Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (24 page)

There was another column attacking Williams for hits that were not timely, home runs that were not needed, when the Red Sox already had a healthy lead. “Here are seven runs which he batted in after the battle was over and the issue decided and for my money they’re just frosting on
the cake.” By mid-May Williams was hitting around .320 and near the lead in both home runs and runs batted in, but there was no doubt to readers of Dave Egan that he was responsible for the slow start of the Red Sox.

There was a game here, the journalist as cynic. The role of the player was to be equally cynical. But Ted Williams did not play the game. Other athletes who cared not a bit more for the needs of the press were good at pretending that they did. But Williams would not accept writers as peers; he could hit a fastball, they could not. Even for those Boston writers prepared to write generously of him, he did not make it any easier. For he did not disguise his feelings. He scornfully called the writers “the knights of the keyboard.” He would get on the Boston team bus, spot a writer, and say, “Ugh, I smell something rotten. It smells like shit. There must be writers on this bus—you write such shit.”

He made a few exceptions. Though Joe Cashman worked for the
Record,
which was Egan’s paper, Williams liked Cashman. In late winter, if the
Record
wanted a long piece on Williams as he prepared for the upcoming season, it would assign Cashman. Cashman would call Williams in Florida. “Joe, if it’s for you and you can make some money off a magazine piece, I’ll do it,” he said. “You come down here, stay with me, we’ll fish, and I’ll give you all the time you want. But if it’s for that damn paper, just forget it. Don’t come down. I’m sorry. You know why.”

The writers paid him back for his disdain in many ways. Some of them withheld their votes for the Most Valuable Player Award; in 1947, a season in which Williams led DiMaggio in every single category, he lost the MVP to the Yankee star by one point. One Boston writer had not even listed him in the top ten players. If he had listed him as even the tenth most-valuable player, Williams would have won the award.

Neither was Williams diplomatic with the fans. He refused the most basic courtesy of the era—to tip his cap after
a home run. DiMaggio had the hat-tip down perfectly: He did it lightly and deftly, without looking up, as he moved past home plate toward the dugout. He never broke stride, thus satisfying the fans without showing up an opposing pitcher.

In time Williams’s refusal to tip his hat became a major civic issue. Management and teammates pleaded with him to do it—this was, after all, a small gesture. But he refused. He was nothing if not stubborn. Birdie Tebbetts, the catcher, suggested a compromise: Williams could tip his hat and at the same time say, under his breath; “Go to hell, you SOBs.” The fans, Tebbetts pointed out, would be happy and would not know what he was saying. The idea pleased Williams, but he never followed through on it. Instead, he fought back. If a fan was particularly obnoxious, he would stand at bat and deliberately try to line baseballs at him. On occasion he’d reward obscenities with an obscene gesture of his own. In all, he gave the tabloids just what they wanted: a great hitter, and a great side show as well.

In a way it was too bad because it distracted people from concentrating on his talents, which were spectacular. His eyesight was legendary. Some said that he could see the ball at the exact instant he hit it. Others swore that he could see the signature of Will Harridge, the president of the American League, as the pitcher released the ball; or that he could read the label on a record playing at 78 rpm. He himself thought that the talk about his eyesight was silly. Yes, he had exceptional eyesight—20/10. But his right eye had been damaged when his brother hit it with a walnut in a childhood fight. There were days when he woke up and could not see very well out of that eye.

Then there were his marvelous reflexes. He could wait until the last split second on a pitch and hit it, in the baseball vernacular, right out of the catcher’s mitt, and still pull it. He loved to drive cars because he saw it as a test of eyesight and reflexes. His friends considered him a brilliant
driver, a man with a feathery touch who could easily have been a race-car champion. Once he drove with Matt Batts on a long trip through Florida. Williams was obviously impressed by Batts’s driving. “You know, Batts,” he said, “you’re not bad. In fact, you’re the second-best driver in baseball.” “Ted,” said the young catcher, “I’m the best.” “No, Batts,” said Williams. “You use the brake too much. I never use the brake. I’m the best.” Case closed.

But eyesight and reflexes were only the beginning. It was what he did with them that was important. “God gets you to the plate,” William’s would say, referring to the fact that he had great eyesight and physical size, “but once you’re there you’re on your own.” No one ever worked harder to build himself up, and no one took better care of himself in order to play ball. He did not pal around with the other ballplayers because he could not bear late hours, and he did not want to drink whiskey at night. He did not smoke, and he hated the smell of other people’s tobacco. His favorite beverage was malted milk.

When he went to the movies he would take a rubber ball with him and squeeze it constantly to strengthen his hands. He also had a metal contraption with a built-in spring, which he squeezed to build up his hands, wrists, and forearms. When a game was over, no matter what the weather, he would do one hundred push-ups, his feet elevated on a chair in order to make the exercise harder. He supported his body on his fingers instead of his palms to strengthen not just his upper body but his hands as well. Sometimes he would lie down on the locker-room floor, under two chairs on top of one another and raise and lower the chairs slowly. Gradually he transformed himself into a powerful, muscular man.

Nothing was left to chance. If he was batting and a cloud passed over, he would step out of the batter’s box and fidget until the light was just a little better. He honed his bats at night, working a bone against them to make the fibers harder. He was the first to combine olive oil and rosin in
order to get a better grip on the bat. He learned to gradually decrease the weight of his bats as the summer wore on and fatigue set in. That practice began one day when he had gone to the bat rack and picked up a bat belonging to Stan Spence, one of his teammates. It felt like a toothpick made out of banana wood, in his words. He asked Spence if he could use it, and in his first at-bat he went after an outside pitch. It was not even a full swing, more a light flick of the bat, but the ball seemed to jump out of there—a home run to the opposite field. That taught him something: Bat speed, not bat weight, was critical.

In those days the big hitters traditionally used heavy bats—36, 37, 38 ounces. Williams had been using a thirty-six. He soon met with John Hillerich of Hillerich and Bradsby, the bat manufacturers, and asked for bats styled more on the Spence model, at 33 ounces. “Ted,” Hillerich argued, “that’s too light—you can’t get good wood on the ball with them.” But Williams argued that torque, the whip of the bat, was more important than mere weight, and he was right. Besides, he was losing roughly 10 percent of the weight of the bat; he measured it against the pitcher, who, in Williams’s mind was now losing 10 percent off his fastball. Shortly after his conversation with Hillerich, Williams visited Louisville and talked with an old-timer named Fritz Bickel, who actually took the raw wooden cylinders and meticulously fashioned bats out of them. “Ted, here’s a wonderful piece of wood for you,” Bickel said, holding up a cylinder. “See, it has two knots, and that’s good; it hardens the wooden.” Pleased, Williams gave Bickel twenty-five dollars, and from then on Bickel carefully looked for just the right piece of wood for Williams, and Williams sent him occasional small gratuities. He was glad he had done that; it meant he had light bats that remained strong.

He was also aware that on damp or muggy days, bats picked up extra moisture and became heavier. He would warn his teammates not to put their bats down on the damp
grass at night. When some of them argued with him, Williams immediately set off for the post office, where he had a variety of bats weighed. Sure enough, he was right: They had picked up a critical half-ounce from the dampness, an increase of about 1.5 percent. It was important to him, even if no one else cared.

Every advantage helped. In those early days of night baseball, Williams was more successful than most hitters at adjusting to playing under the lights. One reason, he was sure, was the regimen he put himself through. The other players stayed out later, got up later, ate a heavier meal, and then took brief naps. By contrast, Williams woke up early, ate an early light lunch, went for a long walk, and then took a long nap. He was always fresh at the ball park at night.

Fielding did not intrigue him quite as much as hitting did. Only later in his career did he begin to take this aspect of the game more seriously. Once he turned to Dominic DiMaggio and asked him how he managed to charge ground balls hit to the outfield with such aggressiveness. DiMaggio was startled by the question: It was, he thought, so long in coming.

But Williams loved hitting, especially against fastball pitchers. “No one can throw a fastball past me. God could come down from Heaven, and He couldn’t throw it past me,” he liked to say. He loved playing against certain teams: the Tigers because they had great power pitchers—Trucks, Newhouser, Trout, and Benton—who came right at him, and who rarely walked him; and Cleveland because the Indians had Bob Feller, the standard by which other pitchers were measured. When baseball players were talking about another pitcher, they would say, “His fastball is almost as fast as Feller’s,” or, “His curveball is almost as good as Feller’s.” It was Feller, after all, who had caused Lefty Gomez to say, after taking his third straight strike without moving the bat off his shoulder, “That last one sounded a little low.”

“That was the test,” Williams reminisced years later. “He was the best and I wanted to be the best, and three days before he pitched I would start thinking Robert Feller, Bob Feller. I’d sit in my room thinking and seeing him, thinking about him all that time. God, I loved it. That was a personal challenge. I’d always get my rest and I’d weigh my bat that day. I did pretty well off Robert Feller. I hit sinking line drives off him, a lot of top spin on them. Allie Reynolds of the Yankees was tough and I might think about him for twenty-four hours before a game, but Robert Feller, I’d think about him for three days.”

Williams had complete confidence in himself. He was once called out on strikes at a home game in Fenway, and he came into the dugout ranting and raving that home plate was out of line—that was why the umpire had called the strike. Mel Parnell, Tex Hughson, and some of the other pitchers teased him about it, said he was blaming a strikeout on the plate. But he persisted. A great injustice had been done. The next day, just to humor him, Joe Cronin went out and measured the plate, and, of course, Williams had been right. It
was
out of line. Eleven pitchers on the team, Parnell had thought, and only Williams picked up on it. Somewhere in the record book there is a mistake: He is credited with 709 career strikeouts, but one of those is because of a faulty alignment in Fenway Park. It should read 708.

It was often written that he was disliked by his teammates. That was a canard. He was invariably generous and thoughtful, especially to young players coming up behind him. His colleagues regarded him with an unusual affection long after his playing days were over. There was a feeling on their part that he was devoid of meanness or narrowness; whatever faults he had were simply the inevitable, lesser side of someone so gifted and so passionate. He forged especially long-lasting friendships with three teammates: Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Pesky. He and Doerr shared their love of
the outdoors; with DiMaggio, the friendship was based on Williams’s great affection and immense respect for his intelligence; and with Pesky, it was the affection of an older brother and little brother—a fifty-year marathon of playful insults. In 1985 he and Pesky were still needling each other. Pesky would say to him, “You know, Ted, you’ve got a high school diploma, and
I’ve
got a high school diploma. How come you’re so much smarter than me?” “Because you’re dumb, Needle, you’re just goddamn dumb is why,” Williams would answer.

What such teammates as Boo Ferriss remembered about him more than anything else was the excitement Williams brought to the game—his energy and vitality, and the belief that in any baseball game something marvelous was going to happen. He was, Ferriss thought, always studying the game. Ferriss had one clear memory of Williams: Williams sitting in the dugout on the second step, his head propped on his arms, his elbows resting on the top step. From there he would study the pitcher as clinically as a scientist looks through a microscope. “Hey, look at that. Did you see what he just threw?” Ferriss would hear him say. “He never threw that before.”

Having Williams on the team was like having an additional hitting instructor. “Needle,” he once told Pesky when they were playing New York at the Stadium, “that pitcher on the mound is named Spud Chandler. He throws a sinker. A damn good sinker. A very heavy ball. You keep trying to pull him and you can’t. You’re not big enough or strong enough. I am forty pounds heavier, damn near a foot taller than you, and a hell of a lot stronger, and I can’t pull him, in case you didn’t notice. You’re zero for fourteen against Mr. Chandler this year. Just go with the ball. They are not going to walk you to get to me, believe me. You’re going to get a good pitch. So just slap it by them.” Pesky did. Enraged, Chandler stood on the mound cursing him, so upset that he lost his concentration. Thereupon Williams
hit a home run. When Williams reached the dugout he yelled, “Where is our horned-nose little shortstop?” Pesky shook his hand. “Did I tell you how to hit him?” said Williams. “Did I?”

If there was anything wrong with Williams’s advice as a hitter it was his assumption that everyone would get the same pitches he got. Once in a series with Detroit, Mickey McDermott, who was a very good hitter, was sent up to pinch-hit against Virgil Trucks. “Bush,” Williams told McDermott, “just sit there and wait on the slider.” So McDermott did, but Trucks fed him three fastballs in a row. He struck out on three pitches. “Ted,” McDermott told Williams, “there are no Trucks sliders for me—only for you.”