The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (52 page)

In the midst of this streak, Williams went up to Maine on a five-day fishing trip. This outing took place during the five-to six-week time frame within which Ted had estimated he would return to playing, so the specter of him fishing leisurely in the wilds of Maine rubbed some the wrong way. Colonel Egan, for one, let him have it: “T. Wms. Esq., who usually is considered part Ruth and part Shakespeare, has chosen the high point of the baseball season to become Izaak Walton and to throw all his energies into bagging a five-pound bass.”
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He went on to write his column from the point of view of a bass terrified at the prospect of being stalked by Ted.
HOW THE FISH FEEL AS TED DESERTS SOX
, the headline read. Others, including Harold Kaese, wondered if Williams’s teammates were irked by his fishing getaway. If he couldn’t play, could he not at least come to the ballpark and cheer his team on?

In fact, Williams was ambivalent about playing again. When he took his cast off, he couldn’t extend his left arm to within four inches of his right. He still had considerable pain, and wasn’t sure if he would help or hurt the team. Many argued that the club’s recent winning streak was evidence enough that the Red Sox were better off without Ted.
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But Steve O’Neill wanted Williams in the lineup and argued he should test the elbow now rather than wonder all winter what he could have contributed. So Ted was eased back, first with a pinch-hitting appearance against the Yankees at Fenway on September 7. When he bounded out of the dugout in the fifth inning and strode to the plate, making his first appearance in more than eight weeks, the crowd of 29,897 erupted. “No one ever received a greater ovation,” wrote Alex MacLean in the
Record.
“No appearance was ever more dramatic.”
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There were men on second and third and one out. Yogi Berra walked to the mound and looked into the dugout for instructions as the cheers continued to thunder down from the grandstand and the bleachers beyond. Casey Stengel, predictably, ordered an intentional walk. Ted was lifted for a pinch runner, then he showered and left the park before the writers could get to him. The Sox went on to win, 10–8, and were now within one and a half games of the Yankees and the Tigers, who were tied for first.
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O’Neill held Williams out for another week before pinch-hitting him again on September 14 against the Browns in Saint Louis. Ted doubled in a 6–3 loss. He returned as a starter the following day. It was hot and
humid at Sportsman’s Park, so Williams was able to get his elbow good and loose. He hit a long home run over the fence in right and out onto Grand Avenue, as well as three singles, to lead the Sox to a 12–9 win.

But Ted’s barrage of hits amounted to false hope. His elbow still hurt, his timing was off, and he wasn’t in game shape. He could manage only two hits in his next seventeen times to the plate. “At times he seems afraid to swing,” remarked Hank Greenberg after watching the Sox play the Indians at Cleveland.
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By the nineteenth, Boston went back within a game and a half of the top, but then they crashed, losing four in a row in Cleveland and New York despite two homers by Ted in the second Yankees game. They finished third, four games behind the Yankees.

In their postmortems of the season, the press noted that the team had gotten close without Williams and sunk when he returned—to be precise, Boston had been 44–17 without Ted and 8–8 after he came back. Some players were quoted anonymously as saying they “could have won it without Ted” and that he had only created tension when he returned. Such conflict was fuel for the hot-stove season, of course, and soon there were renewed rumors that the Kid might be traded, even though, despite missing sixty-seven games, he’d still hit .317, with 28 homers and 97 RBIs.

Williams retreated to Florida for a winter of bonefishing in the flats of the Florida Keys. He would pole the boat four or five miles each day, stretching his elbow and building it up again in the process.

“In the spring, I began to feel a little strength coming back,” he said.
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But it was still sore and stiff. As a result, Williams, now thirty-two, announced that he would set his own schedule in spring training and play a limited number of Grapefruit League games. That struck Steve O’Neill, who was anxious to put his own stamp on the team in his first full season, as a direct challenge to his authority, and he decided to publicly face Ted down on the issue, declaring that the star would play whenever he, O’Neill, said so. Williams, grumbling all the while, capitulated and played a full exhibition schedule.

O’Neill, fifty-nine, was no naïf. Before being named to succeed Joe McCarthy, he had been a manager for nine years—with the Indians from 1935 to 1937 and the Tigers from 1943 to 1948, compiling an overall record of 708–582. He’d won a World Series with the wartime Tigers in 1945. But O’Neill would turn out to be Williams’s least favorite manager, and they sparred throughout spring training over his playing time. When Ted asked to be let out of a March 18 game in Tampa against the Reds
because of a cold, O’Neill refused, whereupon Williams went into his diva routine—pouting, loafing, and generally going through the motions, earning boos and jeers from the crowd as a result. He responded by spitting at the fans on three different occasions, the last time as he crossed home plate after belting a homer. Assessing Ted’s new nadir, John Gillooly of the
Record
gave him a new name: the Splendid Spitter.
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The Red Sox started slowly, per usual, and Williams slower still. On May 20, Ted was hitting only .226, prompting alarmist whispering from the press box and elsewhere that he was done. Naturally, that kind of talk was just the motivational tonic he needed to go off on one of his tears. In the last ten games of May, Williams went 26–53, including 4 homers and 22 RBIs, to raise his average to .321. The Sox won ten in a row and by mid-July were in first place. Ted was hitting to all fields, fielding well, and hustling—even scoring from second on a bunt in a game against New York. Boston stayed competitive through August, but collapsed again in September as the Yankees surged to another pennant. Boston finished third, eleven games out, and Williams slumped at the end to post what for him were subpar final numbers: a .318 average, with 30 home runs and 126 RBIs. The punctuation mark came in his final at bat of the ’51 season, when his two-out pop-up in the ninth gave Yankees pitcher Allie Reynolds his second no-hitter of the season.

For the Red Sox, the 1951 season marked the end of what many prognosticators, starting in 1946, had thought would be a dynasty in the making. Key pitching injuries had derailed the 1947 season, but pennants were lost on the final days of 1948 and 1949, while the ’50 and ’51 teams contended into September and could have won. Now the nucleus was aging, with Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Pesky, Stephens, Doerr, and Kinder all in their thirties.
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Doerr, bothered by a chronic bad back, announced his retirement following the ’51 season, and DiMaggio followed in early 1953. The team wouldn’t be a pennant contender for the rest of the ’50s, a decade in which Williams was virtually the only reason to come to the ballpark. These would be years in which Ted, lacking even the semblance of a supporting cast, no longer bothered to eschew the role of individualist, the role that his critics had long cast him in.

O
n December 11, 1951, Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement in New York.

The fabled Yankee Clipper, who had just turned thirty-seven, said his decision was prompted by advancing years, a spate of physical ailments, and the simple realization that as a player, “I no longer have it.”

Addressing a gaggle of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameras at the Yankees offices in Manhattan’s Squibb Tower, Joe said that “when baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game. And so I’ve played my last game of ball.”

Responding to questions, he said his greatest thrills had been the fifty-six-game hitting streak of 1941 and his smashing return to baseball in Boston that summer of 1949, when he’d missed the first sixty-five games of the season because of a heel injury. Asked who he considered to be the greatest of present-day hitters, Joe replied: “Ted Williams. He is by far the greatest natural hitter I ever saw.”
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After some more questions, the large room suddenly went dark after fuses blew under the strain of all the cables and wires powering the newsreel and radio feeds. When the lights came back on after several minutes, Joe was gone.

The heir to Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio had personified a certain graceful nobility as well as the Yankees aura of success and invincibility during his relatively short career, which spanned 1936 to 1951, with three years out for World War II. In Joe’s thirteen seasons of supple but sparkling defensive play and prodigious clutch hitting, the Yankees won an astonishing ten pennants and nine World Series, a record that served only to put a sheen on his skills and reputation and define him as a
winner. DiMaggio came to transcend baseball as a cultural icon: the Hemingway hero, the Joltin’ Joe celebrated in Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, the megawatt star who married his equal in Marilyn Monroe. In his latter days, he assumed less dignified roles as the omnipresent Mr. Coffee TV pitchman and, finally and less visibly, the rapacious memorabilia hawker obsessed with making money.

DiMaggio’s acknowledgment of Williams at his farewell press conference was fitting, since the two were by far the dominant players of their era—baseball’s golden age—and came to be joined at the hip in fan discourse. During their careers and into their retirements, there were endless debates about who the better player was and who was most valuable to his team, and both men remained rivals for the rest of their lives. For Ted, the rivalry was friendly. For Joe, it was fierce.

The two were opposites in many respects.

DiMaggio was shy, backward, and hardly spoke at all. Traveling in a car across the country in 1936 to his first spring training as a Yankee with fellow San Franciscans Tony Lazzeri and Frankie Crosetti, Joe never uttered a word until he was asked if he would like to share the driving, whereupon he said he didn’t drive.

Williams, on the other hand, was a chatterbox, with a boisterous, voluble personality and a curious mind. Joe, whose teammates called him the Sphinx, was stolid. Where Ted was explosive and colorful, Joe made it a point to conceal his emotions.

Ted came from a troubled home; Joe a strong one.

Joe always dressed immaculately, usually in a tailored suit and sporting a fresh manicure. As Roy Blount Jr. once wrote, when they saw Joe in the flesh, people would always say to him, “You look good, Joe.” And when the Clipper was out of earshot, the people would say to themselves, “Don’t he look good?”
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But the Kid was a rumpled, unmade bed who almost always wore a casual, open-collared shirt.

“DiMaggio was regal,” wrote Tom Boswell of the
Washington Post.
“But Williams was real. Joe D met the world like an icy myth of a starched man and liked it that way. Ted wore his rough edges and his opinions on his sleeve.”
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When Joe returned to Yankee Stadium after he retired, he would demand an appearance fee and insisted on being introduced last, after Mantle and other stars.
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Williams never made any such demands, and he stayed involved in the game far more than DiMaggio did. Joe didn’t have any modern-day favorites, the way Ted did in Tony Gwynn and Nomar
Garciaparra—or any baseball causes, such as trying to get Dom DiMaggio and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson into the Hall of Fame.

Ted often argued with the fans, whereas Joe did what he could to cultivate their goodwill. Joe knew how to tip his hat deftly, just enough to acknowledge the crowd but not enough to annoy the other team. Ted, of course, did not tip his hat at all.

Both were proud. When photographers wanted a joint picture, they’d have to get both of them to meet in neutral ground, behind the backstop. Neither would go to the other’s dugout.

Ted enjoyed being Ted more than Joe enjoyed being Joe, and Williams had a more satisfying post-baseball life.

Ted never demanded sycophants and had a healthy distrust of people who sucked up to him. Joe could cut you off if you didn’t call him Clipper and insisted that everything be done for him. He was surrounded by coat holders and fixers; he expected freebies or others to pay his tab. Ted always insisted on picking up his own check and paying for others.

Joe smoked incessantly—even in the dugout. Ted never smoked. Joe loved nightclubs, Ted loved the outdoors.

Ted had a significantly longer career—seventeen full years and two partial seasons, which were interrupted by the Korean War. Since Williams aspired to be the world’s greatest hitter and was largely an indifferent fielder, DiMaggio, who was perhaps peerless in the outfield, certainly must be considered the better all-around player. But Williams was clearly the superior batter, statistically.

Ted was better in average, homers, and RBIs as well as on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Ted won six batting titles to Joe’s two, four home-run titles to Joe’s two, four RBI titles to Joe’s two, and six runs-scored titles to Joe’s one. Ted won two Triple Crowns, Joe none. Interestingly, though DiMaggio is generally thought to have been faster than Williams and a better base runner, Joe only had thirty career stolen bases compared to twenty-four for Ted, whose six runs-scored titles suggest he was at least not a liability on the base paths. DiMaggio was harder to strike out. He had only 369 strikeouts in 6,821 career at bats compared to Ted’s 709 in 7,706: Joe struck out just 5 percent of the time compared to Ted’s 9 percent.

Ted hit from the left, Joe from the right. Joe was still at the plate. Ted was jittery and moved his hips from side to side.

Ever the disciplined hitter, Ted took far more walks than Joe, who was willing to swing at bad pitches to drive in a runner. That was a key
difference in their hitting philosophies, and even some of Ted’s teammates gave the edge to DiMaggio on this issue.

Eddie Pellagrini, a Red Sox utility infielder in 1946 and 1947, recalled that when he was stationed in Hawaii during World War II, playing ball with other major leaguers, the Williams-DiMaggio debate was a hot topic among Red Sox and Yankees players: “All the Red Sox guys would say, ‘Aw, shit, Williams is the better hitter.’ I’d say, ‘Williams might be a better hitter for average, but let me ask you a question. Who would you rather have up there with the winning run on third, Williams or DiMaggio?’ This was in forty-five or so. Ted had hit his .406. I said, ‘Joe would hit that ball when it was way outside. Williams would take the walk.’ I met DiMaggio at some Old-Timers’ Game years later.… I said, ‘With runners on base, you’d hit a ball that far outside.’ You know what he said? ‘Farther than that.’ He wanted to hit the winning run in. Even on a bad ball.”
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But Johnny Pesky, Ted’s longtime friend and teammate, dissented, saying simply that Williams was the better hitter and DiMaggio the better all-around player. “That’s the way we always settled it. I’ve been calling Ted the greatest hitter that ever lived for the last fifty years.”
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New York writers were given to fawning, over-the-top depictions of Joe. “He’s an artist in the exact sense of the word, a Cezanne with a finger mitt, a Van Gogh with a Louisville slugger,” gushed Joe Williams of the
New York World-Telegram
in 1948.
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And while Joe was protected by the press to conserve his standing as a hero, Williams was not. “The New York writers both respected [Joe] and feared that he would cut them off,” wrote David Halberstam in
Summer of ’49.
“They generously described his aloofness, born of uncertainty and suspicion, as elegance.… No such protection was offered Williams.”
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It was thanks in part to his good press and strong relationships with the writers that Joe won three MVPs to Ted’s two. Despite Ted’s .406, the 1941 vote in favor of DiMaggio was defensible because of Joe’s streak and because the Yankees won the pennant, but the narrow 1947 tally for DiMaggio, in the face of Williams’s overwhelmingly superior numbers, was not.

“The New York temperament rallied around Joe,” John Updike, the writer and longtime Williams admirer told author Peter Golenbock. “You cannot say that about the Boston fans and Ted. But the run of us certainly were for Williams, and admired him all the more because he seemed to be carrying all these handicaps, broken bones, angry
Herald
columnists, all these loud fans, double war service, divorce problems.…
He never had a smooth season where he just played ball and everything just fell into place.”
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As Ted made his mark in the Pacific Coast League he’d been touted by Lefty O’Doul, Joe’s manager with the San Francisco Seals, as the best prospect to come out of the PCL since… DiMaggio. Ted demurred: “I’ve never even seen DiMaggio play but from all I have read about him, I know I’m not in his class yet,” he said in 1938.
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The two first laid eyes on each other in Yankee Stadium on opening day of 1939, Ted’s first big-league game. Williams was a bit starstruck and made sure to play the Clipper deep. Over the years, they would play in nine All-Star Games together, but never became particularly friendly. There was that famous picture of the two sluggers in the clubhouse after Ted’s winning home run in the 1941 game, both beaming, Joe’s right arm around Ted, his left fist pumping Williams in celebration. But Joe would generally keep to himself at those affairs, not talking much to anybody.

“It was either Ted or it was me,” DiMaggio would say years later about the rivalry between him and Williams. “In a sense it was flattering. What people were saying was that, at the time, we were the two best.”
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Williams had been aware of DiMaggio since 1933, when Joe began starring with the San Francisco Seals. In 1936, the year Ted graduated from high school and joined the San Diego Padres, DiMaggio had his magnificent rookie season with the Yankees, batting .323 with 29 home runs and 125 runs batted in. That fall, Joe—the fisherman’s son who couldn’t stand the smell of fish and had spurned the entreaties made by his father, Giuseppe, to join him at sea—returned home to San Francisco and a hero’s welcome. Giuseppe’s fishermen friends hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him along the wharf in triumph.
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In his public comments about DiMaggio, Williams was unfailingly generous. “It took the big guy to beat me,” Ted said after Joe beat him out as the 1941 MVP. Of the streak, he said: “I believe there isn’t a record in the books that will be harder to break than Joe’s fifty-six games. It may be the greatest batting achievement of all.” And assessing Joe’s career, Williams wrote in one of his books on hitting: “I can’t say enough about DiMaggio. Of all the great major leaguers I played with or against in my 19 year career, he was my idol. I idolized Joe DiMaggio!”
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Joe’s public comments about Ted, on the other hand, ranged from gracious (“There’s no question in my mind—I’ve always said he was the greatest hitter in the game”
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) to damning with faint praise (“Best
left-handed hitter I’ve ever seen”
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) to sharply critical (“He is a crybaby. You can write that for me”
^16
*
).

And, privately, when speaking to his friends or sympathetic writers, DiMaggio was contemptuous of Williams. “He throws like a broad and runs like a ruptured duck,” Joe would say. According to Joe’s agent and lawyer, Morris Engelberg, who in 2003 wrote a book entitled
DiMaggio: Setting the Record Straight,
the Clipper considered Gehrig, Ruth, Hornsby, and Cobb better hitters than Williams and was dismissive of Ted for never having won a championship. “ ‘Tell him to hold up his hands. Where are the rings?’ ” Engelberg wrote, quoting Joe.
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“He thought Williams was a selfish player because he concentrated on one thing, his hitting, and neglected to improve his base running and fielding.” Joe was also critical of Ted for taking too many walks. He even undercut Ted’s .406 achievement, telling pals that he could have achieved the milestone himself in 1939 but for his manager, Joe McCarthy. He’d been over .400 late in the season when he came down with an infection in his left eye. He couldn’t see the ball properly, but McCarthy insisted on playing him, and his final average dipped to .381. After the season, Joe said McCarthy told him he’d left him in the lineup because he did not want DiMaggio to be a “cheese champion.”