3

Minnesota

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Ted Williams hit one so high and fast yesterday that he rode over the city on it. He rode right into his new baseball home, into the hearts of opening day fans. That blow brought cheers for the lanky kid in right field, it helped bring a 14–4 victory over Louisville in the debut of the 37^th [American] Association campaign at Nicollet Park. . . .

He came up a third time against Carl Boone with the singling Stan Spence on base and did it. A terrifically towering flyball sailed like a bird over Nicollet Avenue, over the front part of the roof across the street. For the fans, there was your ballgame.

HALSEY HALL, MINNEAPOLIS STAR, APRIL 30, 1938

The Kallas Café was the meeting point for the good folk of Princeton, Minnesota, one of those luncheonettes where everybody knows everybody and the smell of breakfast hangs around until it is replaced by the smell of lunch. John Kallas was the proprietor, and he had a couple of teenage sons who helped him out. They were helping out on the day Ted Williams suddenly materialized.

Jimmy Kallas, the 19-year-old, spotted Williams first. He had seen Williams's picture in the Minneapolis newspaper, another teenager, same age, knocking the cover off the ball for the Minneapolis Millers during the summer of 1938. Jimmy Kallas told Tony Kallas, the 18-year-old, the news.

“There's Ted Williams,” Jimmy said behind the soda fountain.

“Nah.”

“It's him.”

Princeton was a small town, no more than 3,000 people, 50 miles north of Minneapolis. Not a lot of famous baseball players came through the café's door. Williams, it turned out, had arrived to do some fishing. The Millers were off, and Minneapolis outdoors writer Ed Shave was taking him along in search of some Great Northern. Shave, it turned out, had even told John Kallas, the father, that they would be stopping.

Introductions were made. Friendships were made.

The next time the Millers had a day off, Williams returned, stayed at the Kallas house, and went fishing with John. John caught four or five Great Northern. Ted caught none. How'd that happen? John Kallas was better than he was? Through the years he would come back again and again. He would use the Kallases' cabin up at Green Lake. He would stay at the Gagen Hotel, proprietor: A. M. Gagen, four dollars a week, meals included. He would walk the woods, fish the fresh waters.

Ted liked Princeton, Minnesota.

“I went duck hunting with him the first time he ever went,” Frank Weisbrod, now 85 years old, says. “We went out to Little Rice Lake, three miles outside of town. The ducks are always around there because they like the wild rice. Ted just didn't know anything about duck hunting. He was shooting at ducks clear on the other side of the lake.”

He soon got the hang of it.

“Dad would drive him out to Little Rice Lake at four in the morning to lay out the decoys,” Jim Kallas told Luther Dorr of the Princeton Union-Eagle. “But Dad had to be at work at the café at noon. Ted said, ‘That's okay,' and he'd walk the three miles back. If he did well, he'd walk inside the café with the ducks.”

He wound up spending a lot of time at R. O. Benson's place, the Princeton Sports Shop, tying flies and talking hunting and fishing. Paul Westeman, who built silos when the weather was good, had nothing to do when the weather was bad. He'd sit around the shop too. R. O. Benson was his father-in-law.

“Ted's in there one day, tying flies and tossing them in a bucket,” Westeman says. “In comes Doc Wetter, and he's chewing snuff, and he spits in the bucket. Oh, Ted was mad.”

The rhythms of small-town, outdoors life simply seemed to fit. Ted's father, Sam, finally had called it quits in San Diego, divorcing May and going away with another woman to Sacramento. There never was a great rush to return home. Princeton seemed as good as any place to be. There were trips to South Dakota to hunt pheasant. There was good Greek cooking at the Kallas house, the pheasant and duck covered with gravy.

Only one thing was missing.

“Jim, make me a chocolate malt and put a lot of ice cream in it,” Ted said one day at the café in the fall of 1938. “And hey, know any good-looking girls around here?”

Kallas said he did. He said he would call one and see if she would come down for a Coke at three o'clock.

Doris Soule arrived right on time.

   

Williams shouldn't even have been in Minnesota. That was the thing. Never should have been there in the first place. He should have been playing in Boston. He should have gone to spring training in Sarasota, Florida, and been with the Red Sox for that 1938 season.

“I never figured it out,” 85-year-old Max West, who traveled across country from California with Williams, still says. “I was going to camp with the Braves. He was going to the Red Sox. I made the team and he didn't. And he was better than me.”

Hadn't the “stringbean” already proved himself in the Pacific Coast League? Wasn't he supposed to be “the best prospect to come out of the league since the Yankees' Joe DiMaggio at the end of 1935”? That was the advance notice. DiMaggio, golden and smooth, had glided into the American League to put together two remarkable seasons. In 1937 he'd led the league with 45 homers, hit .346, and finished second in both hits and runs batted in. He'd finished second by four votes for MVP to Detroit's Charlie Gehringer, done so well that he was holding out for a bigger contract, a subject that was the talk of all spring training.

Even if Williams couldn't reach DiMaggio's high mark on the wall on the first try, then shouldn't he at least be somewhere on the surface? Shouldn't he at least be in the league?

The baseball in the PCL was as good as could be found in the thirties without going to one of the 16 major league ballparks stacked on the east side of the Mississippi River. A number of players in the Pacific Coast League could have been playing in the majors but liked where they were. These were players who loved the sun or loved the West Coast (or whose wives loved the sun and the West Coast) or who found they could make more money in places like L.A. or San Francisco once they developed a local name and a following.

Minnesota—the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association—offered none of that. The Millers were a farm team mostly raising new talent for the big leagues. The veterans on the roster were there because they had no place else to go, being terminally deficient in some ability on a major league scout's list or coming back down the ladder and taking a graceful exit from the game. Minnesota, for the young player, mostly was a place to improve some area the big team thought was lacking.

The Red Sox and manager Joe Cronin wanted Williams to improve his head. They decided very fast that he was too young, too immature, too . . . wacky. Had anyone ever talked his way out of the big leagues? His first experience with his new employers was just a mess.

   

He arrived at the Sox 1938 training camp as a tall bundle of fidgets and bluster, fingernails bitten down to nothing, a motormouth covering his own insecurities. He later would say that he never even had thought he could play big-league baseball until he went to camp and saw that his abilities matched those of the other players on the roster, but that was not the way he acted. He talked and talked, his confidence touched with defiance.

“I remember him on the train,” Max West says. “He'd keep saying things like, ‘Well, if Cronin thinks this, then he's got another think coming.' Or, ‘If Cronin thinks that, he'd better think twice.' I said to myself, He's never met Joe Cronin. What's this all about?”

The trip across the country—Williams on his way to that first meeting with the square-jawed player-manager—was an adventure before the big adventure even started. Bobby Doerr, who'd played the '37 season in Boston, was asked to take the train from his home in Los Angeles, meet the new kid in San Diego, and babysit for the rest of the long grind to Sarasota.

This plan was doomed when heavy rains and flooding hit the Los Angeles area. The Oscars were canceled for the first time, the flooding was so great. Tracks were washed out, and trains couldn't get in or out of Los Angeles. Williams was advised to take the train by himself from San Diego as far as El Paso. Doerr took a bus out to Indio, California, where he took another train to El Paso with Braves rookie West and veteran Babe Herman, who also was heading to Florida.

“Our train got to El Paso first,” Doerr says. “Babe Herman had played there at some time in his career and knew a good restaurant in Juarez, Mexico. So we went across the border, ate, and came back to the station three hours later and there was Ted.”

Descriptions from the time always make him sound like some quirky character played by a young Jimmy Stewart in a comedic movie. Part science-project scatterbrain. Part fast-talking salesman. A large part kid from nowhere. Talking. Asking questions. Handing out opinions. Swinging anything that resembled a bat. Swinging the pillow in the Pullman car. Swinging his arms if nothing else was available, swinging his arms through the air.

West remembers waking up, the train stopped at a siding or maybe a station. He pulled open the shade and, sure, there was Ted, standing on a rail on the next track. He was balancing himself while swinging a rolled-up newspaper at an imaginary pitch. Talking to anyone. Talking to no one. Doerr mostly remembers the talking. Williams latched on to Herman, a hitter with some power during 12 previous big-league seasons, a man who had hit .393 in 1930. The talking never stopped. Almost never. Williams always had one more question, one more opinion, about hitting.

“In the dining car a woman turned to the porter and asked, ‘Could you please make him keep quiet?'” Doerr says.

“I don't think he slept a minute the whole way,” West says. “At least he didn't from what I saw.”

When the train reached Tampa, two long and talkative days and nights after leaving Texas, West departed to Bradenton and the Braves camp. Herman already had left, headed to a minor league camp. Williams and Doerr continued to Sarasota, winter home of the Ringling Brothers Circus and spring home of the Red Sox and not much else.

The team had been at work for over a week when the two-man California contingent arrived. Doerr quietly folded again into the roster. Williams did nothing quietly.

The first character he met in the clubhouse was equipment manager Johnny Orlando. A few years older than Williams, Orlando was a direct opposite. He had a street-corner sophistication, the wise-guy knowledge not only of where all bodies were buried but how they got there. He had started working at Fenway Park when he was ten years old, a kid from nearby Chelsea, picking up papers so he could get into the games for free. He worked his way into the operation, moving up to run the clubhouse. He then brought his younger brother, Vinnie, off a construction site and onto the payroll. Vinnie was the visiting clubhouse man and the same age as Ted.

“Sarasota in 1938 was a hayshaker town,” Johnny Orlando began, years later, in a 12-part series in the Boston American about his experiences with Williams. “You could shoot a cannon up Main Street from Five Corners and maybe only hit a rattlesnake. . . .”

He described how the other players, including stars like Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove, had been working hard for days and everyone was wondering where this “Williams kid” was. Then, finally, the door to the clubhouse opened and . . .

“This Li'l Abner walks in. He's got a red sweater on, his shirt open at the neck, a raggedy duffle bag. His hair's on end like he was attached to an electric switch. If anyone ever wanted a picture of a raw rookie, this was the time to take the shot.”

“Where you been, kid?” Orlando asked. “Don't you know we been working out almost a whole week? Who are you supposed to be, Ronald Coleman or somebody, you can't get here on time?”

Welcome to the big leagues. Orlando gave the new arrival a uniform that did not fit. There was no uniform in the trunk for a six-foot-three, 172-pound stick, so Orlando simply gave him the biggest shirt and biggest pair of pants he could find. Two Ted Williamses could have fit inside. Orlando then said, “Come on, kid,” and took the new arrival to the field for the first time.

Sitting in the stands, watching his players on the field, was Cronin. He spotted Williams immediately. He also noticed the big uniform.

“Hey, tuck your shirttail in,” Cronin shouted. “You're in the big leagues now.”

Williams reacted.

“Who's that wise guy up there?” he said.

“That's Joe Cronin, your manager, kid,” Orlando replied.

Williams ran onto the field, trying to tuck the too-big shirt into his too-big pants, not exactly getting the job done. Welcome to the big leagues. They didn't fit any better than the uniform did.

Orlando's instant nickname for Williams, “Kid,” not only stuck for his first spring training but would be with him for the rest of his life. The Red Sox veterans—especially incumbent outfielders Sam Chapman, Joe Vosmik, and Doc Cramer—also soon found other nicknames. Williams was “the San Diego Saparoo” and “the California Cracker” and a bunch of other names that never made the newspapers. Williams responded by calling everyone “Sport” or “Meathead.” He called Joe Cronin “Sport.” Cronin, in turn, called him “Meathead.”

The unwritten rule at the time was for rookies to shut up, wait their turn, and be indifferent to all abuse heaped upon them by their elders. Williams did none of the above. He pushed his way into the batting cage, kept talking, and reacted to every remark. He made comments about the humidity in Florida, about the unfairness of Fenway Park (which he never had seen) for a lefthanded hitter, about the physical oddities of his new teammates.

An oft-repeated piece of dialogue between Doerr and Williams—DOERR: “Wait'll you see Foxx hit.” WILLIAMS: “Wait'll Foxx sees me hit”—may or may not actually have happened, but it captured the moment perfectly.

“Here's a thing I've never seen written,” Vinnie Orlando said years later. “Ted showed up with his own bat. He'd bought it at a drugstore or a five-and-dime somewhere in Florida on the way. A cheap bat. The veterans all were laughing at his bat. Then he started hitting, and they weren't laughing so much anymore. He used that bat for a couple of weeks.”

The hitting, alas, seemed to sour when the games began. In his first exhibition on March 13, he went a quiet 0-for-4 against the Cincinnati Reds. Nerves, pressure, and youth, combined with the tougher pitching that he now faced, made his first week a struggle of adjustment at the plate. By the end of it, he was gone, shipped to the Millers, the Red Sox affiliate, one of the first cuts of the spring. His first big-league audition was done almost as soon as it started.

Of course, there was a story.

The Red Sox were scheduled to play the Braves in Bradenton on March 20. When the players assembled for the short bus trip in uniform, Williams still was in civilian clothes. He didn't think he was going. Cronin had posted a list of names for the trip. Williams hadn't read the list.

“Why aren't you on the bus?” Cronin asked. “You were on the list.”

“When folks want me to do something, they come up to me and tell me, man to man,” Williams replied. “They don't expect me to go around hunting for bulletins.”

“Young man, you stay right here,” Cronin said. “Don't bother about Bradenton.”

“Okay, Sport.”

The next day he was told to report to the Millers' training camp in Daytona Beach. He packed some forever unanswered questions along with his clothes. Wouldn't he have hit the way he always hit—the way he soon would hit in Minneapolis—if he'd been given more time, a longer look, in Sarasota? True, the Sox were set in the outfield, and true, it was an easy decision to say that a 19-year-old kid needed to go somewhere he could play every day, but wouldn't he have made these decisions harder if he had had a longer chance? He never gave himself that chance.

Johnny Orlando, his biggest ally and a first Red Sox friend, walked him to the bus stop. Williams was mad. He had confronted the veteran outfielders, Chapman, Vosmik, and Cramer, one last time in the clubhouse before he left.

“John, I'll be back,” Williams said. “Don't have any worries about that. I told those guys that I'd make more money in one year than all three of them combined, and I will. How much would that be?”

Orlando said he figured the outfielders made $12,000 apiece. No more than $15,000 tops. He asked how much Williams had in his pockets at the moment.

“I got enough, John,” Williams said. “I don't need much to get along. A bit for meal money. That's all I need.”

“Kid, I got a finif [a five-dollar bill],” Orlando said. “I'll split it with you. That'll buy you a good steak. You just go out and have a good year. You've got a lot of time coming for you in the big leagues.”

That was the way he left his first experience in the big leagues: with a bus ticket for Daytona Beach and $2.50 of Johnny Orlando's money in his pocket.

   

The best part about the Millers' camp was meeting Rogers Hornsby. A short-tempered veteran of 23 years in the big leagues, nine of them as a player-manager, Hornsby had retired at age 41 at the end of the 1937 season. His name was mentioned in any argument about who was the greatest hitter in the history of the game. He'd won the Triple Crown for best batting average, most homers, and most runs batted in twice in his career and just missed it another time. He'd batted over .400 three times, the highest at .424 in 1924. He now was a coach for the Millers for the spring, figuring out exactly what he would do next in his life.

Williams took care of any immediate plans. With the disappointment of being shipped to the minors quickly shelved, the confidence meter back to high, and his enthusiasm working noisily again, Williams latched on to Hornsby the way he had latched on to Babe Herman on the train.

“He was one of the most knowledgeable guys I ever talked hitting with,” Williams said years later in a book he co-authored with Jim Prime called Ted Williams's Hit List. “Here I was, a 19-year-old kid, and he wanted to talk about hitting all the time. Boy, I sure took advantage of the opportunity to pick his brains.”

(Williams put Hornsby fourth on his hit list after Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx.)

The questions fell out of Williams's mouth in a typical torrent. The veteran put into words a philosophy that the kid intuitively had been following.

Hornsby said, “Get a good ball to hit.” The way to control the battle between the hitter and the pitcher was to force the pitcher to throw his best pitch in the worst situation. Use the rules of the game, four balls and three strikes, to carve the situation into what you want it to be. Don't chase pitches, don't give away strikes. Work the count to your advantage, 2–0 or 3–1, and force the pitcher to come to you.

Study the pitcher. Know what pitches—fastball, curveball, change of pace, whatever—he can throw. Know how well he throws each of the pitches. Know where he throws them best. Know when he throws them. Know what he likes to do when he is in trouble. Study, study, study. What did he try to do to you the last time? What do you think he will try to do this time? Study. Study. Get that good ball to hit.

This simple sentence would be the foundation of Williams's success, maddening at times for fans and teammates when he refused to swing at a fat pitch an inch outside the strike zone in important situations. Critics would call it a selfish approach, personal success over team success, but he never varied. Why would he ever want to give up any of his advantage to the pitcher, even a quarter of an inch? He would argue this point into his eighties, still yapping back when political columnist George Will suggested he should have swung more often at hittable pitches outside the strike zone. (“I like George Wills politically,” Williams said. “But baseballically he was all wrong.”) He had walked over 100 times in his second PCL season and would walk 150 times in Minneapolis and 2,019 times (second only to Babe Ruth) in his major league career.

To hear Hornsby say all the things he himself had been thinking was comforting to the kid. He spent hours in the batting cage with the middle-aged teacher, working on his swing before and after exhibition games, talking and talking, engaging in hitting contests with one of the greatest hitters who ever lived. They would bet on who could hit the most line drives. Hornsby was gone before the team broke camp, taking a job as a coach with the Baltimore Orioles, then moving along later in the season to become manager of the Chattanooga Lookouts, but while he was around the Millers, he was a captured resource for one special student.

This pattern would continue for the rest of Williams's life. He would seek out the greats of the game, ask questions, challenge the answers. He would talk with old Hugh Duffy, who hit .438 in 1894. He would talk with Bill Terry, who hit .401 in 1930. He would argue with Ty Cobb, who thought a man should hit down at the ball, while Williams thought a man should hit up. He would talk, as an old man, with Tony Gwynn and Nomar Garciaparra and Jason Giambi. Take away the segregated stars of the Negro Leagues and take away Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned from baseball for gambling, and Williams would talk hitting with virtually every great living hitter of the twentieth century.

The subject would never go stale for him. He would talk hitting with anyone who asked and with a lot of people who didn't. He would ask little kids and sportswriters and cocktail waitresses and senior citizens to show him their swings. He would adjust the batters' hands. He would preach hip action, concentration, the virtues of repetition. The act of hitting a baseball would fascinate him to the point of obsession, sending him to the physics laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the lumberyard at the Hillerich and Bradsby bat factory in Louisville, Kentucky, to the batting cage at the end of the day, after everyone else had gone home.

A sportswriter remembers taking a blind man to meet Williams one day, years after Williams's career was finished. Williams nodded, shook hands, went through the celebrity motions, until the blind man mentioned he played softball. Williams perked up at that.

“How do you hit?” Williams asked.

The blind man explained that a special ball was used, a ball that beeped in sequence so the players could hear it approach. Wait for the beeps to draw close. Swing. Williams asked to see the man's batting stance. The blind man obliged, swinging a couple of times. Williams stood and made various adjustments to the stance. The blind man swung a few more times. Better.

“Now, here's what you gotta do,” Williams said, holding the man in the new stance.

“Yes?” the blind man said.

“You gotta stand there,” Williams said. “Don't swing early. Wait. You gotta wait until you hear that last fucken beep!”

Get a good ball to hit. The lesson of Rogers Hornsby.

   

Minneapolis turned out to be more playground than purgatory. Freed from the final, nagging constraints of San Diego—freed from living in the house on Utah Street, from playing in front of high school friends and teammates, the sound of the Salvation Army band in the background—Williams bought his first car, the Buick convertible, moved into a room in the rented house of married teammate Walter Tauscher, and let his last few inhibitions, if any, drop to the ground. He was a picture.

“Williams is tickled to death to be with the Millers, especially under the tutelage of Donie Bush, talks a blue streak, wants to know all about Minneapolis and Minnesota, when the duck hunting season opens, the fishing, would like to get his hands on the guy that started ‘this second DiMaggio business,'” Dick Hackenberg of the Minneapolis Star said in a first description. “He smacks his lips over the 279-yard [sic] right field fence at Nicollet Park because he got 19 of his 25 home runs last year over the 340-yard [sic] right field barrier in San Diego.”

The pieces seemed to fit. Bush, the 51-year-old manager, a stubby little man at five-foot-six, 160 pounds, was a former big-leaguer with a no-nonsense disposition and seemed to be a perfect character to try to channel his new star's eccentricities. The ballpark, Nicollet, was friendly to both a lefthanded hitter and an average and indifferent rightfielder. The situation was perfect. Rather than fight for a space in the veteran outfield in Boston, the new number 19 for the Millers was in the lineup every day, the team's certified star. And if there were any, uh, irregularities, they would take place a long way from Boston.

The Millers opened the season with a mammoth four-stop road trip heading north. Williams was hitless in his first 12 appearances in three games in Indianapolis, but when the team hit Louisville, he began to roll. He collected his first hit in the first game of the series on a day when he walked five times to tie an American Association record. (Get a good ball to hit!) He collected his first and second home runs, both inside-the-park shots to the wide-open 512-foot centerfield of Louisville's Parkway Field in the third game. The second shot traveled an estimated 500 feet on the fly.

When the Millers finally hit Nicollet on April 29, he went 3-for-4 in the home opener, including a long home run over the short fence in right, the ball landing on a roof across Nicollet Avenue. Two more home runs and a double would follow in his third game at home. The pattern of success was established.

“There was a furniture store and the President Café across the street on Nicollet Avenue,” long-time Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Sid Hartman says. “The insurance company canceled its policies for plate-glass windows because of Ted. They had to put up some kind of bogus windows. Because of Ted.

“I was a kid when he played. I had dropped out of school then and was selling popcorn and peanuts at the park. He took a liking to me. I don't know why. He took me for a ride in his Buick one day. We were doing 100 miles an hour down Wayzata Boulevard. I was scared to death.”

The season unfolded at this same 100-mph pace. The Millers were a .500 club, destined to finish sixth in the eight-team league, but Williams was a one-man offensive show. He hit long, impressive homers to places where homers never had been hit. He reeled off a 21-game hitting streak from Memorial Day until the middle of June. He won games at the plate, lost games in the field, and drove his stubby manager to distraction.

What do you say to an outfielder who slaps his glove on his thigh and yells, “Hi-yo, Silver,” when he chases fly balls? What do you say when the outfielder turns his back to the action at the plate and works on his swing, taking imaginary cuts at imaginary pitches, oblivious to whatever else is taking place? What do you say to an outfielder who loses a fly ball in the sun because he won't wear his sunglasses? To an outfielder who keeps up a running dialogue with the scorekeeper inside the scoreboard in right? Who keeps up a running dialogue with the nearby fans, who have learned that if you yell at this particular animal in the cage he will yell back? Who says, “I got here by myself, I can find the way home,” when you give him base-running instructions when he has landed on second with a double?

“Either he goes or I go,” Donie Bush supposedly said to Millers owner Mike Kelley.

“You're a good guy and a fine manager,” Mike Kelley supposedly said in return. “This, however, is the Red Sox star of the future, and if you're really threatening to leave, well, it was nice to know you. . . .”

Hyperactivity was the norm for Williams. If he had seemed a bit eccentric in San Diego, the “bit” part of the phrase was removed in Minneapolis. He always seemed to be doing something that was a little different.

He was riding around the outfield before a game on a bicycle borrowed from a Western Union delivery boy! He was climbing up the screen to the press box before another game, commandeering the public address system and announcing the names of his teammates as they went into the batting cage! He always was moving, talking, reacting, emotions as easy to read as the big M on the front of his shirt! He was doing jumping jacks in the middle of the game in rightfield! He was throwing rocks at guys sitting on boxcars watching the game over the fence in Louisville! He was driving everyone to distraction!

“I joined the team late, in the middle of June,” Lefty Lefebvre says. “I was really surprised. Nobody wanted to be around him. He was just a cuckoo guy. A loner. I felt kind of sorry for him.”

Lefebvre, a lefthanded pitcher, had been shuttled to the Millers straight from college. He had graduated from Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, on one day, then signed a contract in Boston the next morning to become a professional ballplayer for $600 a month. A strange and wonderful thing immediately had happened to him.

“The Red Sox had me dress for the game that day, just to see the park, meet a few of the players,” he says. “The rules were different then. I sat on the bench for the game. They were playing the White Sox, and by the fourth or fifth inning the White Sox were just killing them. Joe Cronin looked down the bench and told me to start warming up.”

The call from the bullpen came an inning or two later. Lefebvre was flabbergasted when he saw Cronin signaling from the mound that he wanted the lefthander. (“I almost shit,” Lefebvre says, 65 years later.) The one-day college graduate hit the first batter he faced in the neck with his first pitch, but finished out the inning, and then another one. He figured, leading off the bottom half of the inning, he would be replaced with a pinch hitter.

“Go up and take a swing, kid,” Cronin said instead, fed up with the mess the Red Sox were making in front of him.

On the first pitch, his first at bat in the majors, Lefebvre swung and made contact. The ball went up, up, and over the leftfield wall. Lefebvre, running hard into second base, didn't know what had happened. He noticed the fielders standing still. The second-base umpire, Bill McGowan, said, “Come on, kid, keep going, will ya?” Lefebvre had become the first player in major league history to hit a home run on the first swing of his first at bat. It was the only big-league home run he ever would hit.

“The pitcher was Monty Stratton, the guy who got shot,” Lefebvre says. “I always told him, ‘You were so embarrassed, giving up a home run to me, you shot yourself.'”

Moving along to Minneapolis, Lefebvre became part of the Millers' pitching rotation. Williams asked him one day to go to lunch. They were close in age. They were both rookies. Lefebvre felt sorry for the loner and also wanted to know him better. He said he'd be glad to go.

They drove from the park in the Buick, as fast as the Buick would travel. Top down. They screeched to a tidy halt in front of some sandwich shop. Williams led the way.

“He was loud,” Lefebvre says. “We sat down at the counter. He said he wanted a chicken sandwich and a frappe. The sandwich came and he started smelling it. He said, loud voice, ‘Is this chicken fresh?' The owner came over and told him it was. Jesus Christ, it was embarrassing. Ted smelled the chicken some more. He'd say things a nine-year-old kid wouldn't say. No control at all. Anyway, he eats the sandwich, drinks the frappe in about a minute, and says we're out of there. I've got three-quarters of a sandwich still to go.

“We go from there to another sandwich shop. It happens all over again! He orders the same thing, a chicken sandwich and a frappe. He says the same thing. Is this chicken fresh? He starts smelling the chicken. Eats the sandwich, drinks the frappe in a minute, and says we have to go. I'd been to two restaurants, seen him eat two meals, and I still hadn't eaten a whole sandwich.

“He was just cuckoo.”

Williams's friends off the field were not ballplayers. He picked up people who interested him, people who shared his same love for hunting and fishing. The people could come from anywhere, do anything for a living. If they were interesting, he latched on to them. Hard. He once again found other, older men for guidance, adopted them and their families, and they adopted him.

“We lived in a nice neighborhood in South Minneapolis,” Jack Bean says. “One of our neighbors was a widowed woman with a couple of kids. She would go to the beach for the summer and to make ends meet she rented out the house. Ballplayers were a good match, so she rented to players from the Millers.

“In 1939 she rented to Walter Tauscher and his wife, who had a baby. Maybe two kids. And we heard that there also would be this other young ballplayer, 20 years old, who would live with them. That was Ted. My father was kind of a rambler, a first-class talker, a salesman for an ice cream company. He got talking to Ted and found that Ted liked to hunt, and my dad liked to hunt, and they just became friends. He liked Ted, this raucous young guy.”

Bean was a couple of years younger, a gap large enough at that age to make him more onlooker than participant in the relationship between Williams and his dad. He spent more time with Tauscher, a sweet man, who would play catch with him in the driveway. He mostly watched Williams and was amazed. Williams was just so outrageous.

“Our family went to dinner one night at the Hoffmans' house, and we took Ted,” Bean says. “It was a legendary night. Mr. Hoffman was an important guy, some kind of vice president for Woolworth's. He was sort of short and round. I remember Ted meeting him on the porch. He slapped Mr. Hoffman's stomach and said, ‘Good evening, Whale Belly.' I couldn't believe he did that. Mr. Hoffman just looked at him and started laughing.”

The night proceeded from there. Williams didn't talk through dinner. He shouted. When the potatoes came, he said, shouting, “No thanks.” He then took two great servings. Same with the meat. “No thanks.” Two great servings. Same with everything. “No thanks.” He was a steam engine as he chewed.

“What do you do around here for fun?” he shouted when dinner was finished.

Tom Hoffman, the youngest Hoffman, ventured that sometimes everyone played ping-pong. Had Ted ever played ping-pong?

“No, but I know I can beat anyone in the house,” Williams shouted.

“We played table tennis until about 12:30 that night,” Jack Bean says. “Ted couldn't beat anyone in the house, especially Tom Hoffman, but that didn't stop him from trying. His face was all red. He got so mad. He'd still be playing if the kids didn't have to go to bed.”

Good night, Ted. Good night, Whale Belly.

“We played an exhibition against a softball team during the season,” Lefebvre says, remembering a similar kind of offbeat challenge. “The softball team had a great pitcher. Fast pitch. I said to Ted, ‘I'll bet you five bucks you can't get a hit off this guy.' Ted ran for his money. First time up, the guy strikes Ted out. Ted owes me five bucks, and he's steaming. ‘Ten bucks,' Ted says. Okay. He gets up there and hits a home run, maybe 400 feet, off this guy. Out of the park. He ran around the bases, just laughing and smiling. Like a little kid.”

Every day was a different drama. Williams threatened to quit once, told Donie Bush he was going home to California. Bush calmly told him the club would pay his fare and he could come back when he felt better. (He never left.) A wild fastballer named Bill Zuber beaned him on August 3, knocking him out, sending him to the hospital with a concussion. Three days later he was back, hitting a homer and a double. And then there was the water cooler. Frustrated at fouling out with the bases loaded, he delivered a punch at the glass water cooler, sending glass all over the dugout. Bush went crazy again.

“One day . . . Doc Brown, the trainer, had a little cubbyhole in the clubhouse and was in charge of all the equipment,” Lefebvre says. “Williams goes to him before the game and says he needs a ball to give to a kid. Brown wouldn't give it to him. Williams pouted. He goes out to rightfield, it's only 280 to rightfield, and he leans against the fence. He's still there when the game starts. A ball comes out to right center, and he doesn't move. Stan Spence had to run over all the way from centerfield to make the play Williams was supposed to make. He didn't move. He didn't give a shit. He was a big baby.”

The free pass for all of this, of course, was that he could hit. Try any of it as a scuffling utility infielder, batting somewhere around .250, and you would be back in the family kitchen, eating Mom's home cooking. Hit .366, whack 46 home runs, collect 142 RBI—win the American Association Triple Crown—and even if you finish second in the MVP balloting, the sportswriters already looking at you a little strangely, your future is pretty much bulletproof.

“I remember Ted and my father having a discussion about money in the living room,” Jack Bean says. “The Red Sox general manager, Mr. Collins, had sent Ted a contract for the next year. My father and Ted were talking about it. I remember Ted saying, ‘You mean you think I should ask for more?'”

   

Andy Cohen, the veteran second baseman for the Millers, arranged a postseason barnstorming tour for the team. This was a way to make a few extra bucks, 15 exhibitions against local opposition in the small towns of northern Minnesota, even into the Dakotas. Williams signed on for the tour.

The team went around the state in personal cars. Tauscher drove one of them. Lefebvre and Spence rode in the backseat. Williams sat in the passenger seat. The term “riding shotgun” applied. Williams carried his shotgun.

“There was a thing during the season called Radio Appreciation Day,” Lefebvre says. “Each player got to pick what gift he wanted. Most of us picked clothes, things like that. Williams wanted a case of shotgun shells. He brought the whole case with him on the tour.”

Lefebvre and Spence would fall asleep. . . .

Blam.

“I thought I saw a jackrabbit,” Williams said.

Lefebvre and Spence would fall asleep again. . . .

Blam.

“Another jackrabbit.”

“He used up that whole case of shotgun shells,” Lefebvre says. “I think he shot a few cats, a few dogs, anything that moved. Maybe a cow.”

The love affair with Minnesota had begun for Williams. He never would play again in the state, but he would come back again and again in the off-season in the next decade. There would be other places he loved in the future, places where the hunting and fishing were good and easy, places where he could disappear and walk with ordinary people, far from the publicity storms he started somewhere else, but this was a first.

“He'd check into the King Cole Hotel downtown and come out and see my dad,” Jack Bean says. “The hunting was so easy. You could go around the corner and find a pheasant. My dad and Ted and some other men would go to Green Isle, Minnesota, where my dad grew up, this little town with maybe 460 people, 458 of them Irish, and stay at our relatives' houses and hunt for three or four days at a time and love it.

“It was like Ted was part of the family . . . and here's the thing, neither my father nor I ever went to see him play baseball once. He was just a friend, outside of baseball. I think that's what he liked the most. My father would never show him off. Or anything like that. He was family.”

Bean remembers Williams would let him use his car sometimes on these later trips. Bean decided to pay him back. He introduced him to a new great razor.

“It's called a Gillette,” he said, presenting his gift in the car. “It's adjustable. You turn the dial and you get the kind of shave you want.”

Williams adjusted the razor. He went to the highest setting. He took one swipe, no foam, no soap, and half his face was scraped off. The blood appeared immediately.

“I didn't know what to say,” Bean says. “I didn't know what he was going to do. He would have been justified in doing just about anything. He looked at me and said, ‘Jack, you're right. This razor is great.' Then he threw it out the car window as far as he could throw it.”

Part of Williams's love affair with the state, along with his love for the hunting and fishing and the anonymity, eventually was an actual love affair. There was a definite reason to go back to Princeton. Doris Soule, the girl who had come down to the Kallas Café, seemed pretty interesting. The daughter of a fishing guide, she had been visiting her grandparents in Princeton in the fall of 1938 when he showed up after the end of the barnstorming tour. He was intrigued. She hunted, she fished, she argued with him. What could be better? Her grandfather was the town's last remaining blacksmith.

“The first time I saw Ted, he was an awful sight,” Doris later said. “He hadn't shaved, he had a hole in the seat of his pants (though he did have another pair of pants under those), and he was wearing those earflap things. Taken all in all, I guess I wasn't very impressed.”

“I just couldn't stand him,” she said at another time. “We had arguments all that first evening, and I told him I never wanted to see him again. But I soon learned that when Ted fixes on an idea, he stays with it. He came back the next day.”

Williams had told writers in spring training that he didn't smoke, didn't drink, and “was still a virgin.” Lefebvre says he met Doris and thought she was “a nice-looking girl, very pleasant, and I don't know how the hell she could stand him.”

Paul Westeman, 85, remembers her in Princeton.

“I remember that she was nice enough looking,” he says. “I also remember that she was sexually active.”

Really? How would you remember something like that 65 years later?

“She'd been sexually active with my best friend, Buddy,” the 85-year-old man says.

Ted Williams had a girlfriend.