The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (29 page)

Ted saw a silver lining to the injury. He never hit well in the early part of the season anyway because of the cold weather. Now he’d bide his time until it got warmer, and in the meantime he’d keep sharp by hitting against Joe Dobson, the pitcher whom the Red Sox had acquired in a trade with Cleveland.

“I got the most batting practice of my life, and the best, because Dobson had a hell of a curve and a good overhand fastball, and he always bore down,” Ted later wrote. “Every day that his arm would hold out, and the blisters on my hands would hold out, we’d go out there like it was all out war, one-on-one.”
¹⁷
Back in the lineup, Williams hit .436 for the month of May and .536 from May 17 to June 1. May 15, in hindsight, was one of the most significant dates of the season, for that was the day Ted and Joe DiMaggio each started hitting streaks. DiMaggio’s, of course, would last for fifty-six games, a wondrous skein in which he hit .409 and defined his magnificent career. Williams’s was a more modest twenty-three and lasted until June 8, but during that time he hit .487 and launched himself on the path to .400.

It was the first time that the two men came to be linked in the public imagination as the dominant players of their era. Ted was still only
twenty-two and starting his third season; Joe was twenty-six and in his sixth year with the Yankees, but the summer of 1941 would be their gateway to baseball immortality. Lively debates began in Boston, New York, and around the country—debates that would span Williams’s and DiMaggio’s lifetimes and beyond—as to which man was the better hitter, the more valuable to his team, the more reliable in the clutch, the better leader.

Ted got the edge in two early Red Sox–Yankees meetings, going 7–11 in a three-game series at Yankee Stadium on May 23, 24, and 25, and 3–5 in a Memorial Day doubleheader at Fenway Park that sixty thousand fans turned out to try to get tickets for. DiMaggio had four errors in the doubleheader and barely kept his streak alive in the second game, thanks to a windblown fly muffed by Red Sox right fielder Pete Fox.

By June 1, Ted was hitting .430, and there was talk in the papers that not only could Williams be the first to hit .400 since Bill Terry in 1930, but perhaps he had a chance to break the .440 mark set by Hugh Duffy of the old National League Boston Beaneaters in 1894. As it happened, Duffy was then the seventy-four-year-old first-base coach for the Red Sox and one of Ted’s biggest boosters.

“I can say this about Teddy,” Duffy told the
Globe
’s Hy Hurwitz. “I have never seen a hitter better than Williams in all my life, and that goes for Cobb, Ruth, Hornsby and all the rest.” Duffy said Ted came to him quite often “for a check-up.” But there was little that he could tell him other than to not think about setting any records, lest he lose his rhythm. “All Teddy has to do is keep swinging in that lazy natural way of his and he’ll hit a million.”
¹⁸

In 1941, the notion of hitting .400 was not considered the exalted accomplishment that it is today. Between the start of baseball’s modern era, in 1900, and the beginning of the 1941 season, seven players had achieved .400 or higher twelve times. In the 1800s, nineteen players had done it twenty-two times.

Baseball historians informally place nineteenth-century players in a different category because the rules of the game were far different then. For example, hitters could use bats that had a flat side; they could call for low or high pitches; and a strike zone was not defined until 1887. In the 1887 season, walks were counted as hits, a rule that helped fully ten players reach the .400 mark or higher that year. In the modern era, Nap Lajoie’s .426 average in 1901 came with an asterisk because there was no
foul strike rule. Until 1903 in the American League, foul balls that were not caught did not count as strikes, giving the hitter a significant advantage. Between Bill Terry’s .401 in 1930 and the beginning of the 1941 season, only four players had made serious runs at .400: Al Simmons of the A’s (.390 in 1931), Arky Vaughan of the Pirates (.385 in 1935), Luke Appling (.388 in 1936), and Joe DiMaggio (.381 in 1939).

On June 7, the Associated Press did a feature on Williams for its national audience, noting the .436 tear he was on while proclaiming that “the Kid has grown up.” Ted reflected on his bitterness of the previous year and said he was through feuding with writers and fans. He said both he and the fans got sore that he didn’t hit as many homers as they thought he would in a smaller Fenway. “Everyone thought I’d hit 80 homers and I guess I thought I would too.… Boy, it got so I hated to go out and meet people.… But that’s all over now. I’m just trying to get along. It’s a dream I’ve always had—the way I’m hitting now. Boy, I’m just busting the cover off that ball.”
¹⁹

At the end of June, Babe Ruth himself weighed in to tout Ted. “When I first saw Ted Williams swinging a bat I knew he would be one of the best,” the Babe told Grantland Rice. “He’s loose and easy, with a great pair of wrists. Just a natural. Williams ought to be one of the first hitters in many years to pass .400.”
²⁰

On July 1, DiMaggio hit in his forty-fourth straight game, tying the record that had been established by Wee Willie Keeler in 1897. This sent the press into overdrive and would eclipse any attention given to Ted over the next three weeks or so—except for July 8, when the elite players from the American and National Leagues gathered in Detroit for the annual All-Star Game. Ted, who was batting .405, took the train out from Boston along with his teammates Doerr, Foxx, Cronin, and Dominic DiMaggio—all of whom had also been selected to play in what was only the major leagues’ ninth midsummer showcase. The game was bigger then, with a far more intense feel and rivalry than today’s languid exhibitions have.

Williams loved the All-Star Game, and that year’s venue, Briggs Stadium, was his favorite park to hit in. He’d bought a new 8mm movie camera for the occasion and used it to pan across the crowd of 54,674—and to film some of the ballplayers, too, including Dominic’s older brother Joe. “I want to study his style,” Ted told the writers, giving the Yankee Clipper his due at the height of his streak. “DiMaggio is the greatest hitter I ever saw and probably will see during my career.… I have to tie into a pitch to get power. DiMaggio is stronger. He hits the
ball hard in any direction. And then there’s the matter of temperament. I’ve been down on myself, but I never heard of Joe getting unsettled.”
²¹

In the starting lineup, Williams was to bat cleanup behind DiMaggio. In the fourth inning, Ted laced a line drive to right field, which Bob Elliott of the Pittsburgh Pirates misjudged, and the ball went sailing over his head for a double, driving in a run that gave the American League an early lead. But by the ninth inning, the Nationals were ahead 5–3, thanks to Pirates shortstop Arky Vaughan belting successive two-run homers, first in the seventh and then in the eighth.

Frankie Hayes of the Athletics opened the last of the ninth for the Americans against right-hander Claude Passeau of the Cubs by popping up to second base for the first out. Ken Keltner of the Indians followed with a smash to shortstop, which Eddie Miller, who had entered the game for Vaughan, couldn’t handle cleanly, giving Keltner time to reach first safely. The Yankees’ Joe Gordon then stroked a clean single to right, and Cecil Travis walked to load the bases for the great DiMaggio.

The crowd roared with anticipation, as Joltin’ Joe, who by then had hit in forty-eight straight games, stepped to the plate. DiMaggio fouled the first pitch off, swung and missed at the second, then hit a tailor-made double-play ball to short. Miller fielded the ball cleanly, and flipped it to Dodgers second baseman Billy Herman for the force-out, but Herman’s relay to first was wide, enabling DiMaggio to reach safely. Keltner scored.

So with the AL now trailing 5–4, Ted was up. National League manager “Deacon” Bill McKechnie of the Reds came out to the mound to talk with Passeau and summoned the catcher and infielders in as well. Famed broadcaster Red Barber gave the moment a little more of a drumroll for his national radio audience: “How do you like this for a setting? Two out. The tying run at third, the winning run at first, last half of the ninth inning, and the .400 hitter of today at the plate, Ted Williams.… I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

Rather than go to a left-hander, or walk Williams to get to the on-deck batter, Dom DiMaggio, McKechnie decided to allow Passeau to pitch to Ted, no doubt mindful of the fact that in the eighth inning the Cubs right-hander had struck Williams out. Ted had thought that called third strike was low. As the conference at the mound continued, Williams asked home plate umpire Babe Pinelli where the pitch had been. At the knees, Pinelli replied.

“Then I stood back and sort of gave myself a fight talk,” Ted told J. G. Taylor Spink of the
Sporting News
after the game. “I said, ‘Listen you big
lug. He outguessed you last time and you got caught with your bat on your shoulder for a called third strike. You were swinging late when you fouled one off, too. Let’s swing, and swing a little earlier this time, and see if we can connect.’ ”
²²

Passeau’s first pitch was high and outside. Williams fouled off the second, straight back. Then came another ball, high and tight. With the count two and one, Passeau threw a slider, letter high, and Ted was sitting on it. He swung with all his might—“no cut-down protection swing, an all-out home run swing, probably with my eyes shut,” he said later—and smashed a towering drive to right field. The only question was whether it would be fair or foul. There was a brisk wind blowing across the field from left to right, but the ball was crushed so hard the breeze couldn’t alter its path much before it struck the facing of the third tier, about twenty feet fair. The ball bounced back to right fielder Enos Slaughter, who picked it up and stuffed it in his back pocket as a souvenir.
²³

Of course, hitting a game-winning home run in such a circumstance “was the kind of thing a kid dreams about and imagines himself doing when he’s playing those little playground games we used to play in San Diego,” Ted wrote in his book. “Half way down to first, I stopped running and started leaping and jumping and clapping my hands, and I was just so happy I laughed out loud. I’ve never been so happy and I’ve never seen so many happy guys.… I had hit what remains to this day the most thrilling hit of my life.”
²⁴

After he finished skipping around the bases, Ted was mobbed at the plate by delirious teammates, including both DiMaggio brothers and starting pitcher Bob Feller of the Indians, who raced out of the dugout dressed in his street clothes. The bedlam moved to the clubhouse, where the American League manager, Del Baker of the Tigers, planted a big kiss on Ted’s left cheek, and the photographers made him do it again. The Red Sox brass—Tom Yawkey, Eddie Collins, and Joe Cronin—glad-handed their star, as did Will Harridge, the American League president. Bill McKechnie, the rival manager, also stopped by to pay homage. “Ted, you’re just not human,” he said.

The writers demanded more detail from Ted, of course. “I had a funny feeling after I struck out in the eighth that I was going to get up there at least one more time and hit one,” he said. “And when that one came up fast and about elbow high, I said to myself, ‘This is it.’

“Confidence is a great thing. You have to have it in our game and
that’s how it was with me that last trip to the plate.… There ain’t nothing like hitting a homer.… Wasn’t it a pip?”

Then Ted paused and added: “I know one thing. The happiest woman in America right now is my mother.”
²⁵

May Williams had been listening to the game on the radio and had sent Ted a telegram before the game, which he did not receive until afterward. “Congratulations on being on All Star team,” it said. “We’re pulling for American League and thinking of you, my wonderful son.” It was signed “Mother.”

Little more than an hour after his All-Star Game heroics, Ted was not out painting the town but back in his hotel room alone, writing a letter to Doris Soule. A reporter, Gerry Moore of the
Globe,
decided to take a chance and knock on the door of room 1812 of the Book Cadillac Hotel. “Come in, the door’s open,” Ted called out cheerfully.

Moore found the Kid ebullient, eager for company, and talking in staccato bursts—mostly about his mother. “Do you know the biggest kick I get out of this whole thing? I’m tickled for my mom’s sake because she was listening.” He showed Moore the telegram she had sent him, then read from a letter May had written, which he’d received just the day before. “Dear Son,” it began. She hoped he was well. She’d bought a schedule of his games but was having problems deciphering it to know where he was when. But she was pleased he was hitting so brilliantly. “San Diego is thrilled.… There have been some lovely articles about your hitting.” She added in a postscript that she was “glad you’re getting along so well with the sports writers.”

The All-Star Game served as a loud exclamation point in that summer of ’41, a season long regarded by many baseball historians as the sport’s greatest ever. There was DiMaggio, whose streak would extend for another eight games—until July 17—ending a two-month run of drama that riveted the nation, fan and nonfan alike. There was Ted, who in the second half of the season dug in to prove that his All-Star heroism was no fluke. He eagerly reclaimed the national spotlight later in the summer as DiMaggio’s acclaim receded and his own march to .400 showed no signs of abating. Lefty Grove finally won his three hundredth career game, for the Red Sox, at the same time as the leader of a new pitching generation, Bob Feller, won twenty-five games for the Cleveland Indians. And the Brooklyn Dodgers emerged as baseball’s Cinderella team, edging out the St. Louis Cardinals for the National League
pennant only to be heartbroken by Mickey Owen’s dropped third strike, which paved the way for the Yankees to win the World Series.

Baseball was a generation removed from the
Field of Dreams
era but was still bathing in its halcyon days and in the aura of Ruth, who had retired in 1935. A few concessions were starting to be made to the future, such as the beginning of night play, but expansion was more than a decade away, and this was still old-time hardball.