The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (50 page)

Johnny Pesky led off for the Red Sox in the ninth and fouled out. Raschi again pitched around Williams, walking him. A wild pitch sent Ted to second. Stephens singled sharply to center, Williams stopping at third, then Doerr tripled over DiMaggio’s head, driving in two. Zarilla popped to shallow center, forcing Doerr to hold at third, but Billy Goodman singled to make it 5–3 and keep the Red Sox alive. Tebbetts,
representing the tying run, came to bat, but popped up to Henrich at first to end the game.

The loss was devastating for Boston, a team that had run away with the 1946 pennant only to lose the seventh game of the World Series, then the playoff game of ’48, and now this de facto playoff game. The loss crystallized emerging Red Sox lore that would remain firmly entrenched until 2004: Boston was a club that for all its talent always found a way to lose in critical situations.

McCarthy’s decision to pinch-hit for Ellis Kinder in the eighth, when it was still 1–0—while defensible and certainly no Galehouse-like gaffe—was nonetheless immediately the primary topic of discussion among players, writers, and kibitzers. Kinder was beside himself in the losers’ clubhouse, openly flashing the choke sign at his manager. The way Kinder spun it to the writers, had McCarthy not lifted him at such a key moment for the untested, raw Wright, he would have pitched two more shutout innings and the Sox would have later won, 3–1. On the train ride home, Kinder burst into McCarthy’s compartment and railed at him further.

Williams and his teammates were crushed. “It was like a damn funeral train,” Ted wrote in his book. “Everybody was stunned. We had come so far, had made up so much ground.… The whole team was heartbroken. Sick. To come that close twice in a row was an awful cross to bear.”
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Individually, Ted had had one of his most stellar seasons. His 43 home runs led the league, as did his RBI total of 159. He came within a whisker of winning another Triple Crown, but after going 0–2 against Vic Raschi he lost the batting title to George Kell of the Tigers on the last day of the season, .3428 to .34275. The writers did name Williams the runaway winner of the American League’s Most Valuable Player award, his second MVP—slight balm for the 1947 calumny.

Ted’s archenemy in the press, Dave Egan of the
Record,
seized on his performance in the final two games against the Yankees to make the charge that in the ten biggest games of his life—the seven World Series games of 1946, the playoff game for the pennant against the Indians in 1948, and the last two games of the 1949 season—Ted had failed in the clutch, his big-game average just .205.

It was a deceptive artifice, of course, to cherry-pick ten games out of more than two thousand in a career and ignore the scores of other instances in which he did come through—like the time when he hit a
homer and three doubles to drive in five runs while reaching base eight out of ten times in the final two games against the Yankees in 1948 to propel Boston to the playoff game against Cleveland. Or his critical role in the Sox’s eleven-game winning streak—including three over New York—at the end of the 1949 season, which put them into first place. Williams had won four of those games himself with home runs. The Egan analysis also failed to take into account the number of times pitchers took the bat out of Ted’s hands in key situations by walking him, intentionally or otherwise.

Still, the sting and hurt of that final loss to the Yankees lingered, more difficult for Williams to accept than the ’48 playoff loss to the Indians. He gave Lou Boudreau his due for a phenomenal performance that year. But he thought the ’49 Yankees, besides getting a brilliant half season from DiMaggio, had mostly been lucky.

After a few weeks of moping, Ted, Doris, and little Bobby-Jo repaired to Minnesota, where they would again spend the winter in Princeton. Williams quickly went off with friends to the wilds of the Superior National Forest, in the northeastern tip of the state, for a month of fishing and hunting. Then it was down to Stuttgart, Arkansas, for what he considered to be the finest duck hunting in the country. (Asked to be a judge in a duck-calling contest, he marveled at the way the locals could summon mallards at will.) Ted returned to Minnesota for some ice fishing through Christmas and New Year’s, then it was time to head for Florida.

Doris and the baby took the train down while Ted drove his brand-new powder-blue four-door Cadillac. They rented a cabin in Everglades City, and Ted got in another month of fishing, this time for tarpon and snook in remote Lost Man’s River.

Williams and the Red Sox agreed on a one-year contract that made him the highest-paid player in the history of the game: a base salary of $90,000 (representing a $15,000 raise from 1949), with attendance escalators topping out at $100,000 if Boston drew 1.6 million fans to Fenway Park. Total home attendance in ’49 had been 1,596,650.

Ted was now thirty, arguably still in his prime, but acutely aware that he was starting the second half of his career. He’d already lost three years’ salary to the war, so he wanted to maximize his income on as many fronts as possible. In his first column of the upcoming season—this time writing for the
Boston Herald
—Williams noted that he was struck by the short length of the normal baseball career when he arrived
at spring training. There, he realized that only one player, Bobby Doerr, remained from the time he had first arrived in Sarasota in 1938. He authorized Fred Corcoran to aggressively seek outside income opportunities, such as endorsement deals for Quaker Oats, Ted’s Root Beer, and even Chesterfield cigarettes, though he didn’t smoke and knew it set a bad example for kids.
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He turned down a book and movie offer, but gladly accepted a two-week gig that paid him $10,000 to appear at the Boston and New York sportsmen’s shows, where he put on fly-casting exhibitions. He also decided to buy his first home—in Miami. Williams was increasingly comfortable in Florida, where there was good fishing and it was always warm.

Corcoran had also gotten Ted interested in the stock market, and he now read the
Wall Street Journal
regularly, as well as
Forbes
and
Barron’s.
Becoming conversant in market lingo, using expressions like “book value,” “dividend yield,” and “holding company,” he confined his investments to blue-chip firms such as General Electric, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Union Carbide—but would take an occasional flier if he got a good tip. He even mused about becoming a trader once he retired.

Before leaving for spring training, he decided to spend a few days bonefishing in the Keys and was thrilled by the experience. “Brother, that’s the biggest fishing kick I ever got,” he told a
Time
reporter—one of five the magazine had dispatched to hang out with Williams during spring training and report an April cover story on him. “One of those ten-pound babies will damn near jerk the rod out of your hand—just take off like a jet airplane. From now on, I’m a Florida bonefish man. I’m going to be down here every winter.”

Arriving in Sarasota with Doris and Bobby-Jo, Ted checked into a deluxe furnished two-bedroom apartment in Florasota Gardens, an ivory-and-yellow apartment-hotel complex covering three square blocks, which was billing itself as the city’s newest and smartest address. Ted’s apartment, for which he was paying $350 a month, looked out on a sweep of lawn, a lagoon, and native Florida pine trees.

Per usual, his first-day arrival at Payne Park was chronicled minute-by-minute by a pack of writers and photographers who generally were struck by Ted’s healthy appearance and sunny disposition. Ted said he wasn’t predicting anything; he just hoped he and everyone else on the
team would have a good year. He also said he planned to play for as long as he could. “It’s the greatest game there is and I want to stay with it just as long as I can. It’s done everything for me.”
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The
Time
team paid careful attention to Ted’s daily routine from the moment he entered the clubhouse until he left. Appearing at noon for a 2:00 p.m. game, he usually announced his arrival by whistling loudly and greeting the first teammate he saw with, “Hey, ham head” or several variations thereof, including lunkhead, mule head, mutton head, or fart head, uttered with either affection or annoyance, but generally the former.

Ted’s greetings for closer pals were usually more profane or simply an equally filthy complaint about something mundane—like the wind blowing in that day or his inability to find one of his extra pairs of spikes. Accustomed to such minitirades, his teammates would let him blow off steam, then one, often Birdie Tebbetts, would sing out, “Hey, that’s telling ’em, good Kid. Yes, sir, good Kid.”

As Williams arrived at his open locker, his distinctive number 9 road-gray uniform was hung neatly near various personal accoutrements, such as a lanolin preparation for his curly hair and some suntan lotion. Johnny Orlando, always carefully attuned to Ted’s wants, would check in to see if he needed anything else.

Dressing for the game, Williams first tended to one of his three pairs of spiked shoes, making sure the laces were tied just so. The first pair was old and soft for pregame warm-ups. The second and third were harder and stiffer for better ankle support during games. Then he would fuss for quite a while putting on his uniform pants, adjusting the elastic to hold the pants far down on his shin. Some critics thought Williams wore his pants far lower than most players as a way to draw even more attention to himself, but his friends knew that the real reason was to make his skinny, pipestem legs look a bit more substantial.

When Ted stepped into the batter’s box,
Time
took detailed notes on his every move: he planted his left toe a few inches behind home plate, then dug in the spikes of his left heel, but more gingerly than some of the other hitters, who often pawed big holes in the dirt. Then he placed his right foot a yard ahead of the left, anchoring it less solidly. He extended his bat across the plate, assuring himself he had proper coverage. He wiggled his left hip back and forth, setting himself more firmly. His right leg flexed and unflexed. His long hands rotated in opposite directions on the handle of the bat until he was ready. When he swung, his left heel came out of its hole slightly while his right toe turned toward right field as he
followed through on his swing. Unlike most hitters, he did not stride into a pitch. His power was in his wrists, hands, and forearms.

Ted told the reporters he was in good shape. “I always am, but I’ve never felt better than this year. I’m really relaxed.” Asked about his ambition and what kept him going, Ted turned earnest: “That’s easy. I want to be as good a hitter as ever came along.” Then he paused and added: “And I want to be the best ballplayer Joe McCarthy ever managed.” Which, of course, included the great DiMaggio. When assessing his legacy, Williams almost always talked in terms of wanting to be regarded as the best hitter, not the best all-around player, which would have to include fielding. But he didn’t make the distinction in this case. McCarthy, however, told one of the
Time
writers that Ted was paying much more attention to his fielding and had generally matured as a player.

Not that he was going to crash into a wall chasing a fly or anything. “What’s the sense of it?” Ted asked. “You hit the wall and maybe you don’t get hurt, but you’re out of position to play the ball and the guy takes the extra base.… If you get hurt bad, you’re out for a long time and how the hell does that help your ball club?”

On March 19, returning to Sarasota from Miami on a chartered DC-4 with the rest of his teammates, Ted was in fine fettle. He’d hit a big home run to power the Sox to a 10–7 Grapefruit League win against the Yankees. He sang a song in falsetto, bowed in good humor after he was roundly jeered, then went up to the cockpit and flew the plane for a while. He returned to his seat just before landing and announced: “Don’t be scared, you guys. I’m going to let the regular driver take it in.” A Boston writer who’d had his scraps with Ted watched all this and said quietly to a nearby
Time
reporter, “You know, I’m falling in love with that character. He’s never been so nice. He can be a terrific guy and he’s always terrific copy, nice or not. I hope the stiff hits .494.”
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The Red Sox had a horrific opening day on April 18. Playing New York at Fenway Park, Boston jumped out to a 9–0 lead, only to have the Yankees storm back and win the game, 15–10. “The Red Sox went from the heights of sublimity to the lowest depths of ridicule,” as Jack Malaney put it in the
Boston Post.
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Any writers who might have been prone to rip the team after this woeful exhibition were given more reason to seethe when, upon assembling outside the clubhouse to interview the players after the game, they were told there was a new policy in effect: the press was now banned before games and for an hour afterward.

The catalysts for barring the writers were Ted and Dom DiMaggio, but it was Williams who controlled the locker room and enforced the ban—with great relish. Usually dressed only in a towel, he would stand by the clubhouse door, counting the seconds until the hour was up, then say, “Okay, now all you bastards can come in.” By then, all the other players were typically gone—it would be just Ted and the clubhouse boys.

The writers complained to general manager Joe Cronin, who ducked the issue, saying it was the players’ clubhouse and they could do as they pleased. Joe McCarthy went along. Ted had long felt that the Red Sox didn’t do enough to insulate him from the writers and the stress they created by poking, prodding, and trolling for trouble, so he’d finally taken matters into his own hands. He even posted a sign by his locker that said,
NO WRITERS
. (Harold Kaese wondered if Williams, the new
Herald
columnist, would be restricted from entering the clubhouse along with the other newspapermen.) Of course, the eight Boston papers (the
Transcript
by then had folded) could have banded together and boycotted coverage of the team, but who wanted to risk losing the readers who bought copies specifically to follow the Red Sox? Eventually the postgame ban was dropped to thirty minutes for the remainder of the 1950 season and to fifteen minutes for years after that.
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