The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (32 page)

A reporter asked Ted if he thought he had a chance at being elected MVP. “Gee,” he replied with a wide smile, “do you think there’s any chance? Even if I don’t, I’ll be satisfied with that thrill out there today. I wasn’t saying much about it, but I never wanted anything more in my life.”
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Outside, at least two thousand Philadelphians waited near the Red Sox clubhouse and spilled out onto 21st Street to honor the visiting hero.
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Ted was pinned against a wall and happily signed hundreds of autographs until police finally shoved him into a cab, which drove him to the train station.

Besides Ted’s illustrious .406 batting average, he led the league in home runs (37), runs scored (135), walks (147), on-base percentage (.553), and slugging percentage (.735). His 120 RBIs were five short of DiMaggio’s leading 125, so that narrowly cost him the Triple Crown.

His average had been remarkably consistent, falling below .400 only from April 30 to May 24 and from July 11 to July 24. Ted had a substantially higher average at home, where he hit .428, than on the road (.380). Williams liked Fenway for its good green background, its lack of shadows, and the short left-field wall, which enabled him to wait longer on a pitch and still hit it. “I always said to myself: ‘If you swing a little late it won’t be the worst thing in the world, because there’s that short fence, the defense isn’t there, and slices or balls hit late can still go out,’ ” Ted wrote in his book.
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Williams is the only .400 hitter, at least in the modern era, not to get the benefit of the sacrifice fly rule, which does not charge a batter with a time at bat if he hits a fly ball that scores a runner from third base. The rule was on the books from 1908 until 1931, on again in 1939, and off from 1940 to 1954. While no one at the time kept track of the number of sacrifice flies Williams hit in 1941, statisticians would determine years later that he hit six. So if those six at bats had been deducted from his total, he would have had an average of .411.

Another hurdle that Ted had to overcome was his lack of speed. Only five of his 185 hits were infield hits, or so-called leg hits.

But fueling Williams’s road to .406, on the other hand, were his 147 walks—far more than any of his twentieth-century predecessors in the .400 club—which enabled him to be charged with many fewer times at bat. With just 456 official plate appearances, Williams was the only .400 hitter in the modern era to have fewer than 500 at bats and the only one to have fewer than 200 hits.

Another factor was his average relative to that of the rest of the league. When Bill Terry—the last .400 hitter before Williams—posted his .401 mark in 1930, the league batting average was .303, meaning that Terry’s average was 32 percent higher than the norm. When Ted hit .406, the league average was down to .266, meaning that Williams hit 53 percent higher—a much greater feat than Terry’s in a far more competitive era.
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The late Stephen Jay Gould—renowned Harvard University evolutionary biologist, science historian, baseball statistics maven, and ardent Yankees fan—crunched Williams’s 1941 numbers against those of the previous .400 hitters and concluded that Ted’s feat was “the greatest achievement in twentieth-century hitting… a beacon in the history of excellence, a lesson to all who value the best in human possibility.”
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Several days later, Ted and Jimmie Foxx flew to San Diego to join a team of major leaguers and Pacific Coast League players on a brief barnstorming tour through Southern California.
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Several thousand people and a brass band turned out at Lindbergh Field on October 3 to greet their hometown hero. As a city official launched into a windy speech, Ted shifted his feet nervously, scanned the crowd for familiar faces, and spotted Rod Luscomb, his mentor at the University Heights playground.

“Hi, Rod!” Ted yelled as the city official droned on. “Come the hell up here!”
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Williams walked over to the rope line and escorted Luscomb up to the platform.

Ted was embarrassed at all the fuss and said only a few words. Foxx assured the crowd that “you will find that Ted still wears the same size hat despite his success. The only thing that’s bigger is the bat that he waves in front of opposing pitchers.”
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Then there was a parade to the civic center downtown, followed by another program at Williams’s old playground in University Heights.

That night there was a reception at Ted’s house, and Luscomb wanted to talk hitting with his former pupil. Had he changed his swing at all?

“Wait a minute, I’ll get a bat and show you,” replied Ted eagerly. “Hey, Ma, got a bat for me?” May Williams could come up with nothing. “A helluva house,” Ted said. “Haven’t even got a bat here.” So Ted proceeded to shadow-hit, taking full imaginary cuts to demonstrate how his swing had evolved, the throw rug gathering under his feet as he swung and as May’s guests watched, transfixed.

Before the first game the following day at Lane Field, Ted put on a show in batting practice, smashing four over the right-field fence onto Pacific Highway. Ted and Foxx each hit homers for their team, the San Diego All-Stars, who were managed by Cedric Durst, Williams’s old teammate from the Padres.

On November 11, Joe DiMaggio was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player. The sportswriters had voted, and DiMaggio garnered 291 points compared to Ted’s 254. Colonel Egan called the
decision a “crying sin and shame,” and a
Sporting News
fan poll concluded, by a margin of 55 to 26, that the award should have gone to Williams.

But Ted didn’t squawk. He acknowledged that the streak was a singular accomplishment—and besides, the Yankees had won the World Series. In any event, he was keeping his head down in Minnesota, back for another winter of hunting and romance. The activities took place in that order, if Doris Soule’s plaintive poem of November 28, commemorating the first anniversary of their meeting, was any indication:

Nine days later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and shortly thereafter, the United States declared war against Japan. Three days after that, the United States declared war upon Germany and Italy. World War II was on. Doris suddenly had a new worry about her man, and Ted geared up for a vastly different 1942.

O
n the morning of Pearl Harbor, Ted had been out hunting ducks. When he returned to his room at the Gagen Hotel in Princeton, Minnesota, he heard the news on the radio.

“Frankly, none of this war talk had meant a damn to me up to then,” Williams later wrote.
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“I had read where some admiral had said if the Japanese got too frisky we could take them in six months, so I’d pretty much dismissed them as a threat. Hitler had been giving Europe fits, and things were looking bad all over, but it hadn’t sunk in on me yet. All I was interested in was playing ball, hitting the baseball, being able to hunt, making some money.”

In other words, he was self-absorbed. He certainly didn’t react to Pearl Harbor the way Bob Feller did, which was to enlist in the Navy two days later.

With the notable exception of Hank Greenberg, few pro ballplayers had been called up in 1941, when the US role in the war was confined to financial and logistical support of Great Britain and the Allies under the Lend-Lease program. Greenberg had been drafted into the Army in May and released two days before Pearl Harbor. After the bombing, he signed back up and would serve until mid-1945.

But Feller and Greenberg were baseball anomalies. Among major leaguers, there was no mass rush to enlist following Pearl Harbor, especially after President Roosevelt told Commissioner Landis that baseball should carry on with its schedule for the sake of the nation’s morale and sense of normalcy.

Williams thus felt he had been granted at least some latitude to savor the grandeur of his luminous 1941 season.

“All right,” he told the writer Cleveland Amory in a piece for the
Saturday Evening Post,
“so I think I’m one helluva hitter. Well, all I’m asking is, suppose I stop thinking it, then who do you suggest is going to?”

Amory, fresh out of Harvard and five years away from publishing his seminal satire,
The Proper Bostonians,
was charmed and disarmed by Ted as he watched him prance around the room where they met, a suite at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, swinging a wet towel as he spoke. At one point, Williams stopped, gazed down at the hotel guests gathered by the swimming pool, and said, “How would you like to be really rich?”

Amory was struck by Ted’s naked ambition, his rebelliousness, his disdain for mediocrity, and by what Bob Feller told him when the writer called to ask how good Williams really was: “The pitcher never lived who could throw it by him.”

Among the many stories Ted told Amory, one stood out as particularly delightful. A few years earlier, following the dedication of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and apparently soon after the contretemps over his throwaway line about wanting to be a fireman, Ted had secretly visited the new shrine to baseball.

“As soon as he got the chance, the Kid stole away all by himself and wandered into the little building where he longs someday to be remembered,” Amory wrote. “For a long time he stood in awe among the various busts, plaques, records and bats. He read every line. After he had gone out he thought no one had seen him. He was even sure of it. But a few days later, back in Boston, he received a letter at his hotel. On the head of the envelope was a name and after it the words, ‘Chairman, Cooperstown Committee, Cooperstown, N.Y.’ The Kid could not believe it—it was sooner than even he had expected. He tore it open.” But a town father was merely writing to inform Ted that he had been named Cooperstown’s honorary fire chief.

In 1941, Williams’s draft board in Minneapolis had classified him 3A because he was the sole supporter of his mother. Though May and Sam Williams would not be officially divorced until May 14, 1942, they had been separated since April of 1939, when Sam had run off with Minnie Dickson and settled in the San Francisco area. Ted’s father had not seen fit to send May any money since then, and Danny Williams was of no help to his mother. Moreover, Danny was preparing to enlist, so the responsibility for May’s support—the Salvation Army paid her little or nothing, and she was in poor health—had fallen totally on Ted. He’d
been giving her money since he first joined the Red Sox and often had the team send her his payroll checks directly.

In November of 1941, Ted’s draft board had asked him to have his mother submit affidavits attesting to her financial and medical condition. This apparently prompted May to conclude that Ted either would be or had already been reclassified 1A: eligible for induction. When a San Diego paper quoted her as saying that Ted had, in fact, been called up, a spokesman for Hennepin County Draft Board 6, in Minneapolis, denied the report, saying Ted was still 3A.

But Pearl Harbor changed the military and political calculus for the Hennepin County board and hundreds of others across the country. About four weeks later, after Pearl Harbor, Ted was notified that he was 1A. He was ordered to report for a physical in Minneapolis on January 8.

In his initial public comments about his reclassification, Williams was chipper and seemingly enthused about going off to war, cracking that it would be fun to serve with Hank Greenberg. “If they can’t put me in Hank’s company, I hope they put me in Company B,” said Ted. “You know old Company B: ‘B there when they go and B there when they come back.’ ”
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But that quote was just for public consumption. Privately, Ted was miffed, and he couldn’t understand why his draft status had been changed. He plainly was the sole supporter of his mother and could easily document that. She depended on him, Pearl Harbor or no Pearl Harbor, so on the same day that he told the writers he hoped he could be in Company B, Williams consulted a lawyer.

The lawyer, Wendell Rogers, was a Selective Service adviser appointed by the governor of Minnesota. Rogers was supposed to serve as an honest broker between draftees and the government regarding the circumstances of individual cases. Williams asked Rogers if the draft laws had changed as a result of Pearl Harbor. Rogers said he didn’t think so. They discussed his situation, and Rogers asked Ted if he wanted him to appeal the 1A classification to a state appeals board. Williams said yes.

On January 8, Ted appeared before his draft board and passed an initial Army physical as a scrum of reporters and photographers recorded the event. The
Record
of the ninth ran a front-page picture of Ted getting his eyes examined. “I guess they need more men,” a more subdued Williams remarked.

Within a week, the Red Sox announced they had received written word from Ted that he would have his final Army physical at Fort Snelling
in Saint Paul on January 25 and probably be inducted into the service soon after that. Ted added that it was doubtful he’d be able to make the January 28 dinner given by the Boston baseball writers, who had voted to give him their MVP award for 1941.

So as far as the public and the Red Sox knew, Williams was bound for the Army. His appeal effort was a secret. That changed on January 23, two days before the final physical at Fort Snelling was to have taken place, when local draft board spokesman William Price announced that Williams’s case had been successfully appealed and his induction postponed indefinitely. Price said a board agent had asked the state appeals panel to consider whether May Williams would be left without support if Ted was drafted. “Williams did not appeal the case himself,” said Price, charitably.
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The press made little of Price’s announcement, treating it as a pro forma exercise by Williams that had little chance of success, and despite the hyperpatriotic milieu, refrained at this stage from any suggestion that Ted was a slacker. Then on January 28, Williams called Eddie Collins to let the Red Sox know that the state appeals board had turned him down, voting 5–0 to keep his 1A classification intact.
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The reasons for this reversal would soon be made clear, but neither the draft officials nor the Red Sox made the decision public. As far as the fans knew, Ted was still 3A.

Ted went back to confer with Wendell Rogers to see if he was at the end of the line or whether any other options remained. Rogers introduced Williams to John Fagre, another Selective Service lawyer. Like Rogers, Fagre concluded that Ted deserved to be 3A, so they went to their boss, Minnesota Selective Service director Colonel J. E. Nelson, to discuss the case.

After the meeting, as Williams recounted it later, Rogers and Fagre told him they were informed by Nelson that “ordinarily this would be a 3A case, but this case is an exception.”
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When asked why, Nelson didn’t explain. The colonel did say that Williams had a final recourse, which would be to appeal his case to Washington, where it would be heard by a national Selective Service board that reported to the president. Nelson would authorize this step if Williams could convince the appeals agent in Minnesota, Herbert Estrem, of the merits of his case, and if Estrem would then agree to file the appeal on his behalf. When Estrem looked into May Williams’s situation, he learned that she was officially considered disabled, that she’d undergone a recent operation (paid for by Ted)
and needed more medical attention, and furthermore, that Ted had invested in annuities for his mother and paid to have her house remodeled. Correspondence with relevant authorities convinced him she had no means of support besides Ted.

Estrem concluded that the local board would not have changed Ted’s 3A classification if he had been earning an average salary. He thought officials incorrectly assumed that because he was well paid as a star baseball player he had enough money saved to take care of his mother and thus could be shifted to 1A. “Yet I discovered that like many other youths of his age, Williams has spent much of his money, and taxes had taken [a] considerable [amount of it], along with the support he gave his mother,” Estrem would tell reporters later. “The result was he actually had very little money, certainly not enough to continue support for his mother were he called into the Army as a private.”

Estrem had also taken note of President Roosevelt’s decision to allow baseball to continue during the war and concluded that “not only Williams but many others were in a ticklish situation and… some definite ruling had to be forthcoming from Washington.… I decided to appeal to the President, still believing Williams should be in class 3A, and sent my certification that unusual hardship would take place for his mother were he not deferred.”

Although Estrem filed the appeal, the law required that Williams not only had to approve it but also officially request it. When the two discussed taking the case to Washington, Estrem said that Ted was initially reluctant, apparently wary of bad press. “I had to ask him and he replied, ‘I don’t know as I would appeal. If I get called, I’ll report for duty,’ ” Estrem said. But ultimately, Ted approved.
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The presidential appeal was filed February 1—again in secrecy. Ted did not tell the Red Sox, who still had not announced that he’d been turned down by the state board.

Reporters already had the Kid virtually in boot camp. The
Sporting News
of January 29 ran a cartoon of Williams in uniform firing a rifle with the caption: “If Uncle Sam gives Ted a uniform, th’ guy’ll certainly be dressed to kill!” The
Globe
’s Hy Hurwitz, who had just enlisted in the Marine Corps (a photograph of him wearing his uniform had been published in the paper), assumed in his notes column of February 3 that Ted would be inducted any day because he “hasn’t a chance of being deferred.”

Yet as the days rolled by, the writers got restless and sensed something was happening on the Williams front. By the seventh, the Red Sox had
mailed out contracts to all its players for the 1942 season, including Ted.
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“This should not be a tremendous problem to solve,” Dave Egan wrote. “He is just a number that was drawn out of a barrel in Washington, and he should be treated exactly like every other number.”
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But the general mood of the nonsports press was less egalitarian. The
Globe
held up to front-page ridicule local men who resisted joining up, and the paper was delighted to note that one of its columnists, Dorothy Thompson, had punched out a woman who had shouted “Heil Hitler” on the dance floor at a nightclub in New York. On February 26, the
Globe
did a piece about the sons of National Hockey League owners who were off to war.
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Meanwhile, Ted had been lying low in Minnesota. When his contract arrived, he couldn’t believe the figure: $30,000—more than a 60 percent raise over the previous year. “The end of the rainbow,” he called it later, and he put the document in his wardrobe trunk for safekeeping.
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Ted’s resolve to fight his reclassification and play the 1942 season was hardening. His 3A was legitimate. The law was the law. Egan had it right: he shouldn’t be singled out as Ted Williams; he should be treated just like any other guy. So the morning of February 27, Ted called Eddie Collins to accept the terms of his new contract.

Then that afternoon, the news finally arrived from Washington, via Minnesota: Ted was officially 3A again. National Selective Service System director Lewis B. Hershey informed the Hennepin County Draft Board in Minneapolis that President Roosevelt’s advisory panel had reversed the local board’s induction notice and concluded that Williams’s case for a deferment based on being the sole supporter of his mother was legitimate.