because of the segregation policies of the day, and the Red Sox were unable or unwilling to leverage their new presence in town in support of Pumpsie. One obstacle was the manager, Mike Higgins, who did little to disguise his antipathy to blacks, telling a Boston writer, Al Hirshberg, sometime after being named manager in 1955, “There’ll be no niggers on this ballclub as long as I have anything to say about it.”26
After arriving in Scottsdale, Williams had gone out of his way to introduce himself to Green and to make him feel welcome. One of the ways he did this was by asking Green to warm up with him before games, a gesture Pumpsie remembered fondly.
“He treated you like you should be treated,” Green said of Ted. “He didn’t put stuff on it that shouldn’t be. He wasn’t forcible or anything. He was a friendly person. I found him to be a very well-liked person among the ballplayers.”27
Spring training ended, and Green appeared to have made the team, but as the club headed back to Boston, Higgins suddenly announced that he was cutting Green. “Another season or half season in Minneapolis is what this boy needs,” Higgins said. The Boston chapter of the NAACP and two other local groups charged the Red Sox with racism and asked the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to investigate. It did, but cleared the team of any wrongdoing.
Williams made a sentimental return to San Diego in mid-March for the three exhibition games against the Indians at Westgate Park. Ted grounded out twice and walked in the first game before 7,358 fans, and afterward hosted a party that lasted into the wee hours for about fifty of his childhood friends. The next night he got an infield hit and cracked a double that was inches from being a home run; he went 0–2 in the third game. The series drew more than twenty-two thousand fans, making it a financial success for both teams, but Ted had aggravated the neck injury he’d sustained lazily swinging his bat in Islamorada over the winter. Returning to Scottsdale, he tried to work out the kinks by throwing some batting practice, but that only made things worse. He went to a Phoenix hospital and was diagnosed with a pinched nerve. It was decided that he would fly back to Boston and be admitted to New England Baptist Hospital, where he would be fitted for a medical collar and put in traction. He ended up staying in the hospital for three weeks, his neck immobilized, and started the season on the disabled list.
Williams made his return at home on May 12 against the White Sox and went 0–5, a performance that would set the tone for the rest of the season. His neck was still killing him, and it was all he could do merely to face the pitcher squarely after he stepped into the box. During the next week, he had one hit in twenty-two times up and was batting .045.
Then on June 13, the unthinkable happened: Williams was benched. He’d brought his average up a bit, but only to .175. Mike Higgins explained that he thought Ted could use a rest. This development prompted Harold Kaese to wonder how and when the Red Sox would eventually get rid of Williams—perhaps by turning him into a manager. In fact, Tom Yawkey did ask business manager Dick O’Connell to sound Ted out on whether he had any interest in the job. “He told me that he would never give the Boston writers the chance to second-guess him,” O’Connell recalled. “I’ve never really been sure whether he understood that the job was really being offered to him.”28 But Ted knew, recalling that Joe Cronin had asked him to manage at the end of the 1954 season. He also knew it was easier to fire a manager than a player, especially one of Williams’s stature. As manager, he could have been dismissed if the team had a lousy record, as seemed likely, or even for blowing up at the writers, which seemed even more likely. He could then have been eased into the front office in some capacity as a gesture of respect, but there would be no hiding the fact that he’d failed.29
Ted returned to the lineup on June 23 and brought his average up to .244 over the next three weeks, enough for Williams booster Casey Stengel to again name him to the All-Star Game. Ted said he appreciated the gesture.
On July 3, the 31–42 Red Sox deflected attention from the Kid’s woes by firing Mike Higgins as manager and replacing him with Billy Jurges. With Higgins gone, it was easier for the Red Sox to finally elevate Pumpsie Green, who was hitting .320 in Minneapolis and had been named a Triple-A All-Star for the second consecutive year. The Sox had finally integrated.
Green was used only as a part-timer, but a week later, another black player, pitcher Earl Wilson, was also brought up, though neither man had much of an impact, as Boston finished 75–79, in fifth place, nineteen games out. Williams had his worst season ever, hitting only .254 with 10 home runs in 103 games. After the Red Sox’s final game, Tom Yawkey summoned Ted to his apartment at the Ritz. After some chitchat, the owner got to the point.
“What do you think you ought to do next year?” he asked his star player.
“What do you think I ought to do?” Williams replied.
“Ted, I think you ought to quit,” Yawkey advised. “You’ve had a great career. You were hurting this year, and I don’t want to see you hurt more. Listen, why don’t you just wrap it up?”
Hearing this “kind of burned my ass,” as Williams put it later. He had no intention of quitting on a sour note. He knew he could still hit. He had posted averages of .345, .356, .345, .388, and .328 in the five seasons previous to 1959. Now he’d hit .254 while clearly hurting. “Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Yawkey,” he said. “I’m going to wait until next spring to decide. I still think I can hit. If I feel I can’t do it by spring, I’ll let you know.”30
A few d
ays later, Yawkey fired Johnny Orlando in a move that the writers speculated would infuriate Williams and perhaps influence his decision to retire. The reasons for the dismissal were not announced, but Orlando’s drinking had gotten out of hand, and he was showing up late to work, generally neglecting his duties, and leveraging his position for personal gain—getting the players to sign autographed balls and then selling them, for example.31
Ted seethed at Orlando’s firing but kept his feelings to himself. Nevertheless, he grew less certain that he would come back if the team didn’t want him. When he returned to Boston for the sportsmen’s show in January, he stopped in unannounced to see Dick O’Connell at Fenway Park to discuss his 1960 contract. “Dick, if there are any doubts the club wants me back this year, hell, I’ll quit,” Williams told him. “I think I can still play. I told Mr. Yawkey I’d go to spring training and find out. But I don’t want to play unless the management wants me to.” O’Connell was surprisingly reassuring. “Aw, Ted, don’t be silly,” he said before pulling out a contract calling for the same salary Williams received in 1959: $125,000, with $65,000 of it deferred.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 57
