The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (11 page)

Back at Hoover for his junior year, Ted broke out, hitting .588 in fifteen games and fifty-one at bats, including seven home runs.
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Caldwell would buy a milk shake for each player who hit a homer—a perfect reward for the “malt-up” Kid. That year, Hoover went 12–3. The
San Diego Union
of April 23, 1935, said young Williams was “pounding the apple like a Babe Ruth.” Ted would have had even more home runs but for a unique ground rule at Hoover High. The baseball field was on a football field and had home plate in a corner of one of the end zones. It wasn’t more than 275 feet down the right-field line. So the local ground rule was that anything hit over the fence to the right of a pole in right-center, known as the barber pole, was only a double.
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“Ted hit some of the longest two-base hits in the history of world,” recalled Bud Maloney, the sportswriter and early Williams observer. “The ball would still be going up when it went over the fence.”
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One of the highlights of the season occurred when Hoover traveled up to Los Angeles to play a doubleheader against Santa Monica. The start of the first game was delayed so that Babe Herman, the former Brooklyn Dodger who had hit .393 with thirty-five homers five years earlier but was then holding out as a Pittsburgh Pirate, could finish taking batting practice. “We were sitting in the dugout while Babe Herman was hitting,” former neighbor Del Ballinger said. “And Ted is beating on his wrist, and he’d say, ‘Oh, I wish I had power like that. I wish I was that big and strong.’ And then Ted got up in the game and hit two balls farther than Babe Herman! I mean, seven miles farther. He hit them farther as a high school boy. I said, ‘Ted, you’re a doozy.’ He never seemed to realize how good he was.”
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Williams mostly played the outfield and first base, but had also emerged as a strong pitcher. He went 4–2 his junior year as the number two starter.
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In his senior season he became Hoover’s lead pitcher and went 12–1, once striking out nineteen against Redondo. Another time,
he pitched both games of a doubleheader, going nineteen innings, striking out twenty-one, and allowing three runs.
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Childhood pal Wilbert Wiley always touted Ted as a pitcher: “When you got up to bat, he’d throw you that breaking stuff and I’ll tell you, it did break. And he had… a palm ball. A few players still remember that. It’d come out of his hand like a knuckler. He’d give all the motions of throwing a fastball and that thing would slip out and… you’d swing when the ball was halfway there.”
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Ted told the Boston writer Joe Cashman in 1941 that the reason he took up pitching was to try and disguise his poor fielding. “I was an awkward, sloppy fielder and couldn’t run any faster than a snail,” he said.
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Caldwell tried hard to improve Ted’s speed. In one drill, the coach stood at home plate with a switch in his hand. He gave Ted a head start, halfway to first base, and told him to take off running. By the time Ted approached second, Caldwell would usually catch Williams and whip his behind with the switch until they reached home.
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When he made his high school’s all-league team in 1936, the
San Diego Union
referred to Ted as “T. Samuel Williams, elongated chucker.”
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The school paper called him “Hoover’s Dizzy Dean.”
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But it was in hitting where he was making his mark. In 1936, his senior season, his average dropped from the prodigious .588 he’d hit the year before to .402 (33–82), perhaps because of all the pitching he did.
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But he still showed explosive power, belting seven home runs over two days and three games at the annual high school baseball tournament sponsored by the 20-30 Club of Pomona, a business group in Los Angeles County.

The invitational tournament was a major event. More than thirty teams from around Southern California played over several adjoining diamonds, and Ted’s homers would spill over into other games, interrupting play. Governor Frank Merriam was there to throw out the first ball in the 1936 championship game. Introduced to Merriam, Ted offered a breezy, “Hi, Guv!”

Jackie Robinson and his Pasadena high school team were playing in the Pomona tournament that year, though not against Hoover and Ted. Race was no great obstacle at the high school level in those days. Hoover’s rival, San Diego High, had black players. And in 1935, Ted had a memorable game against one of Southern California’s leading pitchers, Willie “Emperor” Jones, of Santa Ana. Jones, who was described in the
sporting-press parlance of the day as a “whirlwind Negro pitcher,” was touched for two homers by Ted in a March 16 game.

There were black players on the sandlots, too. Satchel Paige made an appearance in February of 1935, pitching a three-hit shutout against the Texas Liquor House club, further entertaining about one thousand fans by stepping to the microphone to sing. “Singin’ Satchel Paige,” the
San Diego Union
called him, raving that “the elongated colored twirler exhibited blinding speed and miraculous control.”
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Rather than court trouble, opposing pitchers would often simply walk Ted, and that infuriated him. “If we had a threat going, they’d walk him,” said Hoover teammate Roy Engle. “He used to get so upset at that. He threatened to quit one time. It used to irk him something terrible to get a walk.” Del Ballinger said Ted would actually break down and “cry like a baby.”
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As a result of Williams’s baseball prowess and outsize persona, his friends and other schoolmates would talk about him constantly.
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But perhaps the leader of Ted’s Hoover cult was Ray Boone, the journeyman major leaguer from 1948 to 1960 who finished his career with Williams and the Red Sox. Boone, whose son and grandsons also played in the majors, was the batboy on Ted’s American Legion team and several years behind him at Hoover. Ray and his pals would get on their bikes and follow Ted wherever he was playing.

“We watched Ted play every Friday at Hoover High,” Boone said.
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“We never missed him. He was our big leaguer. We idolized him. I used to kid him he was a better hitter at Hoover than he was at Boston. When I got to Cleveland I was always waiting for the Red Sox to come to town. One day, taking batting practice, I wondered if I should go over and tell Ted I went to Hoover. I decided not to, because I figured, what if he said he doesn’t give a damn? Then later at Fenway, I had a great game, hit two homers. After I made an out and ended the inning, I was rounding first. Ted was trotting in from left field and passed me. Without even looking up, he said, ‘They can’t get old Hoover out, can they?’ That stuck with me a long time.”

Major-league scouts, or “bird dogs,” covering San Diego had been tracking Ted for some time. The most ardent suitor had been Herb Benninghoven. Benninghoven worked for San Diego Gas and Electric, ran a Sunday sandlot team, and moonlighted on behalf of the St. Louis Cardinals. He started showing up at Ted’s games, watching from a distance
with field glasses. Afterward, Herb might drive Ted home, and they’d talk baseball, or he’d invite the boy over to his house. His wife was always cooking and baking something good.
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Benninghoven’s chief competition for Ted was Elmer Hill, assistant chief of the San Diego fire department, who served as the bird dog for Bill Essick, a leading scout for the New York Yankees. Essick had first seen Ted the day he hit a long home run for his American Legion team when he was fifteen. The ball soared over the fence and across the street, smashing through a storefront window. The next day, Essick and Hill appeared at the Williams house, and Ted and his mother assumed they were the store owners looking to get reimbursed for the shattered glass.

“Essick was as anxious as anybody to get me,” Ted wrote.
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“I’ll never forget what he said: ‘Ted, if I didn’t think you were going to be a New York Yankee, I’d never sign you.’ Maybe he said that to everybody, but that sure impressed me. I think he offered $200 a month, and a $500 bonus if I made the team at [Class A] Binghamton, New York, but the story is my mother asked for a $1,000 bonus and Essick refused.”

Still, Hill and Essick kept after Ted, watching him play periodically. One Sunday, Elmer Hill, who also pitched for the semipro Cramer’s Bakery team, was scheduled to pitch against Benninghoven’s Cardinal-affiliated team, the Juniors. Ted was playing for the Juniors that day, and Hill had Essick come down.

“I had a good day and pitched a one hitter, struck out Ted 3 times,” Hill wrote a friend in a 1957 letter on file at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. “Nevertheless, Bill liked what he saw, and after the game I took him to Ted’s home to talk contract.”

Ted was acutely aware of his family’s circumstances and ashamed of his dirty, dingy home. “When he was being courted by scouts who came to the house, Ted would move from one side to another to hide a hole in a chair, and once he was appalled when a mouse ran across a baseboard,” said John Underwood, Ted’s ghostwriter for
My Turn at Bat.
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Sam Williams, newly interested in his son’s baseball career now that scouts were about, wondered what might be in it for him and May. “After talking to the parents for a while it was easy to see that Mr. Williams was thinking about a bonus,” wrote Hill.
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Essick offered $250 a month and $400 monthly if Ted made the Yankees’ Pacific Coast League affiliate in Oakland. With Major League Baseball having no team west of Saint Louis at the time, the Pacific Coast League, then playing at the Double-A level, was the leading venue for baseball along the West Coast and indeed west of the Mississippi. The
Oakland option sounded a lot better to the Williamses than Binghamton, across the country and thousands of miles from home. According to Hill, by the end of the meeting it was agreed upon in principle that Ted would sign with the Yankees the following year, after he finished high school. “Bill told them he would leave the contract with me, and when they were ready I would sign him,” Hill wrote.

The Detroit Tigers had also sent their area scout, Marty Krug, down to take a look at Ted, but Krug thought the kid was too skinny to make it as a pro. Ted said Krug had May Williams in tears with his assessment. “He had told her I had a lot of good moves, but I was so scrawny a year of professional baseball would kill me. Literally kill me,” Ted wrote.
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Sam had personally vetoed one team that was interested in signing Ted, the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, because he didn’t like the team’s manager, Truck Hannah. It seems Sam went to see Hannah without Ted, but Hannah said Ted was the one he was interested in talking to, not his father. “My dad didn’t like his attitude,” Ted wrote.
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Meanwhile, in January of 1936, a significant new alternative emerged when San Diego was awarded a franchise in the Pacific Coast League. The owner of the new San Diego Padres was H. W. “Hardrock” Bill Lane, a former semipro ballplayer who’d made a fortune in the goldfields of Alaska and the Yukon. Lane had owned the PCL’s Hollywood Stars, but was forced to share local Wrigley Field with the better-established Los Angeles Angels. When Wrigley management said they would double his rent, Lane bolted for an eager San Diego, which built him a new ballpark on the waterfront in three months, using WPA funds. It was a spacious wooden stadium with a capacity of 11,500. The import of the Padres deal was clear to May Williams: if her son had to play professional baseball, here was a chance to keep him at home.

Benninghoven and Essick persisted on behalf of the Cardinals and Yankees, however. Early in 1936, Benninghoven invited Ted to a regional tryout the Cardinals were staging in Fullerton, California, which would be overseen by Branch Rickey. Rickey was pioneering scouting and player development in the major leagues and had built a vast farm-team system for the Cardinals. At the tryouts, the speed-conscious Rickey required recruits to run race after race with numbers pinned to their backs. But the day before the tryout, Ted was hit by a pitch on his thigh, just above the knee. Slow anyway, Ted was made even less mobile by the injury, and he largely went through the motions. Rickey showed no interest in him.

Benninghoven was still able to get Williams an offer from the
Cardinals, but Ted figured that Saint Louis was not the quickest way to the majors. “They would have probably sent me to Oshkosh or Peoria or someplace, because they had a huge farm system and you could get lost,” he concluded.
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Ted’s last game for Hoover High was on May 22, 1936. The following month, Williams and some other local high school standouts who had finished their eligibility but had not yet graduated were invited to informal workouts by the Padres, who were drawing well and had become an immediate source of civic pride for San Diego.

Bobby Doerr was playing second base for the Padres that year and vividly remembered the first time Ted stepped onto Lane Field: “He was standing right in front of me, maybe fifteen feet away,” Doerr recalled. “I was on the right side of the batting cage. All the old players were standing around waiting to hit, mostly ex–major leaguers. I can remember this just like it was yesterday—Ted standing there, big skinny kid, six foot three, one forty-seven. He was all excited, Ted. Frank Shellenback was our manager, and he was throwing batting practice. He said, ‘Let the kid get in there and hit a few.’ The old guys started grumbling. He must have hit six or seven balls. Seems to me he hit one over, or against, the fence. That was a good poke. We didn’t have many who could hit like that. I remember one of the older guys said, ‘This guy will be signed before the week’s out.’ ”

On June 22, the high schoolers were invited to play for the Padres in an exhibition game against a Navy All-Star team. Late in the game, Ted was sent to left field. He got up once and singled.
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“By now the pressure’s on pretty good for me to sign with San Diego,” Ted wrote. “It was a new team.… A few of the politicians got into it, talking to my mother, and my mother liked the idea because she wanted me close to home.”
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