The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (83 page)

Williams projected enthusiasm and energy and was candid about his weaknesses and strengths. “I’m going to try,” he said. “I may turn out to be a horseshit manager, but I’m going to try. I’m going to be the last man out on that field every day if that will help.” He was perhaps more revealing than he was wise, given the need to inspire confidence in his cellar-dwelling team.

“I know my weaknesses. I don’t know infield play, that’s my special little bugaboo. I don’t know how to run a game—at least I don’t feel I do. I never even made a lineup card. It’s something I don’t know about—when to do certain things. Get too interested watching a pitcher or batter and you’re two moves behind before you know it. But I’ll have somebody right beside me helping me with that part of the act. The thing I know about, the most important part of baseball, is that game between the batter and the pitcher. I know I’m going to be able to help those hitters. I am sure of that.”
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Williams said he had just told his players in a meeting that there would be a midnight curfew during spring training. He would also require them to turn in two hours after night games during the season. “I told them this was for their own good and I told them of the many players I knew who missed big opportunities in the majors by misbehaving. I
hope it registered.”
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He also said there would be no players in the hotel bar, no serious card playing, a three-beer limit on plane flights, and—increasingly convinced that swinging a golf club corrupted good batting mechanics—a $1,000 fine for hitting the links during the season.
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There would also be a dress code—jackets and ties while traveling. For Ted that would mean his familiar blazer and bolo tie. He even tried to insist that his players have a two-hour nap before each night game.

He said he would engage in “trial and error,” hoped to make “an intelligent and meaningful contribution to the team,” and was “intent to use the powers of observation.”

Many of the writers who knew Williams from covering him as a player were skeptical that he had the patience to be a manager. One said to him that first day: “I know you well, Ted, and you might chuck this whole thing in 90 days.” Ted looked at the writer with a cold stare and replied: “You don’t know me as well as you think.”
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He reminded the press how much patience is required to be a good fisherman, and added: “Don’t you forget that ol’ Teddy Ballgame is the best fuckin’ fisherman anywhere.” And this: “Look, I’m the guy who says that the hardest thing to do in sports is to hit a baseball. I know damn well that is true, so how can I be impatient of those who haven’t yet learned to do it? No one knows better than me how much time it takes.”
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Ted pointedly told the writers he would help his players deal with
them:
the prodding press corps. “You know who’s the least prepared of all to cope with you guys?” he asked them. “Young ballplayers, that’s who.” Williams could have been thinking of himself, the naïf who landed with the Red Sox in 1938 and 1939 and was thrown to the writers without protection or advice from the club. “If I ever get a kid like that,” Ted continued, “I’m going to school him. You better believe it.”

Ted was still carrying a letter he had received from an old friend advising him not to take the job, and he took it out now and read portions to a few confidants. It was clear that, at least this once, Ted was enjoying bantering with the writers and giving as good as he got. Besides getting to know his players, half his time over the next few months would be devoted to accommodating the unceasing demand from one newspaper, magazine, radio station, or TV station after another, each of which wanted to do its own variation of the “Teddy Ballgame Returns” story. The reporters swarmed Pompano, and Short was delighted, knowing no one was better copy than Ted and believing that his instinct to hire Williams had been validated. His slogan for the season was: “It’s a Whole New Ball Game.”

The Boston writers all showed up, of course. Ted was willing to let bygones be bygones, but he seemed to enjoy resuming the joust as well. “You know, when the Braves moved to Milwaukee, those Boston papers never fired any of their baseball writers and they all came at the Red Sox,” he said one day, a twinkle in his eye.
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Frank Howard was a holdout that season and arrived late to spring training. Short took him into the clubhouse to introduce him to Ted. They shook hands, and Williams said: “Geez, are you strong. If I’d been as strong as you, I would have hit a thousand home runs.… You hit the ball harder than anyone I’ve seen, though you don’t hit it as far as two I’ve seen—Mantle and Jimmie Foxx.”

Williams told Howard he wanted to sit down with him and talk hitting. The two had polar-opposite styles: Ted insisted on the self-discipline to wait for a good pitch to hit, while Howard swung at virtually any pitch from his eyes to his shoe tops. Howard had only had fifty-four walks the previous year; Ted said he could have at least a hundred by being more selective. He should spot the pitcher a strike, even two, in an effort to get a better pitch to hit. Howard demurred, noting that even when he did get his pitch, he didn’t always make good contact the way Ted did. Still, he offered to try Williams’s approach.

After two weeks, Howard reported back that he didn’t think he could spot the pitcher two strikes—the risks were too high that he’d strike out, because he wasn’t a reliable enough contact hitter—but he would be willing to take one strike as part of an effort to become more selective. “Well, all right,” Williams said, content with the compromise.

Howard had heard so much about Ted’s temper he thought he’d be popping off at the players all the time, but he found Williams to be patient. When a hitter would walk back to the dugout after whiffing, Ted would just say, “Don’t be anxious. Get a good ball.” And Howard thought Williams’s enthusiasm was infectious. “Are you ready?” Ted would shout to the starting pitcher in the clubhouse before the game. Of course, the pitcher would reply that he was. Then Ted would yell at the rest of the players: “All right, let’s go, let’s be ready, let’s have a little ginigar.”
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(The word
ginigar
—not a word at all but a Williams concoction meaning “pep” or “energy”—puzzled the players at first. “What do you drink that with, tonic?” the utility infielder Tim Cullen would ask Ted.
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)

Williams liked to stake out a perch behind the batting cage and issue running commentaries on the hitters he watched in the form of nonstop
chatter. “Be quick,” he’d say. “Don’t be big. Go to right.… Go to right three straight times and you get a Cadillac.”
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Williams tried to be upbeat with the players. Meeting someone new, he’d say, “What did you hit last season?”

“Oh, .204,” the player might say.

“You did? With that swing of yours, you got to be better than that.”
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Ted quickly took on Mike Epstein as a special project. Epstein, a big, left-handed-hitting first baseman, had been a bust his first two seasons, hitting in the low .200s with a total of eighteen home runs. “He wants to hit the ball 550 feet instead of 380 feet,” Williams explained to a reporter. Epstein, a bright University of California at Berkeley graduate, liked engaging with Ted. “There’s interaction,” he told the same writer. “I think that makes for a terribly healthy environment. If you think you have a solid basis for argument, he’ll listen to you. He’ll discuss it with you. He is always trying to make you think a little bit.”
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Epstein, like virtually all the other Senators, held Williams in awe, at least at the beginning. Opposing players came to kiss the ring, too. Epstein recalled one day when the Cincinnati Reds were in Pompano for an exhibition game, Pete Rose, who in 1968 had won the National League batting title with an average of .335, came over to the Senators dugout with a ball in his hand.

“Excuse me, Mr. Williams,” he said. “I’m Pete Rose. Can I have your autograph?”

“Is it for you, Pete?” Ted said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll sign it.”

Epstein was sitting next to Williams and saw that he signed the ball: “To Pete Rose, a Hall of Famer for sure, Ted Williams.”

Then Johnny Bench came over with a ball, and he asked for an autograph.

“Is it for you, John?” Ted asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Again Ted signed the ball: “To Johnny Bench, a Hall of Famer for sure, Ted Williams.”

“So I’m thinking, ‘I gotta get in on this,’ so I reach in the ball bag and get a baseball, lean over, and ask Ted to autograph the ball for me, and he signs it, ‘Ted Williams’ and gives it back to me,” Epstein said, laughing. “That’s Ted. Ted was the most honest person I’ve ever known. He wouldn’t lie to make you feel good.”
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For his coaching staff, Williams chose to keep two major-league veterans he had inherited: Nellie Fox, an All-Star infielder for twelve years with the White Sox, was the first-base coach, and Sid Hudson, who had won 104 games with the Senators and Red Sox and played with Ted from 1952 to 1954, was the pitching coach.

Then there was Wayne Terwilliger, a journeyman second baseman in the majors for nine years who was slated to manage the Senators’ Triple-A team, the Buffalo Bisons, in 1969. Terwilliger was at Pompano Beach helping out, and Williams had been impressed by his energy, enthusiasm, and knowledge of the game. One day Ted approached Terwilliger, who was known as Twig, and asked: “Did you coach third base when you were managing in the minors?”

“Yes, sir,” Twig replied.

“Is there any reason you can’t coach up here?”

“No, sir.”

“Okay, you’re my third-base coach.”

Just like that. Then, right before the season started, they had another chat. Obviously, what he knew best was hitting, Ted said. He didn’t know much about stealing a base, or when to hit-and-run and bunt, so Twig should handle all that and flash the signs as he saw fit.
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As for that “person right beside me” Ted had told the writers he needed, he created the position of bench coach, first trying to recruit his old Red Sox pal Johnny Pesky. But when Pesky turned him down, Williams turned to Joe Camacho, the former minor leaguer who had taught at Ted’s baseball camp and was currently an elementary school principal.

There was an official rule book on the desk of his office at Pompano, and Williams kept saying he had to read it, but meanwhile, his coaches helped expand his knowledge of the game beyond hitting and its converse, pitching.
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Still, Ted always made it clear what his first love was. One day, Fox and Camacho were conducting a run-down drill and after several minutes got into a heated argument about the preferred technique for fielders to use when they had a runner trapped. The argument got louder and louder and attracted a crowd. Finally, Ted ambled over to see what the commotion was all about. “What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded. Terwilliger explained, and Williams threw up his hands, bored by what he considered an insignificant phase of the game. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s hit.” And the batting cages were rolled out.
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Of course, Williams also felt he had something to say to pitchers—after
all, he had studied them carefully all his life. He knew their tendencies, what they liked to do when, but he also liked to needle them. He’d make remarks like: “Pitchers are the dumbest sons of bitches in the world.” This was a variation of the same flippant remark he had made for years as a player, but now that he was a manager, it had a different connotation, especially if it had been heard by a pitcher. The pitcher usually wouldn’t see any humor in the crack and take it as evidence that Ted the manager still had the one-dimensional, hitter-only mind-set he’d had as a player.
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Before the Senators’ opening game, at home against the Yankees on April 7, Ted was pacing back and forth nervously in the clubhouse. Frank Howard called out to him, “Hey, Skip, I bet you would like to be 20 years younger today.” Williams grabbed a bat and went into his batting stance. “Oh, geez,” he said. “Would I? You bet I would.”
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The weather was sunny and pleasant, with temperatures in the sixties. President Nixon was on hand, in a box near the home dugout, seated next to Bowie Kuhn, the new baseball commissioner, and Bob Short, confidant to the man Nixon had just beat, Hubert Humphrey.

The presidential seal was affixed to the outside of the box on the field, but a key word was misspelled. For that day, Nixon was the “Presidnt of the United States.” When Kuhn handed a ball to Nixon so he could toss out the ceremonial first pitch, the president booted it and had to rummage beneath his seat to make the recovery. The press quickly called it the first error of the new season. Finally, Nixon lobbed first one pitch, and then two more for the benefit of the photographers, out to the sixty-odd players and coaches from both teams who had assembled in wait.

Nixon was an unabashed Senators fan after spending so many years in Washington, first as a congressman and senator from California, then as vice president, and now as president.
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A beaming Williams was right by Nixon’s side, and Ted pointedly told the writers that he had voted for the president and contributed to his campaign. “I don’t think too many people are any happier than I am that he is President,” Williams said.
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Nixon loved Ted too. He had invited Williams to the inaugural ball in January and sent him a handwritten note in March congratulating him on being named manager. “It’s good to know that we share the same goal: to make Washington a first place city,” Nixon wrote, signing off, “Sincerely, RN.”
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Underscoring his stature as the star of his team, Ted was the last member
of the Senators to be introduced to the crowd—a rarity for a manager. He received a standing ovation from the 45,113 fans, a record number, and then he did something he had not done since 1940: he tipped his cap.
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The game itself was an anticlimax: the Senators lost to the Yankees 8–4, despite getting fourteen hits. But they won the next day, 6–4, and the day after that, too, 9–6, behind sixteen hits. That made thirty-six hits in the first three games, so the press speculated that maybe some of Ted’s hitting magic was rubbing off.
SENATORS SHOW WILLIAMS TOUCH
was the headline in the
New York Times
.
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