The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (68 page)

The culprits were two unidentified out-of-town writers who mischievously slotted Williams ninth and tenth on their ballots. The Boston writers spoke out against the vote, and even Ted’s archenemy Dave Egan called it disgraceful. But while his teammates, Tom Yawkey, and others criticized the decision, Williams took the slight in stride and held his tongue.

“All the American League’s got is me and the Yankees,” Ted quipped, not incorrectly. “When I leave this league, it’s going to be pretty damn dull.”
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Examining the Red Sox’s final season attendance figure—1,181,087—Harold Kaese wrote that the Sox drew 181,087 and Williams the million.
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Ted’s brilliance in 1957 reverberated well into 1958, producing a burst of glowing press and national recognition. The Associated Press named Ted its 1957 Male Athlete of the Year, and the influential New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voted him its Player of the Year. Both awards, especially the latter, served to somewhat mitigate the injustice of the American League MVP award going to
Mantle. And there were fresh assessments of Williams as an all-time hitting great. Besides the eight-page “The Case for Ted Williams,” a statistical analysis published by
Look
magazine,
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other statisticians poring through the detritus of the ’57 season found more nuggets: Ted’s three pinch-hit home runs in September, for example, gave him seven for his career, which was an American League record. And his thirty-three intentional walks for the year were the most ever recorded in a season.
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All this was further evidence that the tide of public opinion—which had begun to shift in favor of Williams in late 1956, after his deft, self-deprecating mime following his spate of spits—was now surging in his direction, buoyed both by the brilliance of his ’57 season and by a popular backlash against the MVP vote for Mantle. What had long been portrayed in the press as Ted’s ill-mannered, crude, and self-centered behavior now mostly came to be seen as principled nonconformity, a willingness to take unpopular positions and stand up for what he believed. People came to appreciate his assertion of independence—his insistence on flouting convention and going without a tie, his daring to give the writers and even the Marine Corps what for.

Seemingly bulletproof now, Ted drew 150,000 people to his annual fly-casting exhibition at the sportsmen’s show in Boston during the first week of February. On the sixth, Williams popped over to Fenway for his annual contract signing and joust with the now-cowed writers. His salary for 1958 was described in all the papers as the largest sum ever given to a professional baseball player. The amount was not officially revealed, of course, but the writers colluded and set the figure at “an estimated” $125,000. If true, then $65,000 of it was deferred, since the team reported to Major League Baseball that it was paying Ted just $60,000 for the season.

Speaking to a horde of reporters and flashbulb-popping photographers, Williams offered détente on his terms. “I’m looking forward to a great summer and I’m going to be as fair as possible with you fellows,” he said. “But the first time I read one of those stinking, detrimental, dishonest, prejudicial stories, then don’t come around me. You know what I mean. Those stories which disrupt my playing or disrupt the club. Just keep out of my way. And don’t be yelling to have me benched if I’m only hitting .280 in May.”
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Then Ted picked a bone with the New York writers who had given him their Player of the Year award for 1957. He’d been unable to go to New York to pick up the prize because he had a conflict, which he’d
explained in a telegram while expressing his appreciation for the honor. But the writers had put the blast on him for being a no-show and hadn’t bothered to read his telegram at the banquet, which featured Vice President Richard Nixon as a headliner. “Strictly bush,” said Ted. “I have confirmation that the telegram was delivered to the chairman at 5:30 p.m. the day of the dinner. It wasn’t even read. Bush, bush, bush.”

As for his physical condition, Williams allowed that he was ten pounds overweight but said he’d sweat it off in spring training without any problem. He planned to take up tennis to help get his legs in shape before reporting. He’d slipped on a rock while fishing up in Labrador the previous fall, and his ankle was sore, but it was responding to diathermy treatments, he said. Joe Cronin broke up the press conference by echoing Williams’s own words about his news-making prowess. “It’ll be damned dull when you’re not here, Ted,” Cronin said.
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Williams’s stellar 1957 performance hardly carried over to the early part of the 1958 season. He would turn forty later that summer and was feeling his age: he’d hurt his side in spring training, and swinging the bat was painful; his off-season ankle injury lingered and nagged; every ache and pain seemed magnified. He found batting helmets, newly mandated by the league for protection, bothersome.

Ted had missed opening day in Washington because he’d eaten a bad batch of oysters and come down with food poisoning.
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When he returned to the lineup, nothing seemed to click, and his hitting was anemic. On May 20 he was batting .225, the worst start of his career. The next day, Ted’s longtime bête noire, Dave Egan of the
Record,
died at the age of fifty-seven, succumbing to heart trouble, the accumulated ravages of the bottle, and related ailments. The Red Sox were on the road in the Midwest at the time, so Ted was spared the tributes for his harshest critic as well as the pomp and circumstance of the funeral, which were considerable. Boston archbishop Richard Cushing (who would be elevated to cardinal the following year) presided over the service. Pallbearers included Joe Cronin, star Boston Celtics guard Bob Cousy, former world welterweight boxing champion Tony DeMarco, former Massachusetts governor Robert Bradford, and former Notre Dame football coach Frank Leahy.

Ted finally got his stroke going and by late June had raised his average to nearly .300, but that was not enough to make the All-Star team. Über–Williams fan Casey Stengel later chose him for the American League squad anyway.

In July, Williams regressed on the spitting front, this time in Kansas City. After failing to run out a routine ground ball, Ted was roundly booed, and he spat at fans along the first-base line. The league fined him just $250, and Ted issued a tepid apology. (“I am principally sorry about the $250,” he said.) The writers, inured to such flare-ups and by then thinking it futile to take Ted on, made little of the episode.

By September, the Red Sox were twelve and a half games out and going nowhere, but Williams was again keeping things interesting, this time by competing for a batting title with a teammate, banjo-hitting second baseman Pete Runnels, who had been traded to the Sox over the winter by the Washington Senators. Runnels, an affable Texan, benefited from batting second in the order, in front of Williams. “To tell you the truth, I was pulling for Runnels,” Williams said later. “But I wasn’t about to give it to him. Baseball isn’t charity.”
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Runnels credited Williams with teaching him how to be a good hitter, especially mentally: “Ted taught me how to be a successful hitter, a thinking hitter. And batting in front of him certainly didn’t hurt, either. Pitchers gave me plenty of good balls to hit. They couldn’t afford to walk me and have to face Ted.… He’d show me which umpires called strikes on high pitches and which umpires called strikes on low pitches. What kinds of pitches to expect from certain pitchers, and what kinds of pitches to expect on different ball-and-strike counts. He was masterful.”
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Williams slumped a bit in the middle of the month, and by the time the Red Sox hosted Washington on September 21, he was 0 for his last 7. Facing pitcher Bill Fischer, Ted made an out his first time up, and on his second trip was called out on strikes by umpire Bill Summers. That almost never happened, and Williams flung his bat in frustration. He had meant to throw it toward the Red Sox dugout, but because of the sticky pine tar he’d begun rubbing on his hands to get a better grip while hitting, Ted lost control of the bat and it sailed seventy-five feet into the box seats just to the left of the dugout, striking a sixty-year-old woman named Gladys Heffernan in the head.

The papers had dramatic photos of Williams’s immediate reaction to this sickening spectacle: first he raised both arms, clenched his teeth, and raised his left leg, as if he were preparing to break an imaginary bat across his knee in a fit of pique; then he hung his head, arms at his side, knees bent forward in utter despair; then he raced over to the seats to check on Mrs. Heffernan and express his sorrow for what he’d done. He could see that his bat had struck her on the left side of the forehead and that she was bleeding.

“Don’t worry about me, Ted,” Mrs. Heffernan said. “I’m all right. I know you didn’t mean it.”

The lady was taken off to a first-aid room under the stands to be bandaged before leaving for the hospital. A shaken Williams followed her down and spent a few minutes with her while his teammates continued to bat.

When it was time for the Red Sox to take the field again, Ted remained in the dugout, crying. Bill Summers, the umpire who had called Ted out on strikes, walked over to the dugout and urged him to resume play. Williams finally took the field to a chorus of boos.

“I told Ted to get out to the outfield and play ball and to forget it,” Summers said after the game. “I don’t think he wanted to play because he felt so badly about it.”

Williams faced the writers in the clubhouse. “I just almost died,” he said. “I was almost sick when I went out to the outfield. I’m very thankful it wasn’t a serious injury. I was mad and threw the bat, but I didn’t mean to throw it that way.… I started to flip the bat along the ground, but the sticky stuff kept it in my grip just long enough so the bat left my hands on the fly instead.”

Mrs. Heffernan, who happened to be Joe Cronin’s housekeeper, had her own press conference from her room at Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge as a smiling Cronin sat by her bedside. “Why did the crowd boo Ted Williams?” she asked. “I don’t see why they had to boo him. I felt awfully sorry for him after it happened. He came right into the first-aid room to see me, and you could tell by the look on his face how badly he felt. It was an accident. It all happened so fast I don’t actually know what happened.” Cronin seemed to enjoy his housekeeper getting the star treatment. “Gladys,” he said, “you’re going to feel like Liz Taylor before this is over.”
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Mrs. Heffernan laughed and gave the photographers permission to take her picture. Ted later sent the lady a $500 wristwatch, likely endearing himself to her further.

As for the batting race, Ted did rip a double to center field his next time up, but Runnels had three hits on the day and led Williams .323 to .314 with six games left. Then Ted went on a spurt, and the two entered the final game of the season in Washington with Williams ahead .327 to .324.

They bantered around the batting cage an hour before the game as if nothing were on the line that day. “I’m getting me some land-locked salmon in Canada tomorrow,” Ted told Runnels. “They’ll run to 25 pounds, almost as big as those deer you shoot.”

“I’ll have me a buck deer before you get your first bite and start yelling about the big one that got away,” Pete replied.
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Williams stayed nice and loose, popping a double and a home run off Pedro Ramos to finish at .328, while Runnels went hitless in four trips and ended at .322. It was Ted’s sixth—and last—batting championship.

One day over the winter, at his house in Islamorada, Williams was sitting outside in the shade of a coconut tree talking to a friend about the upcoming 1959 season. He spoke broadly of his goals and said he felt rested and healthy. As if to prove it, Williams got up, grabbed a bat, and began swinging it easily. After several swings, he felt a twinge in the back of his neck, but thought nothing of it, assuming it would pass or be just another kink to work out in spring training.

That year the Red Sox were to leave Sarasota and train in Scottsdale, Arizona. Tom Yawkey thought his team could draw more fans out west, and one of the economic highlights of the spring, the team hoped, was to be three exhibition games against the Cleveland Indians in Ted’s hometown of San Diego. It would be the first time Williams returned to play ball in the city where he grew up since his barnstorming tour with Jimmie Foxx eighteen years earlier.

Ted reported to Scottsdale on March 1, three days late, causing his usual stir among writers and teammates and delighting the locals, who weren’t used to such star wattage. He put on a show when he took his first licks of the year in the batting cage, casually swatting two homers.

Williams settled into his Cactus League routine and before long pronounced himself happy with Arizona. “This place is better than Florida for a training site,” he said. “The weather is great, really great.… The people here are wonderful too. Why, they’re the most friendly and hospitable group I’ve seen in years.”
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The fans in Scottsdale soon learned that if they wanted to see Williams in action, they would mostly have to come and see him practice, for the Kid followed the same spring training regimen he’d established in recent years, which was to play as few exhibition games as he could get away with. Mike Higgins and the front office were fine with this approach, saying that Ted knew his own body best and concluding that it was an acceptable trade-off for the team to hold back their star from Cactus League games in the interest of saving wear and tear and maximizing his availability for the regular season.

The Arizona writers questioned this philosophy and complained that
local fans who had bought tickets to spring games expecting to see the Great Man were getting stiffed. One fan in nearby Mesa voiced this very complaint to Harold Kaese of the
Globe
when Williams failed to appear with his teammates for a game against the Chicago Cubs. “He should have come with all these people here,” said the local retiree, none other than Ty Cobb himself.
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