Ted was relieved, but he had a different idea: he would take a pay cut. “Dick, look. I had a lousy year, the worst I ever had. I was injured and suffered for it, but I don’t deserve what I made last year. I’ve had the biggest raises a player ever had. I’ve gone up from nothing on this club to $125,000 a year. I want to take the biggest cut ever given a player.”32 He agreed to play his final season for $90,000—$60,000 on the books and $30,000 deferred—nearly a 30 percent drop.
When he arrived in Scottsdale on March 1, Williams was not exactly exuding confidence. He complained to the writers that his neck still hurt him and declared that if the pain didn’t subside, he doubted he could play that year after all.
The day after that pessimistic assessment, manager Billy Jurges announced that in addition to his duties as a player, Williams would also become a batting instructor. This of course fueled speculation that the Red Sox were preparing a soft landing for Ted if he no longer could take the field.
One of the rookies Jurges wanted Williams to mentor was a twenty-year-old named Carl Yastrzemski. Yaz (as he was known) found Ted moody and his teaching style esoteric. “I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,” Yaz would recall. “I’d listen and not say a word, hoping he’d get finished soon.” The rookie’s theory of hitting was simply to wait for a good pitch and try to hit it, and he was baffled by Williams’s talk of hip rotation and the like. When Ted asked him questions about what he’d just said, Yaz remained silent, fearing he’d give the wrong answer. When reporters would ask him what Ted was teaching, Yaz would just vaguely respond that he was learning a lot. Fearful of reprimands, he tried to avoid Ted, but that was impossible because they were assigned adjoining lockers.33
In retirement, when Williams would return to the Red Sox as a spring training instructor, Yaz remained largely unresponsive to the Kid’s teachings. Future team CEO John Harrington remembered witnessing a Williams-Yaz tutorial in the ’70s: “Ted was giving Yaz a lecture about his bat being too long and big. Ted was talking physics and bat speed and calling Yaz a dumb Polack for not grasping the intricacies of the aerodynamics. It was Greek to Yaz.”34 But, in 1960, Ted liked what he saw of Yastrzemski and commended him to Ty Cobb, who lingered at the Red Sox camp, still annoyed that Williams wouldn’t take his hitting counsel.
A week into camp, Ted’s neck loosened enough to let him pop a long homer in an intrasquad scrimmage, prompting encouraging headlines and reportage. “There is still plenty of zing in Ted’s swing,” wrote Bob Holbrook of the Globe.35 Over at Hearst’s Evening American, there seemed no doubt the Kid would have a prosperous season, as the paper sprung Johnny Orlando from his forced retirement to write a twelve-part ode to Ted, as told to Mike Gillooly, who just two years earlier had weighed in with the fifteen-part “The Case for Ted Williams.” While Ted surely missed Orlando, he apparently viewed the American series as a betrayal of sorts, even though the clubhouse nuggets Johnny dished out were all complimentary, almost fawningly so. A month later, Gillooly’s brother John, who had taken over for Dave Egan as the lead sports columnist for the Record, wrote that Williams had yet to contact Orlando: “Now Williams is treating him like one of the Boston press—just because Johnny O had a byline?”36
Ted sought out a favored writer, Milton Gross of the New York Post, to further lower expectations for the season: “I keep thinking, ‘Williams, you’re dying hard.’ I keep saying to myself, ‘Your ankle hurts, your neck hurts and your back hurts, and you are dying so damn hard.…’ Playing is still fun, but it’s harder. God, how much harder it is.”37 So why did he continue? Gross asked. Ted said he needed the money, plus he wanted to redeem his lousy 1959 season and attain five hundred career home runs. He had 492 at that point.
Three days after this column appeared, Williams got word that his brother, Danny, had died of leukemia at the family home in San Diego at the age of thirty-nine. Ted had written his brother and Danny’s wife, Jean, a letter from Scottsdale, again complaining how sore he was but hoping for one more good year. Ted said he hoped Danny’s new medication was helping him, and that the summer heat would be therapeutic.
But Danny’s condition had deteriorated rapidly in 1958 and 1959. After getting leukemia, he’d moved back into the Utah Street house where he’d grown up, accompanied by his wife and sons. As he grew sicker and weaker, the living arrangements became untenable for May, and she went to Santa Barbara to move in with her sister Sarah. Danny had wasted away to just ninety pounds at the end.
“He died tough,” Ted later wrote. “I got his little pistol. I always thought he would shoot himself because he suffered so much.… There wasn’t the closeness between us there should have been. I regret that. After I left for pro ball, I never saw much of him.”38
Funeral services were held at a mortuary in San Diego, and Ted flew out from Scottsdale to attend. Williams spent tens of thousands of dollars on Danny’s medical care toward the end of his life, including flying him on charter flights and private jets to the Mayo Clinic and even to Mexico for treatments.
“When my father was sick and couldn’t work, Ted supported my whole family,” said Danny’s son Ted, whose college education would later be paid for by his famous uncle. “And May, too. Ted comes across as being hard-assed and arrogant and aloof. But he helped a lot of family members. Certainly with money. He knew he had a special place in the world and had the opportunity to help people less fortunate than he. The whole family besides him were just ordinary people who never accomplished much. The rest of the family really saw him as a hero. I don’t think he ever forgot his family. That’s probably missed.”
The Red Sox opened the season in Washington on April 18 before 28,327 fans and assorted dignitaries, including President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. When Williams first came to bat in the second inning, Nixon was heard to tell Eisenhower: “This is probably his last season. Let’s root for him,” according to the Associated Press. “That’s a good idea,” Ike responded.39
Williams worked the count to three and two off Senators ace Camilo Pascual, then crushed a fastball to dead center. The ball took off on a rising line and in just a few seconds cleared the thirty-one-foot fence, landing at least 420 feet away. The president and vice president were delighted, and they rose to give the Kid an ovation as he rounded the bases. Ted’s 493rd homer tied him for fourth on the all-time list with Lou Gehrig. They were trailing only Mel Ott, Jimmie Foxx, and Ruth. Another looming milestone that season, the press noted, was Williams’s two thousandth walk. He would reach that mark after he gained fifty-seven more bases on balls. Ruth again had that record with 2,056.
The next day in Boston, in the home opener against the Yankees, Ted blasted another pitch into the right-field grandstand in the eighth inning off Jim Coates. Williams proved how creaky he really was, pulling a leg muscle as he rounded the bases in his home-run trot. Then he caught a virus, to boot, and didn’t return to the lineup until late May.
As Ted rode the bench, there was managerial and front-office intrigue aplenty. With the Red Sox floundering, a pro–Mike Higgins faction among the writers had been reporting that there was dissension among some players over how Billy Jurges was handling the team. Alarmed by the reports, Jurges called a team meeting in New York on April 26 to clear the air, asking any player who had a beef with him to speak out. No one did.
Williams scoffed at the dissension stories and strongly backed Jurges. “It’s a lot of horseshit!” Ted told his pal Joe Reichler of the Associated Press. “It’s those damn Boston writers again. They’re always starting trouble.”40
But a cloud remained over Jurges. At the end of May, UPI reported that Tom Yawkey was on the verge of replacing the manager with Williams, but both Yawkey and Ted denied the story.* Then the owner, along with Joe Cronin’s replacement as general manager, Bucky Harris (Harris had been the Red Sox field manager in 1934, when he was replaced by Cronin), issued a strong statement saying that “Billy Jurges is our manager and no changes are contemplated.” After
its release, a furious Yawkey walked over to a group of writers at Fenway Park and said that while he believed in freedom of the press, “sometimes it goes beyond the bounds of human dignity and reason. I don’t put up with it. I don’t have to. How many of you guys think you’re qualified to manage a ball club?” No one spoke up. Yawkey picked out one reporter and looked him in the eye. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t think I’m qualified,” the reporter said.
“You’re damn right you’re not.”41
But the anonymous sniping persisted, and the skittish Jurges called another clubhouse meeting, this time inviting the writers to attend as well. Most of the players looked at the floor nervously. Williams glared at the reporters, still protective of Jurges. The manager asked that the player whom the wire story had quoted off the record as saying that Jurges had lost control of the team step forward and identify himself. Of course no one said a word. Then, astonishingly, Jurges turned to the writers and asked them to identify the culprit. “We’re all in this together,” he told the reporters. “We’re all working for the City of Boston and the Boston Red Sox.”42
After another long silence, the Globe’s Roger Birtwell piped up and, in his best Brahmin-Harvard accent, proceeded to give Jurges his lecture on the journalistic ethics of the day, such as they were. The writers covered the team; they were not part of the team, he said, and the manager was exceeding his authority by even asking them to come to this meeting. Most of the players giggled through Birtwell’s separation-of-church-and-state discourse. Ted slowly boiled.
On June 14, two weeks after Yawkey’s nearly Shermanesque statement that Jurges was his man, the manager was fired and replaced by old standby Mike Higgins.
Williams returned to the lineup rejuvenated, with the pain in his neck mostly gone. On June 17, he belted his five hundredth home run in Cleveland. With that, after the game he told a Cleveland writer, Hal Lebovitz, that this was definitely his last year.*
Ted proceeded to hit for average and power, and by July 4, Harold Kaese declared Williams the hottest hitter in the league, with fourteen home runs on the season and twelve in his last eighty at bats, the most potent power streak of his career.43 Three days later his average stood at a sparkling .345, though it was clear he would yet again not have enough at bats to contend for another batting title.
On August 10, in Cleveland, Ted hit his 512th career home run to surpass Mel Ott’s 511 for third in the all-time rankings, behind Foxx at 534 and Ruth at the seemingly unattainable 714. Later the same game, Ted swatted number 513.
“I’m happy and delighted over these two homers,” Williams told the writers in the clubhouse. “I wasn’t going for the long hit either time.… I got to know Mel Ott when he was traveling as a broadcaster with the Tigers. We used to talk hitting a lot. I can hardly believe that I have finally hit more homers than he did.”44
On the flight to Baltimore, Boston’s next stop on that road trip, Williams shocked the writers by sending them champagne. “So scientists think getting to the moon is an accomplishment?” wrote the Globe the following day in noting Ted’s gesture. “Know what happened to the baseball writers yesterday on the flight here from Cleveland?”45
Soon he collected his two thousandth walk on the way to what would be a final total of 2,021—forty-one less than Ruth’s record. Ted’s walk-is-as-good-as-a-hit credo was still not yet firmly established, but the stats mavens who would later emerge as a force in the game blessed his base on balls numbers as a key cog in the vital on-base percentage statistic. Williams’s .482 on-base percentage (OBP) remains a major-league record.
With each milestone reached, with each record tied or broken, there was inevitable press speculation about what might have been had Ted not lost nearly five years of his prime to World War II and Korea. The Globe’s Jerry Nason calculated that his service in both wars cost Williams 2,534 times at bat, or 169 home runs, based on his lifetime average of one home run every 14.9 times up. At that rate, his five hundredth home run would actually have been his 669th had he kept playing straight through, Nason wrote. But Ted brushed off the might-have-been talk. Others who went off to war had their numbers affected, too, after all. “Nobody is more grateful than I am to have played as long as I have,” he said. “I’ve been lucky.”46
The Sporting News announced that it had named Williams baseball’s “Player of the Decade” by acclamation in a vote of veteran players and writers in major-league cities around the country. This was effectively a lifetime achievement award, an acknowledgment that Ted had set historic records and fully redeemed himself in his valedictory season. Williams told Sporting News publisher J. G. Taylor Spink that to be recognized ahead of the likes of Mantle, Mays, Musial, and Aaron was meaningful to him, and it helped alleviate the sting of various MVP snubs.
The Red Sox mailed in the rest of their season and finished in seventh place with a record of 65–89, thirty-two games behind the pennant-winning Yankees. It didn’t matter—the story, as ever, was Ted. He resisted offers from other AL teams to hold days in his honor as he took his final trip around the league. Instead, Ted underscored his longevity by homering off the Senators’ Don Lee, prompting old-timers to recall that twenty-one years earlier, he had also homered off Lee’s father, Thornton.
Williams tried to keep his mind on baseball—even though he’d had to deal with the news that his home in Islamorada had been destroyed by Hurricane Donna on September 11, along with many of his trophies and a set of custom-made four-foot-by-five-foot scrapbooks containing personal photographs and clippings. His final numbers—a .316 average in 113 games with 29 home runs and 72 RBIs—validated the story line he had hoped for entering his final season: that even at forty-two years old he could put together a season worthy of his excellent career and prove that 1959 was an aberration resulting solely from injury.
On September 25, the Red Sox made official what Ted had already announced—that he was retiring. The announcement, which was made after the Yankees clinched another pennant, also said that Williams would serve as a batting instructor at spring training in 1961, and after that, he would assume “other duties best suited to his talents.” Four days earlier, Yawkey had offered Ted the general manager’s job for the following season, but Williams had turned it down and suggested the hitting coach role instead.47
His final game at Fenway Park as an active player would be against the Baltimore Orioles on September 28, a Wednesday afternoon.
17
Last Ups
The Red Sox didn’t play on September 26, and Ted used the free time to make a half-hour instructional film to be released in 1961 entitled How I Hit, by Ted Williams. He smashed balls off an elevated tee, then faced live pitching from Jerry Casale, a third-year right-hander. Rookie Jim Pagliaroni, who idolized Williams, served as the catcher, while another rookie, Don Gile, shagged out in right field.
Ted bantered with some hovering writers, and said with a smile that this was “some private business. The boys are just taking pictures of my swing. They got an idea that it might make a film.” One writer asked him if he was sorry to be retiring as a player. “Yes, I am,” Williams replied. “Baseball has been very good to me over the years, and I’ll be forever grateful. Sure, I’ll miss it as a player. That’s only natural after all these years, but it had to come.”1 Such innocuous stuff provided adequate fodder for a press corps hungry for any off-day morsels about Ted. The news, such as it was, was featured in all the papers the following day, alongside accounts of the historic first televised Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate the previous night in Chicago as well as a report that Nixon would be boldly campaigning in JFK’s home state of Massachusetts later that week.
Ted’s penultimate home game, on September 27, was a forgettable 17–3 shellacking at the hands of the Orioles in which he grounded out, popped up, and walked. On the twenty-eighth, the weather was overcast, chilly, damp, and bleak, with little wind. Ineptly, the Red Sox chose this very day to step on the Williams valedictory story li
ne by announcing the firing of general manager Bucky Harris and the return the following season of slugging outfielder Jackie Jensen, who had quit the team in 1959 because of a fear of flying. The news meant that before the game most of the writers were preoccupied in the executive suites. That left more running room for Ed Linn, who had been assigned by Sport magazine to cover Ted’s last stand.
Linn had grown up in the Dorchester section of Boston as an ardent Williams fan who had watched with delight from the Fenway bleachers in 1939 as the rookie made his debut in right field and captivated the crowd with his youthful exuberance. After serving in the Army during World War II and attending Boston University on the GI Bill, Linn began a career as a freelance writer that was anchored by his association with Sport and his status at the magazine as a Williams aficionado. He had first been assigned a piece on Ted in 1954, following the spring training mishap in which the Kid broke his collarbone. Linn showed up at the clubhouse and heard Williams’s response inside the training room when he was asked if he would receive a man from Sport.
“Send the son of a bitch in,” said Ted.
Linn entered and introduced himself, whereupon Williams immediately said he would not talk to him. But he would tell him why. He had been nursing a grudge against Sport since 1948, when he had failed to show up for a luncheon the magazine had invited him to following the World Series and Sport had retaliated by dispatching a reporter to do a hatchet job on him. He couldn’t remember the writer’s name, but it would come to him, Ted said.
Linn mumbled something about the magazine having new ownership now and a new editor.
Who was the editor? Ted asked.
Ed Fitzgerald, Linn replied.
“Ed Fitzgerald! That’s the son of a bitch” who had maligned him, Williams roared.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 58
