America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (38 page)

At Luscomb’s urging, the gawky boy began to beef himself up. His daily exercise regimen included squeezing tennis balls to strengthen his wrists and doing dozens of daily fingertip push-ups, a practice he continued for decades. Convinced that he would not have made it to Cooperstown without Luscomb, whom he later called “my first hero,” Williams mentioned this mentor in his Hall of Fame induction speech along with Wofford Caldwell, his baseball coach at Hoover High. Caldwell used the stick more than the carrot. To get Williams to run faster, he would chase him around the bases with a switch.

In 1934, Williams chose to attend Hoover High over the larger and more established San Diego High, the school located in his district, for reasons baseballic. “I didn’t think,” he later told the
Boston Traveler
, “that I had a chance of winning a letter on the San Diego High team.” As a teenager, the gangly Williams, who was a born right-handed hitter, could not drive the ball with power consistently. At Horace Mann Junior High, he struggled to make the baseball team and was far from a standout performer. For Williams, as for NBA legend Michael Jordan, who was cut from his varsity basketball team as a high school sophomore, this brush with failure would just add fuel to his competitive fire.

To fulfill his dream of getting to the major leagues, Williams was willing (and eager) to hit and hit and then hit some more. “From the time I was eleven years old,” Williams later stated, “I’ve taken every possible opportunity to swing at a ball.” At the beginning of each season, before his hands developed calluses, he would bat until he bled. While the hero of
The Natural
, the Robert Redford baseball film, was partly based on Williams (Roy Hobbs wore the Sox outfielder’s uniform number, 9, and hit a homer in his last time at bat), the man himself had to work at everything. “Hundreds of kids have the natural ability to become great ballplayers,” Williams later told
Time
, “but nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability.”

Like San Diego High, Hoover High was also a big school—it had a student body of about 1,500—and the competition to make the starting lineup was keen. In his first season, the
San Diego Union
reported, Williams was used primarily as “a reserve outfielder.” He went to the plate just eighteen times, swatting six hits. The following spring, Williams initially worked his way onto the field as a pitcher. “He was a skinny bastard,” his coach recalled. “But he could rear back and really throw the ball in there.” In an April game, he struck out sixteen batters. And then when he finally got a few chances to start at first base and in the outfield, Williams began tearing up the league. As the season wore on, the sixteen-year-old, who swigged milk shakes to bulk up, emerged as a hitting sensation, batting .588. With Williams also winning four games on the mound, the Hockers from Hockerville, as the upstart Hoover High team was referred to (and denigrated) by the locals, pulled off a surprising victory in the league championship. After another stellar season, in which he hit .403, scouts from the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals came calling. Unwilling to let her boy leave home, May Williams insisted that he turn down all contract offers from big-league teams. In June of 1936, three days after his last high school game, he signed on with his hometown team, the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League. Though Williams was not yet a high school graduate—he would not finish up until the following February—he would be earning $150 a month as a professional ballplayer.

While the Splendid Splinter’s Red Sox career, as John Updike has observed, fell into three phases—Jason (Youth), Achilles (Maturity; like the Greek warrior, he pouted), and Nestor (Old Age)—his run-up to the major leagues was another matter. Before becoming anybody’s idea of a Greek hero, the obsessive with no social skills often floundered. In the spring of 1939, as Williams was about to begin his rookie season in “the Show,” the
Boston Globe
noted, “He was notorious throughout his minor league career for his screwball tactics.” In his first year with the Padres, Williams startled his roommate Cedric Durst, a veteran assigned to watch over him, by jumping up on his bed one morning at six o’clock, shouting, “Christ, Ced, it’s great to be young and full of vinegar.” In the second appearance of his pro career, the still just 147-pound athlete was forced to abandon his pitching aspirations. “I got hit,” Williams later noted, “like I was throwing batting practice.” For the Padres in 1936, as a part-time, mostly eighth-place hitter, he batted a modest .271 with no homers. The following year, as a regular outfielder, he upped his average to .291 and banged out 23 homers. Part of the reason for the relative dearth of power was that the fences in Lane Field were far away—350 feet down the right-field line and 500 feet to dead center. Remarkably, those would be the last two seasons Williams would dip below .300 until his injury-plagued 1959 campaign with the Red Sox, who obtained him from the Padres in December 1937.

Two months later, Sox general manager Eddie Collins, who was aware of Williams’s reputation for eccentric behavior, asked Bobby Doerr, then about to start his second season in Boston, to escort his fellow Californian to spring training in Florida. Williams met up with Doerr and two other players: Babe Herman, a veteran who had hit .393 for Brooklyn in 1930, and Max West, a young first baseman with the Boston Bees (Beantown’s National League team), in El Paso, Texas. Soon after their train left the station, the four ballplayers found themselves at one end of a long, mostly empty car; at the other end were four oldish women. The excitable, fingernail-chomping motormouth, who hardly slept at all on the three-day trip east, immediately began quizzing the former Dodger star about hitting. “And Ted,” Doerr later recalled, “he’s pumping Babe, and being loud like he is, using pillows for swinging the bat. These women finally told the porter, ‘Can you shut that guy up a little bit? He’s too loud.’” Each morning when the train stopped, Max West would open the window and do a double take. “There’s Ted,” stated West years later, “walking up and down and balancing himself on the rails. And he’s got a newspaper or a magazine in his hands, making like he’s hitting a ball.”

Once in Florida, his batting stroke quickly convinced reporters that he was likely to be the next incarnation of Babe Herman, if not Babe Ruth. But though Williams was ready for the major leagues, he was still an emotional basket case. He called everyone in the Red Sox camp in Sarasota “Sport,” including his manager, Joe Cronin. To the San Diego boy whose central relationship was with something made out of wood, the concept of a social hierarchy was alien. Assuming that all institutions were as rudderless as the Williams family, he was not trying to challenge authority figures; he just had no idea that they existed, even when staring them in the face. When introduced to California’s then governor Frank Merriam, the adolescent stuck out his hand and said matter-of-factly, “Hi, Guv.” Likewise, when entering the office of Hoover High principal Floyd Johnson for a chat about baseball or hunting, he did not hesitate to put his feet up on Johnson’s desk. “I’d be enjoying the conversation so much,” Johnson later mused, “that I’d be oblivious…to his unconventional way of talking to the principal.” Not so forgiving was the dumbfounded Cronin, who banished “the Kid,” as the nineteen-year-old was nicknamed on day one, to Daytona Beach, the spring home of the Sox top minor-league team, the Minneapolis Millers, after just a week.

Williams would spend the entire 1938 season with Minneapolis. The nonstop nonsensical chatter continued, as did the other quirky manifestations of his internal disorganization. At a dinner party with new neighbors, Williams went up to a top-level executive at Woolworth’s and patted him on the stomach, saying, “Good evening, Whale Baby.” When chasing after a fly ball, the right fielder would slap his butt and shout, “Hi-yo, Silver.” He would also ride his bicycle to the refrain of “Yippy-Yi-Yo” on the outfield grass before games. “He was just a cuckoo guy,” Millers pitcher Lefty Lefebvre, whom Williams once took for a hundred-mile-an-hour spin in his Buick, later recalled. “A loner.” Referring to him as “Peter Pan,” his Millers teammates would keep their distance in an effort to stay safe and sane. Williams’s temper tantrums were what most exasperated his manager, Donie Bush, a former major-league shortshop. After a rare off day at the plate, he might tear up towels or punch the water cooler. When Bush threatened to quit, Sox GM Collins responded, “The day Williams doesn’t put on his uniform, don’t bother to put on your uniform, either.” The moody star was also hitting like crazy, and Collins knew that the future of the Sox was inextricably tied to Williams.

Over the course of the season, he put up staggering numbers: 43 homers, 142 runs batted in, and a .366 average. Though those totals were good enough for the Triple Crown, Williams wasn’t voted the American Association’s Most Valuable Player. The only award the sportswriters agreed that he should get was the league’s “screwball king.” A pattern was set. Though Williams would later win the AL MVP trophy twice, he was denied the honor in his two Triple Crown years—1942 and 1947. With the exception of Yankee great Lou Gehrig in 1934, no other Triple Crown winner has ever failed to win the MVP, and few other players would succeed in alienating “the knights of the keyboard” as much as Williams.

Williams would eventually lament his lack of “a businesslike attitude” in his pre-Boston years in pro ball. “I mean hitting was so important to me,” he later wrote, “consumed so much of my desire, was so much more exciting to me that I tended to let other things go.” And over the course of his nineteen seasons in the majors, his single-mindedness at home plate would make an indelible mark on the “National Pastime.”

“Cronin’s Big Problem of 1939,” as the
Boston Globe
referred to the socially maladjusted Williams in the spring of his rookie year, got off to a shaky start. In an April preseason game in Atlanta, after striking out with two runners on base in the top of the eighth, the twenty-year-old can’t-miss prospect dropped a foul pop-up in the bottom half of the inning. With his frustration mounting, the right fielder picked up the ball, turned around, and hurled it out of the stadium.

Fortunately for Williams, Cronin decided not to apply the measure recommended by the
Globe
, which was to use a screwdriver to force him “not to cut loose with his eccentricities.” Instead, after immediately removing his temperamental rookie from the game, the player-manager—the All-Star shortstop would hit fourth or fifth in the lineup, right after Williams—sat down with him for what would be the first of several “fatherly chats.” “I just can’t understand what goes on in your mind,” said Cronin, who, in the course of his storied career, had never witnessed a similar outburst. “See if you can’t explain it to me.” Though the Kid could not figure himself out either, he apologized. To express his gratitude for Cronin’s patience and understanding, he would use his bat. He started hitting. A couple of weeks later, in his first Sunday game at Fenway, Williams thrilled the hometown faithful by going four for five, including a towering homer into the center-field bleachers, an area previously reached only by the game’s most feared sluggers. In early May, in Detroit, after he belted the longest homer ever in Briggs Stadium, the
Globe
predicted that he would “become the biggest hitting sensation since Babe Ruth.”

Despite a slump in June, which prevented him from being selected to the All-Star team—from then on, he would be a fixture in the midsummer classic—Williams led the league in RBIs with 145, the first rookie ever to do so. He ended up hitting a robust .327 along with 31 homers. Though his discipline at the plate was impressive—he had 107 walks compared with only 64 strikeouts—his first-year jitters precluded the eye-popping totals that would soon become his trademark. Then, as now, seasons with 100 or more strikeouts were common for power hitters, but he would exceed 50 strikeouts only two more times; his next highest total was 54. Likewise, his OBP for 1939 was .436, lower than any other year except 1959, as his walk totals would typically be much higher (thrice surpassing 150). As Williams would later acknowledge, in his rookie season he was still swinging at pitches an inch above his shoulders. Even so, all the hours of practice at North Park had already paid big dividends. “I can’t imagine,” Williams later wrote, “anyone having a better, happier first year in the big leagues.…Every day was Christmas.” Babe Ruth agreed. At the time, baseball did not yet have its Rookie of the Year award, but the recently retired Sultan of Swat designated Williams “the best rookie.”

The Babe would soon go further and anoint the Kid as his successor, an honor that Williams tried his best to live up to. In their first face-to-face meeting, before an exhibition game in Boston in 1943, Ruth, as the papers widely reported, told Williams, “You remind me a lot of myself. I love to hit. You’re one of the most natural ballplayers I’ve ever seen.” In a recent interview, Mike Epstein, who played under Williams in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a member of the Washington Senators, told me that his manager liked to tell a different version of this story. Attempting to channel Williams, Epstein said, “And the Babe comes up to me and tells me, ‘I used to study Shoeless Joe Jackson [the great left-handed hitter for the Chicago White Sox accused of betting on the 1919 World Series] before games to copy him because I thought he had the prettiest fucking swing I have ever seen. But no, Williams, you’ve got a prettier fucking swing.’” Hearing such praise from the mouth of the Babe just a few years into his career moved the Red Sox outfielder deeply. “I was flabbergasted,” Williams recalled years later. “After all, he was Babe Ruth.” In the early 1990s, when compiling
Ted Williams’ Hit List
with sportswriter Jim Prime, a book in which he would rank the twenty-five best hitters of all time, the Splendid Splinter would put Ruth at the top, followed by Lou Gehrig. While his findings reflected more than just a “dry statistical analysis,” Williams put a premium on slugging percentage and on-base percentage. And he ended up not ranking himself, sticking a section on his career in an appendix. “But it was clear from our conversations,” stated coauthor Jim Prime in a recent phone interview, “that Ted thought he was second only to Ruth.” Though Williams was in awe of Ruth, the perfectionist could not help but point out his flaws. “Ruth struck out too many times,” wrote Williams, proud that his 709 lifetime total of Ks paled in comparison to Ruth’s 1,330.