10
Boston
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of the bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into an immense kind of open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is non-transferable.
JOHN UPDIKE, THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 22, 1960
The 1957 season was his late-career masterpiece. If 1941 and the .406 batting average was his work of inspiration—a 23-year-old rising star startling everyone with his fresh approach, his energy, his fire—1957 was the triumph of experience. The young man has to overcome the things he doesn't know to succeed. The old man has to overcome the things he no longer can do.
That was what Williams did here. He was 38 years old at the beginning of the season, 39 at the end, and unsure each day of what surprises his body might have for him. He was a senior citizen, an elder statesman, a relic in his environment. He hit .388 and led the American League in batting.
“When did you come up to the big leagues?” he asked Red Sox broadcaster Curt Gowdy one day.
“I was up in 1949,” Gowdy replied. “I was with the Yankees for two years before I came here in '51.”
“Then you saw me when I was really great,” Williams said. “I'm glad you saw me when I was really great. Before Korea.”
The pin from 1954 was still in his shoulder and bothered him at night. Not in the games, just at night. Sleeping. His elbow, the one he broke in the All-Star Game in '50, still bothered him in the cold. He never felt that his swing had come all the way back from that injury. His respiratory system, never good in the spring and fall, now was a time bomb. Since Korea, when he caught a cold, pneumonia seemed a step away.
He was susceptible to all the aches and pains and twists and turns of a man approaching 40 who asks too much of his body. He had missed a bunch of games and been bothered for a long time by a bad ankle when he slipped off a shower clog in the 1956 season. Slipped off a shower clog! He was at an age when the healing process now took time.
All of this caused him to go to Sarasota with questions in his head. How many games would he play? How well would he stay together? He had a feeling that this was it, 1957, the end. There was no public pronouncement, no magazine article, not this time, but that was how he felt. Why not give it his best shot? Not that he ever didn't give it his best shot.
“I never did anything special in the off-season, just fish and hunt,” Williams said. “Off-season work is just important that you don't get a hell of a lot out of shape. Way overweight. Hell, I hadn't played in a year and a half when I was in the service and I was playing in ten days. Fellows hurt themselves drinking and getting fat.”
He arrived in Sarasota in this good shape, took a dollar from traveling secretary Tom Dowd after Dowd bet him he couldn't hit a ball over the distant rightfield fence in a certain exhibition game (he hit two), and stayed in shape. He started well, hit well, and took a couple of different approaches: he hit the ball to left and he kept quiet.
This was the spring he made headlines with his comments to sportswriter Crozet Duplantier in the New Orleans airport lounge about the Marines, about being recalled to Korea, about Harry Truman and Senator Robert Taft and other “gutless politicians.” He never thought he would be quoted, and when he was, he was embarrassed. After issuing all the appropriate apologies and explanations, he basically decided to keep his mouth shut.
“I was so mad about the New Orleans incident I wouldn't say anything to anybody,” he explained ten years later to Miami sportswriter Edwin Pope. “You might say your boss or some political candidate is lousy in a rhubarb session, but you don't write that . . . things that are unfair or untrue or prejudiced always made me fired up and go hit better.”
Pope, whose first choice of 1941 for a Williams book was rejected by the editors of the Golden Year Series because it was in conflict with a book about Joe DiMaggio's 56-game streak, substituted 1957 as Williams's golden year. He interviewed Williams extensively about the season, collecting all the words the famous man held back while he flat-out stunned the American League one more time.
The key to 1957, it turned out, was the bat as much as the batter.
“I picked up a 341⁄2-ounce bat on the way north from spring training, a little heavier than what I had been using,” Williams explained. “I tried it out and, boy, I was ringing the ball with it. Boom, right through the middle. I said, ‘Hell, I'm going to start the season with this bat.' It was about two ounces heavier than the bat I normally used. It had iron in it. I started the season with it, and I never hit the ball consistently harder than that year.”
The heavier bat stopped him from pulling the ball as often. As early as the second game of the season, against the Yankees, bang, he had a hit to left against the shift, straight through the shortstop hole. Bang, another one. Next game, three for five. Bang. He used the bat through the spring, and soon the mouth-to-ear-to-mouth telegraph of pitchers and managers started to spread a new message: maybe Williams can't get around on the fastball anymore. The shift started to be shifted back toward normal dimensions.
Williams's crucial time for accumulating average, proven fact, always was the spring, when the weather was cold. If he started well in the spring, the summer months would carry themselves. After the first two weeks of the season, he was hitting .474 with nine home runs. He was rolling. This was the best start of his career.
“So when it gets warmer, I go back to a little lighter bat,” Williams said. “Where I hadn't been getting hits between first base and second base, now I'm getting them. They couldn't shift me so much and I'm going to pulling again. Balls are going through for me that hadn't been going through for five or six years. This was the beginning of the breakthrough for me. This was the real secret of this year.”
Quietly, unannounced, virtually unnoticed by the chorus in the press box, he finally had solved the Boudreau Shift. He also had solved the slider, the pesky third option that pitchers had been adding in recent years. Forget the fastball with some pitchers, forget the curve. Want to get cute with the slider? He simply watched the curveballs and fastballs go past. He waited for the slider! He drilled it. He drilled everything.
He had three home runs against Chicago's Bob Keegan on May 8. This was his first three-homer game in a decade. He had three more homers in a game against Early Wynn and Bob Lemon on June 13. This was the first time in American League history a man had two three-home-run games in a single season.
On May 16, Jim Bunning of the Detroit Tigers gave him momentary pause. Bunning struck him out three times, and Tigers catcher Frank House told him, “You're swinging too hard. You're grunting and groaning.” Williams's reply was “I only grunt when I miss.” He was, to put it mildly, mad. Pissed.
“He came back to the dugout after that third strikeout,” Billy Consolo says. “I don't know how to describe the bat rack. The bats go in sideways into little cubicles, you know? The knobs are at the end with your number written across, so you know which bat to take.
“Ted comes down the stairs in the dugout. He throws his bat in the cubicle. Then he takes his fist, swings as hard as he can, punches into the cubicle into the middle of the bats. He swung so hard he knocked little pieces off the knobs of four or five of the bats! His arm is all the way in there, and when he pulls it out, his hand is just covered with blood. He was madder than a hornet.”
Williams had a routine. “Bottom of the ninth, two on, two out, Briggs Stadium in Detroit, Williams at the plate . . . ,” was the situation he had loudly described for himself in the batting cage for concentration ever since his All-Star home run in 1941. In the following days, his teammates heard a little addition. “Bottom of the ninth, two on, two out, Briggs Stadium in Detroit, Jim Bunning on the mound. . . .”
The rematch came on July 12. Consolo sat on the bench and said, Holy Jeez, what's going to happen? Everyone remembered the bloody hand. Williams bet Red Sox PR director Joe McKenney 25 cents he would hit a home run off Bunning. First time up, slider, home run off the top of the third deck at Briggs. Second time up, fastball, deep into the second deck. No need for the imagined home run in the bottom of the ninth.
“The ball came up and in on a slider from Bunning, instead of down,” Williams said. “That gave me trouble. I'd be looking for it and swing from my ass and be, ugh, just underneath it. I was missing the fucken sliders and he had that little extra speed. I made up my mind I was going to get on top of the fucken ball. Pssssshhh! That's what I did.”
His competition for this batting race was Yankees wunderkind Mickey Mantle. Now in his seventh season after seamlessly replacing Joe DiMaggio in centerfield for the Yanks, the switch-hitting, 26-year-old Mantle not only had outlasted Williams for the title in 1956, the saliva season, with a .353 average to Williams's .345, but also had won the Triple Crown, leading the league in homers and RBI.
The press tried to make the competition into a prizefight, indicating that Williams was mad, furious, about Mantle's success a year earlier. Williams wasn't talking, so the stories continued. At the end of August, the two men virtually were tied. Williams had come through the summer heat with a .377 average and 33 home runs. Mantle was at .376 and had one more home run. The pennant race was done for the Red Sox, of course, so this was the closing show of the season.
“I wasn't mad at Mantle at all,” Williams said. “Every year, whoever I thought I had to beat, they were my targets and I'd watch and see what they were doing. It was just a goal in yourself. Not anything to publicize. Never anything personal.”
In the first week of September, working the prizefight analogy, both boxers went back to their corners and stayed there for a while, exhausted. On September 1, Williams checked out of the lineup with a cold and checked into Sancta Maria Hospital one day later with what turned out to be pneumonia. Almost at the same time, Mantle checked out of the lineup with shin splints and on September 6 checked into Lenox Hill Hospital in New York with what turned out to be torn ligaments around his left ankle.
Mantle never recovered. He hit only one more home run the rest of the way, and his average fell to .365, still the highest of his career. Williams went in the other direction. After missing two weeks—a Hy Hurwitz article in the middle of this period predicted he would miss the entire season and probably was finished forever—Williams informed Mike Higgins on September 17 that he felt well enough to pinch-hit against Kansas City if needed.
In the eighth inning, the call came. The Red Sox were trailing, 8–6, and he blasted a two-run shot off Tom Morgan to tie the game. The fun had begun. The Red Sox had two days off and then opened a series in New York. In the first game, Williams pinch-hit to lead off the ninth and whacked a 2-2 pitch for a homer off Whitey Ford. In the second game, he hit a grand slam off Bob Turley in the second inning, the 15th grand slam of his career, then walked three times. In the third game, he homered off Tom Sturdivant, singled and walked twice.
He had hit four home runs in his first four official times at bat after being in the hospital with pneumonia. The fact was even tougher to comprehend than the numbers.
“It's a lot tougher to hit four home runs in a row this way than in a single game,” Williams said. “You're playing at night, during the day, different places, four different pitchers. It's a lot tougher than doing it in four at bats against the same pitcher on the same day.”
The accomplishment was doubly satisfying because most of it came at Yankee Stadium. He would finish his career with a .309 batting average at the Stadium, 30 home runs, 94 RBI, but always was frustrated by the number of times the Yankees walked him. Given a chance, Yankees manager Casey Stengel always walked Ted Williams.
“I'm gonna guess I walked more times there than anybody else who ever stepped into that stadium,” Williams said. “Without question. I know I walked more there than I did in any other park.”
The four home runs in four official at bats became part of another streak to mark Williams's return. He reached base 16 consecutive times. No one ever had kept records for something like this, but it certainly seemed like a record.
On September 23, the streak was stopped in Washington when he grounded out against the Senators' Hal Griggs, but in the next at bat he homered. The end of the season simply belonged to him, the old man in the race, the 39-year-old tortoise against the 26-year-old hare. On September 28, he went one for three against Sturdivant at Fenway, to finish with a .388 average.
Jimmy Carroll drove him to the airport after the game.
“He was going to Labrador to go fishing,” Carroll says. “He had to fly to some place in Canada, then take a small plane to Labrador. I thought about that. I said, ‘Ted, I wouldn't be getting on some small plane to fly to . . . Labrador.'”
“Well, I would,” Williams replied.
He always would list the .388 as his greatest baseball achievement, better than the .406, because of what it involved. This was the product of hard labor as opposed to the 1941 product of joy. If he could have run at all, he would have hit over .400. All he needed were eight more hits, bleeders, bang-bang, beat the throw. Wouldn't he have collected the eight more hits if he could run?
The writers again snubbed him in the MVP voting, announced in November. Mantle received 233 votes. Williams received 209. One writer had Williams listed ninth on his ballot, another tenth. Red Sox owner Yawkey called the two writers “incompetent and unqualified to vote.” This was the fourth time Williams had finished as MVP runner-up, second in the .406 season to the Yankees centerfielder, second in the .388 season to the next Yankees centerfielder. He had won the award twice.
“No comment,” Williams said when asked his reaction.
He was in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was making a fishing film.
His life outside the ballpark during this time was only a rumor to the younger men who played with him. He was dominant in the clubhouse, talkative on the trains and planes, even sat down now and then to play gin rummy, then he disappeared. On the road, he stayed in a different hotel now under a pseudonym (Al Forrister was one of them) to keep away from the autograph seekers and the noise. At home, he simply wasn't around once the game ended.
He often was gone before the final out.
“I was his official pinch runner,” Consolo says. “Gene Stephens was his ‘caddy,' who would come in to play the final inning or two, but I was the pinch runner. In 1956 I scored more runs than I had at bats. I had 11 at bats. I scored 13 runs. Is that a record? We'd come into the clubhouse after the game and he'd be gone.”
When Williams wasn't gone, Consolo often would watch him leave the parking lot. Consolo walked to the games from the Hotel Kenmore, where he lived. Williams drove from the Somerset. Consolo would linger sometimes, unnoticed, to watch his exit. Fans would be gathered outside the gates of the cramped lot waiting just for Williams. He would drive through them in the Cadillac. It was pandemonium.
“I always was waiting for someone to get killed,” Consolo says. “He'd floor it, hit the brakes, floor it, hit the brakes. It was all stop and go until somehow he got through.”
Where did he go? What did he do? He was from another generation now. He never was part of any married social scene with the Red Sox, even when he was married. He had never been part of the single social scene, and now, older than everyone else, he wouldn't know where to start. He had his own scene.
“Ballplayers wouldn't ask me to go out and drink because they knew I wouldn't,” Williams said. “Besides, I didn't want to talk only baseball. Most ballplayers are so damn dumb you can't get anything from them. I wanted to talk about pitching, world events, something different from what the others did. I never believed in replaying the game. What happens when you replay the game? You second-guess somebody always. The guy you're talking to will go back and tell the other guy, ‘You know what Williams said?' Instead of saying we were discussing it with Joe Kluttz, because who gives a shit what Joe Kluttz said?”
He had his guys. Johnny Buckley, first in Brighton, then in Lexington, was the theater manager in Cambridge who first met Williams when he told him to put his feet down from the seat in front while watching a movie. John Blake was the state trooper from Foxboro who stopped him back in 1939, rookie season, and became his friend forever. There were always guys to call. Abby Gordon. Fred Corcoran, the agent. Jimmy Carroll. Joe Lindia in Cranston, Rhode Island.
“Joe was always a big Ted Williams fan. Ted was his guy,” Dottie Lindia says about her husband. “We had a restaurant in Cranston. One day, Joe's brother, Eddie, calls from Florida. He was down there on vacation with his wife, Muriel. Eddie was out fishing, and his wife was waiting for him, back at the marina. She was drinking a Narragansett beer. Ted Williams came in and spotted the Narragansett beer, from New England, and started talking to Muriel. She was pretty cute. Ted asked, ‘What are you doing?' She said she was waiting for her husband, who was out fishing.
“They got talking, and when Eddie came in, he was flabbergasted. Ted asked Eddie to go fishing with him the next day. That's when Eddie got on the phone to Joe and said, ‘You'll never guess who I'm going fishing with tomorrow.' Joe heard the name and said, ‘Guess what? I'm going fishing with you too!'
“He closed the restaurant. He got a plane to Miami that night. He took a bus to the Keys. When he got off the bus, early in the morning, Eddie and Ted were waiting for him. Ted said, ‘Hey, I understand you want to do a little fishing.' They went from there.”
“I always thought Ted had a genuine feeling for people,” Jimmy Carroll says. “I remember driving with him the day after Herb Score, the Cleveland pitcher, had been hit in the eye with a line drive against the Yankees. Ted was really shook up. Really, really shook up.”
Carroll's experience with his mother and Williams confirmed his thought. His mother dropped to the sidewalk from a stroke at South Station one afternoon, waiting for the City Point bus on her way home from work. Carroll didn't learn the news until he came home, 1:30 in the morning, after hanging around with Williams at the Somerset. He went to Carney Hospital, stayed with his mother until 4:30 A.M., when the doctors told him she was stable and he should go home and get some rest. He fell dead asleep.
“The phone rings at eight o'clock,” Carroll says. “It's Ted. He was supposed to go do something on the North Shore, and I had made plans to drive him. He's shouting, ‘Where the hell are you, bush?' He's just going on. I couldn't get a word in, because that's Ted. Finally, I'm able to tell him about my mom going to the Carney with a stroke. He just melted. The line went dead. He said something low in his voice and then he hung up. I went back to bed.”
Carroll showed up at the hospital in the afternoon. His mother was now the star, getting the best treatment in the place. What had happened? Ted Williams had showed up! The place had been crazy. Williams had gotten directions to the hospital, drove, become lost, was stopped for speeding, and was escorted to the hospital—the Pope of Baseball—with the sirens screaming. He wound up visiting patients up and down the hall, then said, “I have to go to work now,” and played an afternoon game at Fenway.
“Then he calls me up that night to have dinner with him,” Carroll says. “The Union Oyster House. Upstairs. We got talking about death, I remember. He was very interested in cremation. He wanted to know what the Catholic Church thought about it. I said I didn't know. He said cremation was for him. He couldn't see lying in a box, all those people coming past. Waterman's, the biggest funeral home in Boston, was right up the street from the Somerset. He said he hated seeing the crowds there. Not for him. It was one of two times he talked about cremation. The other was when we went to visit Harry Agganis at Sancta Maria Hospital.”
Agganis was the tragic story of Boston sport. Named Aristotle George Agganis—“Ari” Americanized to “Harry” early through mispronunciation—he grew up in Lynn, one of the many mill towns north of the city. He was handsome as any Greek sculpture, a triple-threat quarterback who took Lynn Classical High School to a mythical national championship at the Orange Bowl in his junior year, then played to crowds totaling over 160,000 people in his senior year.
Scorning scholarship offers from around the country to stay near his widowed mother, he was an all-American at Boston University. Scorning pro football offers after college, he signed a fat bonus contract to play baseball for the Red Sox. He was Consolo's roommate at Sarasota when they both were rookies in 1953. Consolo remembers the phone ringing every day, a phone call from Paul Brown of the Cleveland Browns encouraging Agganis to quit baseball and quarterback the Browns.
In 1954, after a year in minor league Louisville, Agganis hit .251 with the Red Sox with 11 home runs and 57 RBI in his first season in Boston. In 1955 he was hitting .313 when he became sick. On May 16 he complained of chest pains. He went into the hospital, came out, went back in again. On June 27, while doctors tried to help him sit up, he died from a pulmonary embolism, a tragic end.
Williams was the only Red Sox player allowed to visit him in the hospital. Carroll drove him to Cambridge and back.
“What do the Greeks think about cremation?” Williams asked on the ride home.
“Nah, you wouldn't know,” Williams answered before Carroll could speak. “You don't even know what the Catholics think.”
“He went into it again, about how he wouldn't want to be laid out in a funeral parlor,” Carroll says. “That's all we talked about coming back.”
Williams was now conscious of age and mortality. He felt old. The routines of, say, the .406 season, had changed. He did not fish anymore on the day of games. He did not show up before everyone else at the ballpark and did not stay later than everyone else. He still had a bat in his hands at all times at the ballpark, feeling the wood, swinging, measuring, but he also was measuring his body. He saved his energy.
“When you get older, it takes all of your stamina to get loose,” he said. “It's a fight to get loose before you get tired. In a lot of cities I'd walk to the park to get loose. Not New York, but a lot of cities. In Detroit, you'd walk through a slum area. You'd be stopped by 40 drunks, four whores and a lot of sick people. They wouldn't know who you were, but they thought that anybody who would walk through in decent clothes was a millionaire.”
The suite at the Somerset was home base. He could admit who he wanted into his life, keep out the rest. He would watch Jack Paar on the television, would eat ice cream straight from the quart container, would look down from his window at the traffic and the people on Commonwealth Avenue. He would call who he wanted on the phone, all calls in return stopped by the switchboard for clearance. He would order room service more often than not. This was the environment he could control.
Most of the time.
“The air conditioner wasn't working one day,” Jimmy Carroll says. “He called down to send someone up. No one came. He called down again. No one came. Ted was pissed off. He fooled with the air conditioner and it didn't work. He kicked it. Hard. It fell off the wall into the room.
“The guy finally came up. The air conditioner's just sitting there. It's all beat up. He said, ‘What happened here?' Ted said, ‘I don't know. The air conditioner fell off the wall.' ‘How the hell did it fall off the wall?' ‘I don't know.' ‘Did you kick it?' ‘No.' The thing had a big dent. Ted had such a grin on his face.”
There were women in his life. Yes, there were women. The name of a different woman would surface every few years in the paper, the woman claiming that she was going to be the next Mrs. Ted Williams. She usually would be a model or an actress from New York, and the headline would not hurt her career.
“We talked about bubble gum,” one of the women breathlessly told UPI when quizzed about her phone calls with Williams. “Some company was going to put his picture in bubble-gum packages.”
Maureen Cronin, the daughter of Joe Cronin, was a kid, just about the same age as Bobby-Jo. She had a crush on Williams and tried to see him wherever he was. She stood in line one day at an autograph event. Some women were in front of her. They had their baseball signed, and when they looked at the ball as they walked away they all started screaming, laughing. Cronin followed them.
“What's so funny?” she asked.
The women showed her the ball. It read “Room 231, Hotel Somerset.”
“Women chased him everywhere,” George Sullivan says. “I was sitting with him once in the dugout in Washington, just the two of us. This woman must have lay down on top of the dugout because all of a sudden her head is right in front of us. Hanging over the edge. Upside down. She had long, long hair. It hung way down. Two feet, maybe three. She's talking to Ted, asking to meet him, basically asking, ‘Can I screw you?' Ted played along with her a little bit, but then got tired of her and told her to get the fuck off the dugout. I guess he didn't like the way she looked upside down.”
“I was pitching for Washington, maybe the Yankees, after I left the Red Sox,” Mickey McDermott says. “I had something going with a woman in Boston. I asked Ted if I could use his room, because I didn't want the manager to know. Ted gave me the key. I went in and there was a bottle of wine, chilled, waiting for me. A little plate of cheese and crackers. The stereo was set up with a record by that colored guy, the piano player—Erroll Garner? It was all laid out for me. He did have some style, Theodore.”
Williams's laundry was brought to the suite a couple of times per week by Arthur D'Angelo. Arthur worked at the Somerset as a primary job and ran a souvenir business with his twin brother Henry in his extra time. They were young, immigrant entrepreneurs from Italy, selling pennants and autographed baseballs and whatever other trinkets people would buy from two little carts on Jersey Street. Some of the balls and pictures and other merchandise had Ted Williams's signature on them.
“We had a stamp with his autograph,” Arthur, who now owns half of Jersey Street and whose Twins Enterprises supplies souvenirs for the entire country, says. “We just stamped his name on things. He'd tell me sometimes, ‘I know you fucken guys are making a lot of fucken money off me,' but he never asked for any of it.
“It was different back then. The games mostly were during the days, and the crowds weren't anything like they are today. You didn't sell a lot of stuff, and Ted really didn't care that much about the money. Not like the guys today.”
At the Somerset, Arthur had the only extra key to the suite. He would run assorted errands for Williams, deliver the clean clothes, mostly when Williams was on the road. Every now and then, though, when Williams was at home, Arthur would stumble into social situations. He would see some women. Nothing scandalous, understand, just a woman in the room here, a woman there. Arthur was surprised at the women. He did not think they always were particularly attractive.
“Ted,” he finally said, “Joe DiMaggio is married to Marilyn Monroe. What's the deal? You could have any woman you want. These women I see, I hate to say it, mostly are dogs.”
Williams made a crude anatomical remark about all women being basically the same. He wasn't looking for Marilyn Monroe.
The next three years, the closeout to his Red Sox career, were marked by the same kinds of battles he had with his body in 1957. He constantly was trying to keep the parts working. The Associated Press voted him Athlete of the Year for 1957—ahead of World Series hero Lew Burdette, middleweight champ Carmen Basilio, Texas A&M running back John David Crow, and Stan Musial (Mantle was 13th)—but the Athlete of the Year was not exactly ready for four-minute miles and handstands. He mostly was trying to keep his athletic self together.
The magic of the .388 year didn't linger. He was hurt a week after the season ended. Trying to reach a landlocked trout in Labrador, he caught his left foot between two rocks and twisted his ankle. The injury lingered through the winter and into spring training for 1958.
When the ankle started to get better, he hurt his side. He was just demonstrating his batting stroke. The side seemed to feel better, then he hurt it again, demonstrating again. On Opening Day, he was sick with food poisoning from eating tainted oysters a night earlier. He missed the game.
The best start of his career in '57 was replaced by the worst start of his career in '58. The league had mandated the use of protective headgear at the plate for the first time—“miner's caps,” the players called the helmets—and Williams took the least-protective, least-obtrusive route, inserting a plastic liner inside his regulation cap, but even that didn't feel right.
He was hitting .225 on May 20. Mel Ott, the Hall of Fame outfielder for the New York Giants who retired in 1947, sympathized in the Globe with the idea of an old man playing a young man's game.
“Here is a man, almost 40 years old . . . ,” Ott said. “When I reached 40, I'd hung 'em up long ago. I had to. I ran out of gas.
“It was plain murder trying to play when I was only 37. Bill Klem, the old umpire, gave me a helpful hint one time. He suggested that every night I got five pounds of raw epsom salts and drop them into a steaming tub and jump in. I'd spend half an hour in the tub, then crawl into bed, exhausted. I barely made it. Every bone and muscle in my body ached.”
Only three players in the big leagues—Murry Dickson, Enos Slaughter, and Mickey Vernon—were older than Williams. On May 21, there was another indication of how old Williams was: the Colonel, Dave Egan of the Record, his biggest and most persistent critic, died.
Egan was found in the living room of his Wakefield home by his wife, Mary. He had been having assorted health problems, but his death by natural causes was still a surprise. He was 57 years old and already had worn out his body.
His wake at the Horace A. McMahon Funeral Home and his funeral at St. Joseph's Church were large affairs. Archbishop Richard J. Cushing, soon to become Boston's most famous cardinal, officiated the Mass. He eulogized Egan as a man “blessed with a great natural talent.”
“He had a powerful pen and a facility for turning the English language into a most effective form of writing,” the archbishop said. “He accomplished a great deal of good. For many people, the sports pages of the newspaper are the most important section. While all the people who read his columns didn't agree with him, they all appreciated him. They enjoyed him. And to bring joy to people is a great thing.”
Egan left a complicated legacy. He was the only writer in Boston who had complained loudly about the Red Sox' racist outlook under Yawkey, the only one who saw the shame in a forced, half-baked, no-chance tryout in 1945 for Negro League stars Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williams. He was often credited or derided as one of the major forces in the Boston Braves' decision in 1953 to leave town. He was a different voice at all times, making fun of the powerful and successful, siding with the unpowerful and unsuccessful . . . and, of course, there were his “accounts” at the racetracks and boxing rings.
His columns about Williams were remembered more than any others. He had been a defender of Williams in personal situations—the controversy surrounding the birth of Bobby-Jo, for instance—but a constant critic on all other matters. No one had attacked Williams more often.
“I used to sell the Record at the ballpark when I was a kid,” Ray Flynn, later the mayor of Boston, says. “It cost three cents, and I'd always fish around in my pocket, looking for change, hoping the guy would say ‘keep the two cents.'
“Ted Williams was my idol. Whenever the Colonel would write something bad about him, I'd go through all my papers and rip out the page that had the Colonel's column on it. It was my own little tribute to my hero. I swear on my mother I did this.”
Honorary pallbearers at Egan's funeral included owner Walter Brown and star Bob Cousy of the Boston Celtics, Milt Schmidt of the Boston Bruins, boxers Tommy Collins and Tony DeMarco, race track owner B. A. Dario, and Joe Cronin of the Red Sox. Egan's space in the newspaper the next day was taken by Larry Claflin, a young Record columnist.
“Hardly a day passed when someone wouldn't ask you if you knew the Colonel and what kind of man he was,” Claflin wrote. “It was a difficult question to answer and it still is. He was a man of frequently short temper. He would have all the patience in the world with those who interrupted him if he liked them, but none if he didn't like the visitor. He had a savage typewriter when the occasion demanded, yet a beautifully gentle one at times. His typewriter seemed to always have the right word at the right time, but only when he sat at it. . . .
“And you thought to yourself that the Colonel was a man with whom you just had to disagree at times, because he always took a strong stand, but he was a man you just had to read,” Claflin concluded. “And you thought about the time Ted Williams called you ‘the poor man's Dave Egan' and you admitted that you always felt that was a compliment.”
Williams was on the road for all of this. On May 23, the day Egan was buried, the wheels and levers to calibrate his swing all seemed to slip back into place. After reading an Egan-esque column in a Kansas City paper suggesting that he was finished, done, he went 4-for-4 against the A's, including a grand slam homer. The long climb to statistical respectability began.
He was close to .300 in June and was at .308 by the All-Star Game, where Casey Stengel had to add him to the roster, the first time he was not chosen for the starting lineup. He continued at this pace, slowly climbing through the second half of the season. There was a spitting incident in Kansas City when he didn't run out a ground ball and was booed and fined $250. (“I'm sorry,” he half-apologized. “Principally, I'm sorry about the $250.”) He had a game in Detroit where he hit two monster home runs, one of them off Jim Bunning. He missed time with both a sore wrist and his usual respiratory woes.
When late September came, he found himself in a late race for the batting title. His unlikely opponent was slap-hitting second baseman Pete Runnels, his teammate. Runnels, traded from the Senators to the Sox in the off-season for Albie Pearson and Norm Zauchin, had benefited from the fact he batted second in the lineup and Williams batted third. Pitchers had to throw strikes to Runnels because they knew they still had to be careful when Williams came to the plate.
On September 22, Runnels was leading the chase by six points. Williams was struggling, hitless in his last seven at bats. He was not a happy man. The opponent at Fenway was the Senators. In the first inning, Runnels singled and Williams grounded into a double play. The unhappiness grew. In the third, Runnels singled again. Williams was called out on a third strike down the middle of the plate from Bill Fischer. The unhappiness became fury.
Angry at himself, not the umpire, he turned away from the plate and took the swing he should have taken at the fat strike. He went to release the bat toward the dugout in disgust on his follow-through, but his hand stuck for an instant on the mixture of olive oil and resin that he used for grip. The bat flew out of his hand and out of control and into the stands. The knob end struck the head of 60-year-old Gladys Heffernan, the housekeeper for Joe Cronin, sitting in her boss's box seats.
Williams was mortified. It was an accident, of course, but one of those accidents—“Don't run with that pencil in your hand, you'll poke your eye out!”—that kids have when they're doing something they shouldn't do. He rushed to the box and apologized to the bleeding woman. He went to the first aid room to see her. He cried. The fans booed.
“I don't see why they had to boo him,” the plucky Heffernan said, not seriously injured. “I felt awfully sorry for him. He came 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.”
Williams said, “I wanted to die.”
Once again, his emotions had become a public spectacle. How did this happen? Why did it always happen to him? Dr. Sidney Farber, the head of Children's Hospital and the Jimmy Fund, an associate and friend of Williams's, already had given the best explanation in a quote in a story called “How Ted Williams Became Popular” in the June 1958 issue of Sport magazine.
“My two teenage boys watch Ted at Fenway Park and we have some serious talks around the dinner table about baseball and Ted,” Dr. Farber said. “Here's what I tell my boys. There is a man running 100 yards in 10 seconds and he steps on a little pebble and falls down and breaks his neck. The same man, walking 100 yards at his leisure, would never even have noticed that pebble. There is that tremendous strain to strive to do so well in Ted. That intenseness, that fight toward perfection. Here is a man with greatness as an athlete. I can't understand why people sometimes boo him. If he bats .400, which is considered as near to perfection as a player can get, it means also that he has failed 600 times. I think we should remember the 400 times he has hit safely and not dwell on the rest.”
The typists in the press box again decided to dwell on the rest. Williams, who doubled in his last at bat in the game, surrounded by boos from the Fenway crowd, was fined $50 for the incident by league president Will Harridge. The typists thought Williams was handled quite lightly.
“Consider what would have happened if a less important and popular player—say Julio Becquer of the Senators—had thrown the bat after taking a third strike,” Harold Kaese suggested in the Globe. “He probably would have been (1) kicked out of the game, (2) fined much more than $50 and suspended, (3) arrested, and (4) told to go back to Cuba and stay there.”
“It is the excuse of Williams' partisans that disgust with himself provoked him into throwing the bat that struck the old lady,” Jimmy Cannon wrote for the North American News Alliance. “I agree with Williams' opinion of himself.”
The words were nothing but a late-season tonic to the perpetrator of the dastardly deed. Always focused by personal crisis, he began a wondrous stretch of hitting, his double setting him off on a .500 pace for his final 28 at bats. On the next-to-last day of the season, he was tied to the ninth percentage point with Runnels at .322. The difference in the math was that his .322 was on 130 hits in 403 at bats, while Runnels was 180 for 558. Every hit meant more to Williams.
“I'm watching this whole thing on the next-to-last day, and it's just terrific, all this pressure,” Billy Consolo says. “Pete and Ted, one after the other. Pete gets up the first time and hits a triple, and I say, ‘Pete's got it.' Ted walks. Second time up, Pete gets a single, and I say, ‘Well, that's it.' Then Ted gets a single right behind him. ‘Maybe not.' Then Pete gets up and hits a home run. ‘Pete's got it.' Then Ted hits a home run, right after him! ‘Wow.' Then Pete hits a long fly ball that Roy Sievers catches, great catch, and Ted gets a single. Pete's got three hits and he loses the lead. It was just amazing.”
Runnels wound up 3-for-6 on the day. Williams was 3-for-4. For the first time all season, final day of the season, he was at the top of the list. On that final day, with a double and a homer while Runnels went hitless, he clinched the batting title. His sixth. He resembled one of those aging Gary Cooper gunfighters, brought back to the dusty street, still able to do what he did on the right day and in the big moment. He was the American League batting champion at age 40.
“Consolo and I were watching him during a game, I don't remember the year,” Ted Lepcio says. “He hit a ball that almost killed the first baseman. We started wondering about how it was possible to hit a ball that hard. Mickey Vernon was with us, sitting on the bench. He said, ‘Listen, when he first came around, he hit three shots a day down the line like that. I remember when I played against him I asked the manager not to have me hold the runners on first because that son of a bitch hit the ball so fast down there you didn't have a chance.”
In 1959 all that stopped. This was the year the body took control and won the battle over the mind.
A few weeks before spring training began, Williams was swinging a bat underneath a coconut tree behind his house in Islamorada, Florida. He was telling a friend what a good year he was going to have. Something twanged at the base of his neck on the right side during one of the swings. A little something. A “hey!” An “ow!” He thought nothing of it. Except that was his season, right there.
The Red Sox had switched training sites from Sarasota to Scottsdale, Arizona. They opened their exhibition schedule with three games against the Cleveland Indians in San Diego. In the second of the three exhibitions, midway through the game, Williams again felt that small pull at the base of his neck on the right side. A crick. That's what it was, a crick in the neck. The crick in the neck—a pinched nerve—would never leave.
He wound up going to Boston from Scottsdale and straight into traction at New England Baptist Hospital for three weeks. He wound up wearing a cervical collar. He wound up missing the first month and a half of the season. He wound up going 1-for-22, an .045 average, to start his comeback. He wound up benched on June 14 by manager Pinky Higgins. His average now was .175. He was 18-for-103. The Red Sox were in last place in the American League.
“We'll give Teddy a few days' rest,” Higgins told reporters.
“Did Williams suggest this himself?” they asked.
“I just figured it would do him some good,” the manager said.
“But did Williams make the suggestion?”
“No. He's got in a little rut. A few days off will help anybody.”
The move was shocking. For all of his career after the first two seasons, Williams basically had been his own manager. He decided when he would or wouldn't, could or couldn't play. Very few players before him, maybe none besides Babe Ruth, had been given that kind of latitude. Now Williams was being treated like another struggling name on the roster.
“The inevitable has happened: For the first time Ted Williams has been benched for reasons other than his own choosing or through injury, war service or marital mixup,” Austen Lake wrote in the American. “Did we ever imagine we'd see the day when old No. 9 with his droopy pant-legs would be tweezed from the Red Sox lineup because of (1) light hitting—and him the Albert Einstein of the bat, (2) gimpy gallops in pursuit of balls to his outfield sector and (3) inability to get around the bases?
“I report this with a sense of melancholy. For there seemed to be a sense of ‘permanency' about TSW, an ‘imperishable' quality, which went with his super physique and rugged resistance to the ordinaries of life. Who, him? It is a bit of a shock to find he is fashioned of plain meat and bones.”
The time on the bench didn't help. Nothing really helped. Williams would feel uncomfortable at the plate for the entire season. He couldn't turn his head far enough to get a good look at the pitcher. He was back in the pack of the normal, the average, the everybody-else, guessing and swinging and going back to the dugout befuddled. He hit as low as sixth in the order. He was human, normal.
The one leftover constant from his star-power life was his greatest irritant: the attention. He still was Ted Williams, and everything he did was news. Bad news now. He outlined a three-step program to get rid of the problem for Tommy Holmes of the New York Herald Tribune.
“Sportswriters,” he said. “First I'd like to find uranium. Then I'd buy a major league club. Then I'd bar all writers from the park.”
He hit .254 for the sad season, 10 homers, the numbers of a utility infielder, only edging the figures that high when the neck loosened a little toward the end and he started to swing a little better.
“I had a miserable year,” Williams said in My Turn at Bat. “The worst of my career by far. I could barely turn my neck to look at the pitcher. I wasn't getting nearly enough of a look, and I thrashed around all year near .250. A lot of times, I wouldn't even go to the dugout between innings if I didn't think I would get to bat. I'd just wait in the bullpen. I seemed to go from slump to slump. . . . As was pointed out to me by some of my friends in left field, I could spit farther than I was hitting.”
The easy idea would be to quit, to pack it in, to go home. The oft-told story—told by Williams himself—is how he went to see Yawkey on the day after the season ended at Yawkey's suite at the Ritz-Carlton, not knowing what he was going to do. How the owner told him to quit. You've had a great career, you were hurting this year, and I don't want to see you hurt more. Listen, why don't you just wrap it up? How the words struck his ears wrong, one more catcall from the chorus, one more challenge. The faithful follower of Williams's career can almost hear the reply in Williams's head, steam starting to turn the engines. Quit? Go fuck yourself! I'll say when I fucken quit! Not that he said those words out loud. Just that he thought them, chewed on them, used them to make his decision.
One more year. His terms.
He knew he still could hit. That was the one important fact that everyone else seemed not to notice. He was hitting better at the end of the season. If he could keep the parts on the old car lubricated, top off the radiator, and rotate the tires one more time, he could drive out in some semblance of style. Maybe the neck would quiet down with a winter of rest. Maybe nothing new would develop. Maybe he could do this one last thing. The telegrams from Eddie Mifflin listed a string of achievements that could be reached. Eight more homers and Williams would have hit 500. Why not? One more year.
He appeared in the office of Red Sox business manager Dick O'Connell with a strange request in January 1960. In Boston for his now-annual dual-purpose visit for the Sportsmen's Show and contract signing, Williams proposed that he take a pay cut. He'd been paid $125,000 in 1959, the highest salary in baseball, and hadn't played like the best player in baseball. The Red Sox could take back $35,000 for 1960. He would work for $90,000. Fair?
O'Connell tried to talk him out of the idea. Williams was insistent. That was the new contract, $90,000. More than a 25 percent pay cut.
“I don't think that will ever happen again,” O'Connell said, years later, after hundreds of subsequent contract negotiations. “Nowadays, if you want to cut a salary, the players' association is ready to take you to court.”
“I was surprised at first and later I wasn't,” Yawkey said. “You have to know Ted. He's an unusual person. He does what he wants and doesn't give a damn what other people think.”
Ted Williams at a discount. One more year. The Filene's Basement Hall of Famer. How would this work?
“The most we can expect from him is 100 games,” Billy Jurges, now the Red Sox manager, said. “The least we can expect is pinch-hitting.”
Williams arrived in Scottsdale for spring training still wondering what would come next. The pain in his neck was still there. The best encouragement he had received was from a doctor from Johns Hopkins who had stayed in Islamorada for vacation. The doctor told Williams he had suffered from the same type of neck problem and that one day, poof, it simply had disappeared. No reason.
Maybe that would happen here. Maybe not.
Williams's mind also was on events in San Diego in the old house on Utah Street. It turned out he had been more involved with his family than anyone ever knew. His brother Danny, sick for three years with leukemia, would die on March 28. Far from the noses of the Boston press, certainly never mentioned by him, Williams had been involved in Danny's fight against the illness. He had chartered flights for Danny to go to Salt Lake City for treatments. He had provided money to keep Danny's family afloat. He had visited.
“There's been a mythology built up that Ted Williams hated his family,” his nephew, Ted Williams, Danny's son, says. “I just finished David Halberstam's book, The Teammates, that repeats it. That disappoints me. Something gets started and is just perpetuated without research, just a retelling of the old story.
“It's simply not true. There's a quote in Halberstam's book from Bobby Doerr, who says Ted said he hated his family. I'm sure Ted said it. He said a lot of things. The way he talked . . . he said things that sounded a lot worse than they really were. The truth is that he did a lot of nice things for his family. I was just at a gathering, maybe 40 family members, all from the Hispanic side, and they all had stories of things Ted did for them. He took care of everybody at one time or another.
“I think he was as close and as friendly with his family as a loner could be. He really didn't have the time or interest to be around a lot, but he visited. There are pictures of him at some Mexican restaurants, everybody there from the family. He certainly was involved financially.”
Williams would call his relatives on his mother's side “the Mexicans” when talking with his brother. Not, it seemed, in a deprecating way. A Ted Williams way. If he was ashamed of his Mexican heritage, he never said so. If he was proud, he never said so. He never said anything about any of this. He handled his family matters the way he handled his charity work: quietly. He did what he did and shared the facts with no one.
When he was in California, throughout his career and then for the rest of his life, he would pop in and out of Santa Barbara, the home of “the Mexicans.” The visits primarily were to see his aunt, Sara Diaz, who had helped to raise him. Maybe he wouldn't even spell the family name right in his autobiography—“Venzer” instead of “Venzor”—but Danny Venzor lived next door to Sara and other Venzors lived in the immediate neighborhood, and when he visited, he would see most of them.
“I went to live in New York for a while,” Dee Allen, daughter of Saul Venzor, the pitcher who first taught Williams to hit, says. “I went to a game at Yankee Stadium. We sat near the third-base thing, and I asked an attendant to call Ted. Gave him my name. He came right away. We had a nice talk.”
Thirty, forty years later, Williams still was involved. He called Allen and said he had heard that Sara's house needed some help. What was wrong? Allen made a list. He asked Allen to oversee the rehabilitation of the house. She collected estimates to fix the roof, fix the windows, add screens, put a chain-link fence around the property. She called Williams and he okayed the different projects and sent the funds.
“That's the best money I ever spent,” he told a friend.
Was that someone who hated his family? He wrote a letter to Danny in the spring of 1959 that fit his situation perfectly. It was the letter of the still-concerned loner: short, self-absorbed, repentant, but still trying to be involved.
Dear Dan and Jean,
As you probably know, I'm in Phoenix for Spring Training. Right now I'm sore all over. Trying as hard as I can to get in shape to get one more year and be of some good to the club.
Sorry I haven't called or written sooner, but have been so busy getting packed and out here. Its really a rat race.
Saw the people that own the apartment next door and they spoke awfully nice about you folks. He is sure a nice fellow and so is she. She said the Lutz's were all right.
Hope Danny is getting along. Apparently the new medicine is helping. With summer coming on the heat will help him.
Will call next week.
Best, as always,
Ted
Hello to Sam and Ted
Danny had found some stability toward the end of his life as a house painter and carpenter. His son also dislikes the oft-repeated descriptions of his father as a “criminal.” He says his father was angry a lot, exploding at simple situations—which seemed to be a family trait—but was far from a criminal.
“He always wanted things the easy way,” Ted Williams, the son, says. “He could work hard, but then he would make bad decisions. I remember him building the barbecue in the back at Utah Street. I remember him rebuilding the porch. He wasn't afraid of work. The problem was, he'd work hard, say make $80, and then go gambling with it. I guess his idea was that he could make it $300 instead of $80, but that wouldn't happen. He'd come home broke again.
“His anger was an internal situation. He had it, Ted had it, May had it. I'll bet Ted's father, Sam, had it too. My father was like Ted. He could go along, la-de-dah, la-de-dah, then something would boil up and he would cross the line. He'd stomp around the house. Hit people. I remember one time he sent my brother and me to bed and we were in the bedroom, flipping quarters. One of the quarters fell off the bed and made a sound. Rolled across the floor. My father came in, furious, just beat the shit out of both of us. It wasn't what we were doing—we were kids, just playing—it was something inside him. He couldn't stop himself.”
Williams went to Danny's funeral, then arranged to have May move from Utah Street to Santa Barbara to live with Sara, then in a rest home. May was 68 years old, unhinged by the fate of her youngest son. She would be dead within a year. Williams also had a promise for Danny's widow. The boys? His nephews? When they were ready for college, he would pay the bills.
“My mother remarried not too long after my dad died,” Ted Williams, the nephew, says. “We didn't see Ted for maybe the next ten years. Then, when I graduated high school, my mother said, ‘Here's his number. Give him a call. He said he'd send you to college.' I called and that's just what he did for me and for my brother. I'd call him every semester—right around the time tuition payments were due—and give him a progress report. And he'd send a check.”
None of this was ever in the newspapers or the magazines or even his own book. This was family, personal. He didn't talk about family, personal. Not that he didn't carry the personal with him. It seemed to be on his mind when he returned to Scottsdale. The neck still hurt. The body still hurt. The death of his brother still hurt.
He clearly was struggling.
“I keep thinking, ‘Williams, you're dying hard,'” he told Milton Gross of the New York Post. “I keep saying to myself, ‘Your neck hurts, your ankle hurts and your back hurts and you are dying so damn hard.'”
Gross had a unique interview style. He would whisper his questions. It would be maddening to a crowd of sportswriters trying to overhear the answers because the natural reply to a whisper is a whisper. The entire interview would be conducted sotto voce.
“Why did you come back to try it another year when it is so hard?” Gross whispered. “Is it the money? Is it your record, hitting below .300 for the first time in 20 years?”
“I'm not wealthy,” Williams whispered in return. “I can certainly use the money. But that's not all of it. I'd kind of like to redeem myself for last year. Another of the important reasons I came back is that I want to reach 500 home runs.”
The Red Sox offices at Fenway had been swamped with remedies for his strained neck. Fans sent information on miracle salves, miracle diets, miracle doctors, miracle chiropractors. A woman from San Francisco said the neck pain would go away if he massaged his big toe. An ex-Marine from Fort Worth advised rubbing face cream along the “back” of his spine.
“We have a formula which has for years kept our racehorses free of such a condition as you are now troubled with,” a processing manager wrote from Michigan. “When a racehorse is in training for the season he often encounters a condition like yours. This formula heals him while he continues training. Be pleased to send you some if you will use it. There is no charge.”
Nothing seemed to work. The spring was a grind. He never felt right. His comments always would include an “I don't know” and a “maybe I'm done,” and his body still seemed to be screaming at him to go home.
And then the screaming stopped. Opening day in Washington.
“I've been traded to the Senators,” Billy Consolo says. “I'm actually playing. The first inning, I hit a home run. I run the bases, sit in the dugout, and feel pretty good about myself. I can see the headlines about Consolo in the next day's papers. Then Ted gets up in the second inning. He hits a ball off Camilo Pascual that is one of the longest home runs ever hit in Griffith Stadium. I don't think my home run even was mentioned in the stories the next day.”
The shot went almost 500 feet to dead centerfield, clearing a 31-foot wall. Williams hadn't hit a home run in the entire spring in Arizona. Three-two count. Waist-high fastball. He had hit one now in his first at bat in the regular season.
“I put something on it,” Pascual said. “I throw it real good, but it looks like he no care.”
“I think the umpire and I were still watching the ball when Williams came home,” catcher Earl Battey said.
On the next day, the home opener in Fenway against the Yankees, he hit a second shot, curving a Jim Coates waist-high fastball around the foul pole in right. True, he'd be out of the lineup for almost a month from pulling a muscle just running bases in that home run trot, and true, he would then be hit with the annual virus to miss some more games, but the neck was good. He was back.
His final season became a sweet baseball encore, not a pull of the curtain. The home run off Pascual had tied him at 493 home runs with Lou Gehrig, fourth lifetime, and the home run off Coates put him ahead. As the schedule unfolded, he knocked off one after another of Eddie Mifflin's list of goals. He slammed number 495 off Ralph Terry on his return to action on June 5 at Yankee Stadium and went from there. He would hit seven home runs in the next two weeks, 12 in 80 at bats, the best power pace of his career.
In the midst of that streak, he hit number 500, a magic mark, on June 17 against the Cleveland Indians off rookie Wynn Hawkins. He then announced to Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Hal Lebovitz, not the Boston writers, that he was going to retire at the end of the season. For sure this time. He also said he was never going to be a manager. He didn't want the pressure.
“Big guys . . . well, I don't want to say I'm a big guy, but I've been under pressure because I'm a hitter,” he explained. “I guess I've been under pressure all the time.
“I'll give you an example. One time I came into Cleveland here. I can't remember just the circumstances. It may be I was just back from Korea and hadn't been hitting. Anyway, I hadn't been hitting and I was sick.
“But we got here to Cleveland and there was a big headline, ‘Score to Face Williams.' Well, Score had been pitching right along. And I hadn't been hitting. Besides, I was sick. But because of that headline, I had to play. That's the sort of thing I mean. If I became a manager, I'd go right on being under that same pressure. I've had it for 20 years.”
Back in Cleveland in August, he hit homer number 511 off Jim Perry to tie Mel Ott for third place on the all-time list, then soared past Ott with two more shots the next day. On the plane to Baltimore that night, he bought champagne for everyone on the flight, including the sportswriters.
“So scientists think getting to the moon is an accomplishment?” Clif Keane asked the next day in the Globe. “Know what happened to the baseball writers yesterday on the flight here from Cleveland?”
The Red Sox were terrible again, heading toward a seventh-place finish, 32 games out of first, their worst finish in 27 years. The games meant nothing. The rest of the season was a nostalgic last lap around the league for their star. Williams spurned all offers of special presentations at other ballparks and was saluted instead at each stop after a final groundout or pop fly to right only by the standing ovations of a knowledgeable baseball public.
The quotes about him now frequently were in the past tense. The pieces of his career were laid out, a string of cards that went back to 1939. The numbers had become remarkable.
“Do you realize that I'm only six months older than Ted and this is the ninth year I've been gone from baseball?” Bobby Doerr said on a visit to Boston. “I couldn't imagine myself out there trying to do what Ted is doing.”
“He never missed a bus,” Joe Cronin, now president of the American League, said to sportswriter John P. Carmichael in Chicago. “He'd take an upper or a lower on a train. He was a ‘loner' from the beginning. From the first day he appeared, he said: ‘I'd like to leave my playing on the field.' He went along. He took his pitches and he never moaned. That wasn't his nature.
“Ted Williams was built to accept a challenge. He was always at his best. He had a goal for hitting and home runs and he never lost sight of it.”
Cronin sympathized with Williams's path as a loner. The buzz around him often seemed so unnecessary.
“He had his own public relations within himself,” Cronin said. “It could have been better with the press, but so often they wrote about him just to torment Ted and get him going. He was a kid. He had some careless moments when you'd have to yell at him . . . but he never was a disturbing element on the club.
“He'd just get mad at something and there he'd go. His fault was listening to the fans. Players could say the same things to him and he'd laugh, but he'd get mad at the customers. But in his heart he didn't mean it. I always felt that about him.”
On September 25, after the Yankees finally had won the American League pennant, the Red Sox announced that Williams officially was retiring. His final appearance at Fenway Park would be three days later, a Wednesday afternoon game against the Baltimore Orioles.
Dear Boss: This is it,” wrote John Gillooly, sitting in the Colonel's old chair at the Record, for the morning of Williams's final game. “Deal me out. I am through.
“Get another boy and give him a new ribbon and let him take over the keyboard. This is my official resignation. Williams has retired. He won't be back. Neither will I. My old job as a lifeguard at an uptown car-wash is still open. I can return at the same salary.
“The loss of Williams to a Boston sports columnist is like a bad case of athlete's fingers to Van Cliburn. You just can't pound the keys any more. The song has ended.”
The sentiment was perfect. What would the Red Sox do for a leftfielder, for a powerful, consistent bat, a perpetual All-Star? Who cared? Where would all the words go? That was the important question. Take away the haystacks or the water lilies and what would Monet paint? This was a sunset of the imagination, the object of inspiration disappearing forever. If there were no Tintern Abbey, how could there be discussion about what flew around its belfry?
“Our Hemingway,” Gillooly called Williams. “Oh, the stories he has written for us.”
The Great Ted Williams Essay Contest was ending. There never had been anything like it in Boston. The mountain of words around this one man was larger even than his accomplishments on the field. He had been the finest civic entertainment imaginable for 21 years, chin stuck out, taking on all varieties of comers. Yip had been countered with yap, bite with snarl, barbed-wire similes with 450-foot round-trippers. What a wonderful show! Generations had grown up in New England, jumping for the newspaper, gasping or laughing to start the day, taking a side and enjoying it all.
Now it was done?
Almost . . .
Two out-of-town contestants had arrived for the final day. One was the 28-year-old novelist John Updike, simply following his nose to the event. Already celebrated for The Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit Run, on a course to become the preeminent man of letters for an entire generation, he brought a fan's sensibilities to the moment, a hero-worshiper's love. The second writer was Ed Linn, a 36-year-old nonfiction craftsman of sports features and books, on assignment from Sport magazine. He brought the insider's look, the durable cynicism of a Boston native who had followed Williams's entire career with fascination and had spent considerable time inside the ropes with the famous man in mouth-to-mouth combat.
Two perspectives. Updike would describe the flavor and aroma of the gourmet sausage in The New Yorker. Linn would describe how it was made in Sport. The words would be saved and shown to college students in the future.
“On the afternoon of Wednesday, Sept. 28th, 1960, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundskeeper was treading this [leftfield] wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff,” Updike wrote. “The day was overcast, chill and uninspirational. . . .”
“Ted came into the locker room at 10:50, very early for him,” Linn wrote. “He was dressed in dark brown slacks, a yellow sports shirt and a light tan pullover sweater, tastily brocaded in the same color. Ted went immediately to his locker, pulled off the sweater, then strode into the locker room. . . .”
The poetic elegance of the situation, final game, all these years, all of this struggle, would be placed against the cantankerous reality of the competitive man. Updike would describe the ecclesiastical joke he heard behind him from Boston College sophomores. Linn would describe Williams telling some photographers to kiss his ass. Updike would describe the tilt of Williams's head, the nuances of his stance, the busywork of his hands. Linn would describe Williams sweet-talking some unidentified redhead. Back and forth. This was all of it. The whole picture.
The crowd was small, 10,454, everyone bundled against the cold. The Red Sox never had been big on public relations, on show. The largesse of Tom Yawkey, it was said, stopped at the last name on the player payroll. There was confusion too about the day. Was this Williams's last game at Fenway? Or was it his last game period? The Red Sox would head for three more games at Yankee Stadium to close out the schedule. The retirement announcement had been ambivalent about whether Williams would play in those games.
If he was going to New York, well, there probably was bigger Red Sox news to consider on this day. Bucky Harris, the general manager and drinking buddy of Yawkey, had been fired at the tag end of this sad campaign and Jackie Jensen, the hard-hitting rightfielder, had returned. Afraid of flying, Jensen had sat out the year but grown itchy in California. He was on hand to announce that he would be back.
Williams's final game at Fenway was sort of crammed into the middle of all of this. The small crowd indicated how little emphasis had been placed on the moment.
The ceremonies before the game were brief, a few politicians and broadcaster Curt Gowdy speaking. Gowdy's speech was on the fly, off the top of his head, extemporaneous. (“Ted asked me for a copy once,” Gowdy says. “There was no copy.”) Williams's speech was pure Williams, with a shot at the sportswriters and a quick good-bye.
“Despite the many disagreeable things said about me by the Knights of the Keyboard [pointing at the press box]—and I can't help thinking about them—despite these things my stay in Boston has been the most wonderful thing in my life,” he said. “If I were asked where I would like to have played I would have to say Boston with the greatest owner in baseball and the greatest fans in America.”
His final day on the job began.
Baseball is different from other American games. Football, basketball, and hockey are played at an edge-of-the-seat pace. They are car chases, action films, the spectator as pulled into the activity as the participants. Baseball is a drawing-room drama. The spectator sits back, analyzes, discusses. The best big moments arrive at the end, everyone sitting around a long table as Hercule Poirot begins to divulge exactly who done it. That is when the spectator moves to the front of his seat. That is what happened here.
Williams walked in the first inning. . . .
He flied to center in the third. . . .
He flied to right in the fifth, this time forcing outfielder Al Pilarcik to the wall. . . .
He did not come to the plate again until the eighth. . . .
In the on-deck circle was Jim Pagliaroni, one of the many kids in the Red Sox lineup, 22 years old, a catcher. He remembers feeling the moment, knowing that something was going to happen. The excitement.
He had grown up in Long Beach, California, and had turned down a larger offer from the Los Angeles Dodgers and signed with the Red Sox for $85,000 in 1955 simply because his hero was Ted Williams. Brought to the big club immediately under the bonus rule, he had met the man himself for the first time in the bathroom of the clubhouse. Pagliaroni was at one urinal. Williams stepped up to the next urinal and said hello. Pagliaroni had a confused bathroom reaction.
“I almost crapped in my pants,” he says.
The Red Sox had told him to join the Army to get both his military commitment and the weird bonus restriction out of the way, so two years in the service and two more years in the minors had passed, and now he was back with the Red Sox. Ted Williams still was his idol.
“Two things I always tell people,” he says. “First, a few years later I was in the National League. Stan Musial came up to me and asked how I'd liked playing with the Kid. I said, ‘Great,' and he said, ‘You know, people always would compare the two of us. Well, there was no comparison. Ted Williams was the best. He's the only hitter I've never seen check his swing. Not once. Every other hitter, and I've seen most of them, has checked his swing a bunch of times. Never Ted.'
“Number 2, I myself eventually caught behind a lot of great hitters. Musial. Mantle. Roberto Clemente. Hank Aaron. Name 'em. Ted Williams was the only hitter . . . I'd put my glove up, sure I was going to catch the ball, and he would swing and hit it. That was how late he was, how quick. Nobody else ever made me think I was going to catch a ball that was hit.”
Pagliaroni stared now, along with everyone else. What was going to happen? What would Ted do? He came out to a respectful ovation, the 10,454 folk clapping hands, noisier perhaps than if the park had been full, the sound whirling around the empty seats.
On the mound was Oriole reliever Fat Jack Fisher, who had surrendered the last two fly balls to Williams. He was a fastball pitcher working to a fastball hitter.
Williams stood in that familiar straight-up stance, left foot molded to the back of the batter's box. The first pitch was a ball, low. The second was a slider, high. Williams swung and missed it. The next pitch was a fastball. A fastball pitch to a fastball hitter. Williams did not miss it.
“From the moment Ted swung, there was not the slightest doubt about it,” Linn wrote. “The ball cut through the heavy air, heading straightaway to center field toward the corner of the special bullpen the Red Sox built for Williams back in 1941.”
“The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field,” Updike wrote. “From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky.”
Convergence.
Euphoria.
Pagliaroni started walking from the on-deck circle to the plate. He was crying. It was the first time he ever had cried at a baseball game. Another kid, Bill Monbouquette, a pitcher from nearby Medford, was in the bullpen. He couldn't believe what he was seeing as the ball came closer, closer to where he was. He had tried to will the earlier two fly balls through the sky and failed. This one required no help. The ball came over his head and hit an aluminum canopy over the bench where he and the other pitchers were sitting.
“What a noise it made!” he says, more than 40 years later. “It was a joyful, eerie feeling. You were so happy for Ted—what a way to go—but you also realized that this was it for him. You knew you won't ever see this again.”
Monbouquette and the other bullpen pitchers yelled, “Tip it, tip it,” as Williams circled the bases, hoping that he would tip his hat at last to the fans. He never did. Pagliaroni waited at home plate to unload the big hug. He received the fast handshake as Williams hurried past. Business as usual.
Williams put on his blue jacket in the dugout and sat at the end of the bench near Pinky Higgins. The game was held up for four minutes as people cheered “We Want Ted” and asked him to come out for a curtain call. His teammates urged him to do it. He never moved.
“Gods do not answer letters,” Updike wrote, his most famous line.
“I had the impression—maybe I shouldn't say this because it's just an impression—that he got just as much a kick out of refusing to go out and tip his hat to the crowd as he did out of the homer,” Linn wrote, a quote from an unnamed teammate. “What I mean is he wanted to go out with the home run, all right, but he also wanted the home run so he could sit there while they yelled for him and tell them all where to go.”
Higgins sent him back into left for the start of the ninth, then sent kid reserve Carroll Hardy out to replace him. One more ovation. “Tip your hat,” Don Gile, the kid first baseman yelled as Williams passed. Never happened.
The show was closed, done.
The Red Sox quickly passed out word in the press box that Williams would not be going to New York. In the middle of the game, they had announced that his number 9 would be the first number to be retired in club history. If he had been going to go to New York—Linn pointed out that his equipment bag had been packed—it really didn't matter. This was the closeout that everyone had wanted.
The home run was Williams's 521st, leaving him behind only Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx. The hit itself was his 2,654th, just enough to move him past Tris Speaker and into 10th place in career batting average at .344. He had missed five years in the prime of his career due to military service, a sixth due to his assorted injuries and bronchial problems. More than anything, he had persevered, kept going. He had not given up, not given way, not knuckled under to anyone.
He had become—and this was a question to win a dollar bet in any taproom—the first player in history to steal a base in four decades (even though he only had 24, lifetime). He had touched 4,884 bases in his career, knocked in 1,839 runs, and scored 1,798. He had walked 2,019 times, struck out only 709.
A picture of Hitler saluting an all-day troop review in honor of his 50th birthday at Charlottenburgen Chasseau, seven miles outside of Berlin, had been on the front page of the Record the day Williams made his Boston debut in 1939. Men's topcoats were on sale at Filene's for $9.00, $12.00 for herringbone. An electric iron was on sale for a buck at Jordan Marsh. The mother of Amelia Earhart, the local girl who flew away and never returned, was on a vigil. Carole Lombard and James Stewart were starring in Made for Each Other at the Loew's State and Orpheum. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle at the Keith Memorial. Lindbergh was meeting with FDR at the White House.
On this final day, Castro was moving out of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem with “300 pieces of luggage, an unfinished case of whiskey, and two containers of white rice.” Khrushchev was at the UN, dismissing the disarmament speech of British Prime Minister Harold McMillan. JFK was in Albany and Richard Nixon was in Vermont, two days after their first televised debate. Hiroshima Mon Amour was at the Fenway Theater, Steve Reeves was appearing in The Last Days of Pompeii at a number of Loew's theaters. Two-trouser suits were for sale at $54.95 at Jordan Marsh. A 21-inch black-and-white table model was available for $89.95 at Tip-Top TV.
“A day for some of your especial assets and for assisting others, establishing achievement and a well-run place or activity,” Williams's horoscope had read in the Record. “You can make unusual gains when you try.”
Updike reported the letdown of the fans, inevitable after such a high moment. Linn reported the movements of Williams in the clubhouse, the dazed look on his face, the beer in his hand, the last tirade at a last reporter (Linn). Forty-five minutes after the game, Williams was gone, out the back gate underneath the bleachers in his Cadillac. Jimmy Carroll says he was at the wheel. Back to the Somerset.
“Ted had thrown his shoes in the trash can,” Carroll says. “I grabbed 'em. Johnny Orlando said, ‘Hey,' but Ted said, ‘No, that's okay.'”
Harold Kaese, the last remaining columnist of the original typewriter combatants, quoted Shakespeare in the morning Globe—“Forever and forever, farewell, Cassius! If we meet again, why, we shall smile; if not, why, then, this parting was well made.” Huck Finnegan in the Record took a more traditional approach.
“Outside of the theatrics, what did it all mean?” Finnegan asked. “He hadn't won the game. Wertz' pinch double in the ninth (he tipped his cap) and Klaus' error on a DP toss had done that. In fact, if Tasby had fanned, it would have been Williams' turn to bat again with three men on and the Sox needing one run to tie. And there he was OUT OF THE GAME.
“In retrospect, hasn't that been the story of the Red Sox since Williams joined them? Winning always has been secondary to individual accomplishments. Even the year he hit .406 the Sox finished 17 games behind the Yankees. So it was this year. His great hitting LIFTED the Sox from the FIFTH spot they occupied at the close of 1959 to SEVENTH, the worst record they have compiled since Yawkey bought the club in 1933.”
Updike's story, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” became a sports classic, generally recognized as the best American sports story ever written. Linn's story, “The Kid's Last Game,” became expanded into a fine book, Hitter: The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams. The other stories wrapped the requisite number of daily sea bass.
The subject of all this?
The chroniclers had missed one important moment. Somewhere in his time in the clubhouse Williams quickly had found a telephone and laughed and shouted, “Well, I did it, I hit a home run on my last at bat.” He had called a woman in Chicago.
He was in love.