The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (13 page)

Ted would balk at shagging, taking ground balls, or otherwise working on his fielding. “He did little more many times than simply wave at balls hit to left field in the San Diego park,” recalled Jack Orr, a sportswriter for the
San Diego Evening Tribune.
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The first time Ted started a game in left in 1936, George Myatt, the Padres’ shortstop and captain, caught the rookie with his back to the infield.

“I’d see the signs… and give the signs to the outfielders,” Myatt said. “Once, right after the sign had been given… I turned around real fast. There Ted is, standing with his back to the hitter. He had his glove in his hands and he was swinging his glove like it was a bat. I called time and went out and called him a few names, told him there was something else to this game besides swinging a bat.”
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When a ball skipped through Ted’s legs, and he just casually jogged after it early that first season, his manager benched him. “I didn’t speak to him about it at the time,” said Shellenback, a former spitball pitcher who compiled a 296–177 record in nineteen Pacific Coast League seasons.
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“I merely took him out of the lineup the next day. For five days in a row he came to me in the morning and followed me all over the field. ‘Am I going to play today, Skipper?’ he would inquire. When I’d say ‘no,’ he would add, ‘How about tomorrow?’ I’d say, ‘Maybe,’ and walk away. At the end of about five days of this, Ted was about ready to burst a blood vessel. I knew that I had punished him severely by keeping him out of the lineup.… So I finally put him back in the lineup with the
comment that he could stay there as long as he hustled. And he never gave me any cause to criticize him again.”

Ted’s hustle may have improved after that incident, but his fielding skills, and fundamental indifference to the defensive part of the game, generally did not. Shellenback would order him to report early for spring training in 1937 so that Durst could work with him on improving his fielding. Durst also arranged for a track coach to try to improve Ted’s speed on the bases.
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But after the season got under way, Ted’s poor fielding persisted, causing the veteran players to grouse and warn him to shape up. Earl Keller, the beat writer for the
Tribune,
got wind of the grumbling and decided to publicly scold Ted. “If Ted Williams, 18-year-old outfielder with the San Diego Padres is to make the grade in the diamond sport, he has one thing to learn,” Keller wrote. “Ted must get it in his head that fielding is just as important as hitting. The young flyhawk believes all he has to do is get up to the plate and hit the ball, but that’s where he’s wrong. The veterans on the Padres team are trying to convince Ted of this fact, and the sooner they do, the sooner the youth will make good.”
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Keller, who would stay on as a
Tribune
sportswriter for forty-six years, probably intended those words to serve more as paternal advice than as harsh rebuke, for he was a reliable Padres booster and a friend to most of the players—especially Ted, whom he’d been tracking since high school. There was not even a hint of an adversarial relationship between Williams and the writers who covered him in San Diego. Boston would be a different story.

“There was no particular pressure on me playing in San Diego,” Ted said later, reflecting on his first season. “I didn’t know what pressure was. I was nervous—not because I was born there, but because it was a whole new experience playing before crowds, professional baseball.”
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After getting two hits in the game he pitched in on July 3, Ted went up as a pinch hitter in the first game of the July 4 doubleheader against Los Angeles. Then he started the second game, going 1–5 on the day. He also played both games of a doubleheader the next day and went a combined 0–6. He only got up seven more times the rest of the month, collecting one hit. Shellenback was opting to bring him along slowly.
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Then in early August, when the Padres were playing in Portland, Cedric Durst went down with a groin injury, creating an opportunity for Ted. He played in three consecutive doubleheaders between August
7 and August 9, going 6–17, including two doubles.
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The press took notice. Monroe McConnell wrote in the
Union
that “young Ted Williams… has been delivering like a veteran and Padre fans probably will see more of him.”
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Shellenback was probably impressed with this miniburst and display of power, but there was a VIP sitting in the stands in Portland for those games who really took notice of Ted: Eddie Collins. Collins had been a superb second baseman for twenty-five years with the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox, and was then on the verge of being inducted into the Hall of Fame. In 1933, Collins had advised multimillionaire Tom Yawkey, his old friend from prep school, to buy the Boston Red Sox, and Yawkey, after acquiring the team, had brought Collins to Boston with him as general manager and part owner.

Collins rarely made scouting trips, but had decided to take the train out to the West Coast that summer and spend some time watching the Padres, with whom the Red Sox had a working agreement. Specifically, Collins had taken options on Bobby Doerr and George Myatt and now had to decide whether to exercise them before they expired. He’d joined the Padres in Seattle for games against the Indians, then come down the coast for a series against the Portland Beavers.

But in the Portland series, it was Williams, not Doerr or Myatt, who made an impression on Collins.

“The announcer yelled, ‘Williams hitting for San Diego,’ ” the general manager later recounted.
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“I looked down on the field and nearly broke out laughing when I got a peek at the gawky bean pole who was striding toward the plate. But I didn’t laugh when I saw him swing at the ball and line a double over the first sacker’s head. There was nothing remarkable about the hit. There was certainly nothing impressive about the appearance of the hitter. But there was something about the way he tied into that ball which all but shocked me out of my seat. It was as though a shock of electricity had just passed through my body. In that fleeting moment, as he swung at that ball, I became so convinced that here was one of the most natural hitters in baseball history. I’d have staked my life on it.

“I tried to tell myself a little later that I must be mistaken: that if Williams was the extraordinary prospect I believed him to be, he’d be playing regularly instead of infrequently as a pinch hitter, and there’d be an army of scouts present with his name on their lips. But my judgment wouldn’t listen to that argument. So I decided to have another peek at the kid in action and then began making inquiries about him.”

In his mind’s eye that first day, Collins told an interviewer in 1950, Williams had stood out “like a white horse in a herd of black ones.”
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Another person impressed by Williams in that Portland series was Johnny Pesky, the future Red Sox shortstop who would become Ted’s lifelong friend. Pesky was then the clubhouse boy for the Beavers. He shined Ted’s shoes and watched in awe as Williams took batting practice, belting balls out of the park against a smoke-belching foundry in the distance. “He was just a kid, small, skinny, gangly,” Pesky remembered. “I don’t think he weighed one-sixty by then. I remember he had a great swing.”
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Collins followed the Padres down to San Francisco for a series against the Mission Reds and then arranged to meet Bill Lane in Los Angeles to discuss his pending options for Doerr and Myatt. Collins said he would take Doerr, even though he’d watched the second baseman make four errors in the first game of the August 8 doubleheader against Portland. (Doerr said he was unnerved, knowing the GM was in the stands.) Collins passed on Myatt and also acquired the rights to Padres catcher Gene Desautels. When Lane asked if there was anyone else on the team who interested him, Collins said he was intrigued by Ted.

“Williams?” asked Lane incredulously. “Why that’s preposterous. He’s just a child, only a couple months out of high school. He couldn’t be more crude.… He looks pretty good at bat at times. That’s why I’m keeping him around. But he’s years away and may never make it. I wouldn’t think of sticking you with him.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” said Collins. “Name your price and I’ll take him.”

“To be perfectly frank about it, Eddie, I can’t sell him at this time. I promised his parents when I signed him up that I’d keep him this year. And I would anyway. You see, he’s not shown anything to date which would warrant me asking a good price for him. I feel, though, as you apparently do, that he may become a standout. So I want to keep him until I can get some real money for him. However, I promise you that I’ll let you know and give you a chance to bid before sending him to the majors.”
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That was good enough for Collins, who thought Lane was a man of his word. Collins called Joe Cronin, the player-manager for the Red Sox, to tell him he’d bought Doerr and reached an understanding with Lane on a kid named Ted Williams. “The… boy is only seventeen, but he’s got the most beautiful swing I ever saw,” Collins told Cronin.
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Ted played sparingly the rest of the month, but on August 31, in a benefit game at Lane Field against a local semipro All-Star team, he hit a home run, a double, and two singles.
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The next day, the regular left fielder, Ivey “Chick” Shiver, suddenly announced he was quitting the team—and baseball—to take a job as a football coach at Georgia College. Shellenback decided to have Ted take Shiver’s place for the remaining two weeks of the season.

Williams, who had just turned eighteen, responded, hitting .305 the rest of the way, with six doubles and two triples. He played with exuberance. His hat often fell off as he ran the bases, and he found it hard to conceal his delight whenever he tagged one. “When he connected, you could count his teeth from second base,” wrote Monroe McConnell in the
Union.
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Ted was still raw, but he was improving. Though the Padres were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs against the Oakland Oaks, Ted hit his first professional home run in that series—on September 15, off Wee Willie Ludolph, who was also known as the Oakland Ghost. Williams’s average for the season was .271. He had appeared in forty-two games and got twenty-nine hits in 107 times up.
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He wasn’t selective enough at the plate, Shellenback thought—too eager to swing at whatever was thrown up there to him, especially the soft stuff favored by some of the older Coast League pitchers who’d lost their fastball but could still change speeds effectively.

Herm “Old Folks” Pillette, an archetypical junkballer for the Padres who was known for starting the day with a half cup of whiskey, gave Ted a valuable lesson on how to hit pitchers of his ilk: wait for the off-speed pitch, then tee off on it.

“Here is where being surrounded by older players helped me,” Ted said.
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“The opposition pitchers, they were starting to slow up on me a lot, a little slow ball and I’d be out in front and hit a ground ball or something. I just wasn’t waiting on the ball. So Herm Pillette, who pitched for the Detroit Tigers in the 1920s—he was on the Padres, he said, ‘What are they throwing you?’

“I said, ‘Some little crappy curve ball.’

“He said, ‘Why don’t you go up there and kind of lay for one of those, just kind of lay for it a little bit?’

“Well, I did—and I got a line drive to right field. I said, ‘Hell, if this keeps up…’ Pillette got me
thinking
at a young age about having an idea about what the pitcher was throwing. Then once you hit one of those
slow curves the pitchers say, ‘I can’t do that anymore.’ So you get the pitch
you
want. I could never forget what happened when it went right for me. Like for example, looking for the curve ball, here it comes. Bang!”

It wasn’t just the tip from Pillette; it was Ted’s hunger to receive it that was striking. He had an innate baseball curiosity. He was constantly pumping pitchers about what they would throw in certain situations and pressing other hitters about their experiences against a given pitcher. He would absorb the information, process it, then use it.

Durst and other Padres were amazed by Ted’s ability to read pitchers’ tendencies. After a few times around the league, Durst recalled, “Ted was predicting what so and so would throw in a given situation: ‘He’ll get two and nothing on me, and then he’ll throw me a slow, inside curve and I’ll murder it.’ Here was a kid just out of high school telling us things like that. He wasn’t bragging. He was thinking out loud.”
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Reflecting back years later, Durst concluded that “Ted was the greatest hitter I ever saw and that includes Babe Ruth. When it came to day in and day out hitting, I’d have to take Ted. I never saw anyone who had the memory of every pitch a pitcher threw like Ted did.… He’d say, ‘Next time I hit against that guy, I’ll knock the ball out of the park,’ and sure enough he would.”
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Besides Durst and Doerr, Ted also learned from a variety of other Padres, including pitchers Wally “Preacher” Hebert, Bud Tuttle, and Howard Craghead, first baseman George McDonald, second baseman Jimmie Reese, shortstop Myatt, outfielder Vince DiMaggio (Joe’s older brother), and catcher George Detore. They retained vintage Ted stories for the rest of their lives, many of which were mined by San Diego writer Bill Swank for his colorful oral history of the Padres,
Echoes from Lane Field.

Tuttle, who was Ted’s roommate in 1937, was something of a Renaissance man. He would go on to dabble in sportswriting, serve as a publicity agent for Jayne Mansfield, and crank out scores of forgettable books and screenplays. He recalled that on train trips to Portland and Seattle, the train would stop in the small Northern California town of Dunsmuir for fifteen minutes. “There was a lady on the platform with a small wagon. She had home-made ice cream and everyone wanted some. As we pulled into the depot, Ted would climb out the window and drop to the platform and get ice cream for both of us. It sure was good on hot days as there was no air conditioning on the train at that time.”
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