The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (41 page)

After Williams, still sizzling, began the second game of the doubleheader by lacing a double down the right-field line with the bases loaded, Indians player-manager Lou Boudreau implemented a serpentine scheme he’d hatched between the two games. Boudreau knew that Williams pulled the ball to the right 85 percent of the time, so the next time Ted came up there was no one on base, and Boudreau—who had rivaled Williams’s hitting in the first game with four doubles and a home run—shifted his defenders into a drastic realignment that blanketed the right side of the field. He moved his first baseman and right fielder close to the foul line. He put his second baseman forty feet back on the outfield grass, about fifteen feet from the line. Boudreau himself, normally the shortstop, went over to where the second baseman usually played, only shaded more toward first, in the hole. The third baseman moved slightly to the right of second, the center fielder shaded toward right-center, and the left fielder came in to the edge of the outfield grass, about thirty feet behind where a shortstop might normally play.

“Gee, I had to laugh when I saw it,” Ted recalled. “What the hell’s
going on?
¹⁹
In effect, they are now telling me, ‘Go ahead, hit to left field, have yourself a single. We’ll sacrifice singles to take away your doubles and home runs any day.’ They’re tickled to death if I go to left because the only thing they’re really afraid of is the long ball.”

Boudreau knew the shift would play directly to Ted’s ego and that to try and hit to left would be to disrupt the natural arc of a swing that was designed to drive a pitch in the air to right field. Sure, Ted could presumably drop a bunt to the vacated left side of the infield and reach base any time he wished, but he would not, Boudreau calculated, for he would consider it humiliating: he was a power hitter whom the fans paid to watch go for the long ball. So Boudreau felt Williams would take up the challenge and try to blast the ball through his realigned fielders. The shift could not prevent a home run, of course, but by plugging certain power alleys and gaps, it could turn what otherwise would be line-drive singles or doubles into outs.

After settling himself, Ted dug in against Indians pitcher Red Embree and promptly drilled a grounder to Boudreau. The ball probably would have gone for a hit in a normal defense, but Boudreau, in the hole between first and second, gobbled it up for the out. Williams walked his next two times up, as the Cleveland pitchers seemingly ignored their new defense and continued to work him outside.

After the game, Ted and Joe Cronin argued over how to deal with the shift.

“Ted, push the ball to left and Boudreau will have to put all those guys back where they belong,” the manager said.

“The heck I will,” Williams replied. “All my power is toward right, and I’ll jam the ball through them.”

They kept arguing, but Ted was insistent: he was a natural pull hitter and would not interfere with his swing.
²⁰

So Williams ignored the shift and kept swinging away, pulling the ball the way he always had, but Boudreau’s defense, which was soon adopted with variations by most teams in the league and used for at least the next decade, began to erode his average—not precipitously, but noticeably. His 1946 mark before the shift was .354; after the shift it was .327.

By September, as the season wound down, the shift had had its desired effect of getting under Ted’s skin, and he openly acknowledged it was hurting him. “It has cost me a lot of hits,” Ted wrote in his column for the
Globe.
“It takes time to break away from your natural habit. Hitting to the opposite field is a science. Players who have accomplished this skill
have required many long hours of practice. That’s what I’m going to have to do.”
²¹

But despite statements like that, Ted could never shake a fundamental ambivalence over how to cope with the shift. He knew he should hit to left, that it only made sense to take what his opponents were so tantalizingly offering him—if only to force them back to a conventional defense so that he could resume pulling the ball freely. But he was loath to meddle with the mechanics of his swing, to artificially alter its rhythm and flow. He was, after all, the Natural, and style was important to Williams. He liked looking good at what he did; he liked smashing the ball to right, the way a classic left-handed pull hitter should. The notion of punching singles to the opposite field was anathema to him.

Boudreau was not the first to devise a lopsided defense against Williams. Chicago White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes had tried it on July 23, 1941, but abandoned it when Ted drilled one down the left-field line. Three days later, another Indians manager, Roger Peckinpaugh, tried a variant of the shift but also dropped the idea after Ted singled and doubled. And in 1926, there is a record of the Boston Braves using a less pronounced shift against another slugging Williams of the day—the Phillies’ Cy Williams. Still, it was Boudreau’s shift that was the most effective, and variations endure to the present day.

The shift, and how Ted should cope with it, inspired a cascade of commentary in the press for the rest of 1946 and in the ensuing years, as well as lively debate among fans, hitting experts, and other observers. It had all the elements of a great story: there were good arguments on both sides for whether Williams should change his approach; and his reactions—at first blind stubbornness and an insistence that he would forge ahead and swing as he always had, but then a willingness to recalibrate and reanalyze the problem—were revealing of his character and reignited old arguments about Ted being more of an individualist than a team man. Among fans, the shift also provoked animated strategic and tactical discussions, and until they grew used to seeing it, the spectacle of watching six of the nine defensive players move over to the right side of the field produced a certain whimsical enchantment. (This feeling was certainly not dispelled when, in a game later that summer of ’46 against Boudreau’s Indians, a dwarf leaped from the Fenway box seats and ran out on the field to assume the vacant third-base position.
^*
)

There seemed considerable evidence to suggest that Ted, with his superb bat control, could hit to left if he wanted to. San Diego friends from childhood recalled that when they played on the sandlot, because the right-field fence was too short, Ted hit to left without trouble. Then there was the time he’d drilled a foul ball at hecklers in the left-field stands at Fenway Park. But Ted insisted he could not just flip a switch and begin hitting to the opposite side at will. “The story you read was: ‘Williams is too proud, he’s too stubborn, Williams isn’t trying to beat it,’ ” Ted wrote in his book. “The hell I wasn’t. I was just having a hard time hitting to left field. Every spring after that I’d experiment, shifting my feet, trying to drop balls into left field, plunking them into short center, seeing what could be done. But I was having a hard time.”
²²
Before long, the writers were prodding a cast of hitting greats—including Ruth, Cobb, Hornsby, Tris Speaker, Paul Waner, Harry Heilmann, and Al Simmons—to give Ted advice on what to do about the shift. This advice was often conflicting.

But the first meaningful guidance Williams received that summer after Boudreau unveiled his razzmatazz came from one Bert Dunne, a San Francisco advertising executive and boyhood chum of Joe Cronin’s. Dunne had gone to Notre Dame, where he served as Knute Rockne’s publicist and also compiled a .519 batting average for the baseball team. When he joined John McGraw’s New York Giants after graduation, Dunne had the temerity to tell the legendary McGraw that the older man did not know the first thing about hitting technique. Dunne soon found himself demoted to the Eastern League, where he developed a sore arm that forced him to quit the game prematurely. Nearly two decades later, he’d written a well-received instructional baseball book for preteen and young teenage boys called
Play Ball, Son!

Through his friendship with Cronin, Dunne had been hanging around the Red Sox since 1939, Williams’s rookie season. One night after a game in Detroit that year, Dunne approached Moe Berg, who was hitting .210 at the time, and told the catcher that he had certain mechanical defects in his swing. If he corrected these flaws, he could raise his average by at least forty points. Dunne argued that the mechanics of hitting—the proper stance, stride, hand position, and swing—could be taught to anyone. The erudite Berg vehemently disagreed, saying Dunne was not accounting for differences in talent and physical size. The two argued for five straight hours, and “it was a brilliant duel,” Cronin wrote in his introduction to
Play Ball, Son!

Other Red Sox players became interested in the Dunne-Berg debate,
and Cronin decided to test their ideas further by filming many of his players’ swings and batting technique. The result? “We found Bert’s theories fundamentally sound,” Cronin said. Williams, of course, spent more time analyzing clips of his swing than anyone else, and the manager concluded that this paid dividends, especially in his .406 year. “Ted believes in style, as Bert Dunne does,” Cronin added. “Ted watched the pictures, then went before the mirror in his room and swung the bat for hours on end. I am absolutely convinced that Williams added at least thirty points to his average in 1941 by his practice swings.”
²³

Dunne decided to make a movie based on his
Play Ball, Son!
book, and in May of 1946, he screened it for some of the Red Sox—including Ted, Cronin, Bobby Doerr, and Boo Ferriss—in a Philadelphia hotel room. Ted, in fact, watched the film three times and pronounced it “the greatest teaching picture ever made.”
²⁴
What intrigued Williams most was a part of the film in which Dunne had kids batting off tees that had been crudely adapted from simple toilet plungers.

Ted decided to use this as a practice tool himself. He went to a hardware store, bought three plungers, three broomsticks, and a garden hose. He sawed off the broomsticks to knee-high, waist-high, and letter-high lengths and attached each to the rubber base of the plunger after removing the wooden handle the device came with. Then he slipped a small length of hose over the top of each broom, atop which he could place a baseball.

“The beauty of the Tee was that I could move it around,” Williams wrote in a little-noticed chapter he provided for a sequel to
Play Ball, Son!
called simply
Play Ball!
, which Dunne wrote in 1947. “For instance, I wanted to hit low outside balls. I just moved the Tee to the corner of the plate and went to work. Then I moved the Tee for the low-inside ball. I did the same for the belt-ball Tee and the letter-ball Tee.”

Dunne, of course, was delighted that Williams adopted his tee method—even more so after Ted told him he’d be willing to make a film using the tee to show boys how he hit the ball. “Dunne almost hit the sky, so intense was his excitement,” wrote
New York Times
sports columnist Arthur Daley in a preface for
Play Ball!
“Here he would have the greatest hitter in baseball using the Tee and telling the boys of America: ‘Make one of these Tees yourself—and go out and practice hitting.’ ”

Ted wrote in
Play Ball!
that his decision to make the film was actually triggered by a curious encounter he’d had with an older man outside the Fenway Park clubhouse after the doubleheader of July 14, 1946, the day he’d hit three home runs in the first game and Boudreau debuted the
shift in the second. Williams was elated, thinking more of the first game and the possibility of another .400 season than of any dark implications related to the shift. As he was about to get into his car, someone said, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Williams.”

“I turned quickly because the voice had a rare charm and was quite different from some of the ‘raazzberry’ voices I had heard from the left field stands,” Ted wrote. “I said, ‘Yes, sir?’ and eyed an old gentleman. He could have been seventy, but he had such a well-preserved look that he could pass for fifty.”

The man cleared his throat and asked: “Sir, could you please tell me whether or not you are a natural hitter? I mean, were you born a great hitter or did you develop yourself into a great hitter?”

Williams looked for the needle. Maybe one of his teammates had turned this fellow loose on him as a gag. It wasn’t the kind of question he normally entertained in the parking lot after a three-homer game. “You’ve got me,” Ted finally said. “I don’t know what you mean by a natural hitter.”

“This, sir,” Williams quoted the man as replying quietly. “I understand that you are a great student of the art and science of hitting. I understand that you practice swinging before a mirror, that you seek to interpret certain definite mathematical laws, that you endeavor to harmonize the mechanical aspects of the swing until you achieve a composite of rhythm, style, power, and beauty.”

Ted said the words came at him “like Bob Feller’s fastball” and threw him off balance, but he recovered enough to answer: “I study hitting. I study stance, stride, hand action, and the rest. I practice religiously. In fact I live to hit. Of course nature has to give a man good eyesight, strength in his hands, wrists, and forearms, and a lot of other things before he can hit a ball in the major leagues.”

The man thanked him for the answer and said he admired that Williams had added hard work to the natural ability he’d been given. He said he would tell his grandson, whom he thought had natural ability as a hitter but had yet to demonstrate an adequate work ethic. Then the man said to Ted, “Sir, why don’t you tell some of your secrets to the boys of America? I am sure you would make them happy.”

“How?” said Williams.

“Make a motion picture of your hitting secrets,” said the man before smiling, bowing, and walking away.
²⁵

Dunne followed Ted for several months in 1946 and took five thousand feet of film, showing him in practice, in games, and in the clubhouse.
He cut four thousand feet from the final print and gave the outtakes to Williams and Cronin as a present. The film, now a cult classic, was called
Swing King
and released in 1947.