Ted & Me (14 page)

Three-run home run! We won!

I had never hit a ball so far. A bunch of little kids went running after it, and my teammates went crazy.

They chased me around the bases, pounding me on the back as I rounded first, pummeling me at second, and jumping all over me at third. When I stepped on home plate, the whole pile of them leaped on top of me, pinning me to the ground. If they weren't so happy, I would have thought I was back at the rally
being beaten up by Nazis.

As I was making my way back to the dugout, I noticed a girl in the front row of the bleachers holding a little American flag. And I don't know why I did it. I didn't plan it. I didn't think about it. It was just instinct.

I jogged over to the girl and asked her if I could borrow her flag for a minute. She handed it to me, and I waved it over my head to all the spectators. They let out a cheer, and I jogged past the bleachers waving the flag and slapping hands with everybody I could reach. The rest of the team crowded behind me like a parade. We were all slapping hands with the fans.

Somebody in the snack bar must have been watching us. The loudspeaker they usually use to announce that your burger is ready started blaring out “God Bless America.”

After me and the guys had high-fived everybody on the first-base side, I led them across the field. I looked behind me and saw that the kids from the
other
team had joined our little parade too. The whole gang of us ran over to the third-base side and slapped hands with the people over there. Then we all ran out to home plate, and a roar went up from the crowd that rang in my ears as they cheered for us.

 

So what if my mission
was
a failure? I didn't stop the attack on Pearl Harbor. And I didn't help Ted Williams crack 700 home runs. But it was okay, I figured,
because everybody makes mistakes. Nobody's perfect. Flip is a great guy, but he's a lousy hitting coach. The FBI agent screwed up and gave me the wrong baseball card. Charles Lindbergh wasn't the perfect hero so many people thought he was. And even Ted Williams—the greatest hitter who ever lived—made an out six times out of every ten times he came to the plate.

I never felt so good in my life.

E
VERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS TRUE, EXCEPT FOR THE STUFF
I made up. It's only fair to tell you which is which.

It's true that Ted Williams was one of the greatest hitters ever. The statistics in the book are correct. It's also true that some teams would shift their entire defense to the right side of the diamond to defend against Ted, although that began five years after this story takes place.

It's true that Ted hit .406 in 1941, and nobody has hit .400 since. Anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould called it “the greatest achievement in twentieth-century hitting.”

Even so, Ted did
not
win the Most Valuable Player Award that year. Joe DiMaggio did, because of his 56-game hitting streak. By the way, during DiMaggio's streak, his batting average was .408. During that same period of time, Ted hit .412.

It's true that Red Sox manager Joe Cronin offered to let Ted sit out the last day of the season so his average would be rounded up to .400. It's also true that Ted walked the streets of downtown Philadelphia for hours the night before the doubleheader. What's
not
true is that Ted agonized over whether or not he should play. He has been quoted as saying, “I never thought about sitting out. Not once.” And “If I couldn't hit .400 all the way, I didn't deserve it.”

Shibe Park in Philadelphia was real. It was renamed Connie Mack Stadium in 1953. Two years later, the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City. The Phillies played in the ballpark until 1970. It was torn down in 1976.

 

Everything about Ted's military career is true. He enlisted after the 1942 season. While he didn't see action during World War II, he did train other pilots. In Korea, Ted flew 39 bombing missions. On February 16, 1953, his F-9 Panther jet was hit, and he nearly died crash-landing the plane. He was awarded the Air Medal and later the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

It's true that ten weeks after Ted hit .406, Pearl Harbor was attacked. It's also true that before that day many Americans were opposed to the United States getting involved in the war. Antiwar rallies took place all over the country in 1941, and frequently the speaker was Charles Lindbergh.

Lindbergh was famous for being the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean but not quite as famous for being a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. He visited Germany four times and even accepted a medal from the Nazis. The words Lindbergh spoke at the rally in chapter 17 were actual quotes from his speeches.

Father Coughlin (1891–1979) was a real Catholic priest in Michigan who made anti-Semitic radio broadcasts that were heard across the country.

 

It's true that Ted Williams was a complicated man who could be quite mean one minute and a real sweetheart the next. He would often visit sick children in hospitals, and for forty years he worked tirelessly with the Jimmy Fund, a Boston charity that benefits the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Ted would also give money to old friends in need. He would ask the friend to donate ten dollars to a charity. Then, after he received the check, Ted would anonymously deposit
thousands
of dollars in the friend's bank account. So if Stosh existed in the real world, Ted might very well have put some money in a secret bank account to pay for his college education.

After his baseball career was over, Ted managed the Washington Senators for four years, and he was named American League Manager of the Year in 1969. He was also a spokesman for Sears Roebuck, had a radio show and a syndicated newspaper column, and founded the Ted Williams Baseball Camp
in Lakeville, Massachusetts.

It's true that Ted loved fishing almost as much as he loved hitting. In fact, in 2000 he was inducted into the International Game Fishing Association Hall of Fame.

Ted died two years later, at the age of 83. About that, no more needs to be said.

I
DIDN'T JUST
KNOW
ALL THE FACTS THAT WENT INTO THIS
book. I got them from reading other books and newspaper articles, watching videos, and searching the internet. These are some of my best sources….

Berg, A. Scott.
Lindbergh
. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1998.

Cramer, Richard Ben.
What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?: A Remembrance
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

Creamer, Robert W.
Baseball in '41: A Celebration of the “Best Baseball Season Ever”—in the Year America Went to War
. New York: Viking, 1991.

DiMaggio, Dom, with Bill Gilbert.
Real Grass, Real Heroes: Baseball's Historic 1941 Season
. New York: Kensington Publishing, 1990.

Halberstam, David.
The Teammates: A Portrait of a
Friendship
. New York: Hyperion, 2003.

Linn, Ed.
Hitter: The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams
. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.

Montville, Leigh.
Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero
. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

Roth, Philip.
The Plot Against America.
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Seidel, Michael.
Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of '41
. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988.

Underwood, John.
It's Only Me: The Ted Williams We Hardly Knew
. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2005.

Wallace, Max.
The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles
Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich
. New York: St Martin's Press, 2003.

Williams, Ted, and John Underwood.
The Science of Hitting
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

———. My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969.