The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (14 page)

Williams introduced Tuttle to his father after Sam went to see the
Padres play when they came through Sacramento in 1937. Sam was still based in the state capital then for his job as a jail inspector. “He was proud of Ted,” Tuttle said. “He was thrilled. Ted hit a home run when he was there at the Sacramento stadium and oh, his father was just so happy and he reached clear over the fence to shake Ted’s hand when he came by afterward.”
⁴⁴

Howard Craghead, who was nicknamed the Professor because he had a degree in philosophy from Fresno State College, once asked Ted what pitches he had difficulty with. “Can’t tell the difference,” Ted said. “They all look like they are hanging out in front of the plate on a string.”
⁴⁵

“[Ted] had the prettiest swing of anybody I ever saw!” said George McDonald, who had dropped out of high school in 1935 with Bobby Doerr to join the Hollywood Stars. “When I saw him later, when he was hitting .400, his swing wasn’t as pretty as when he was young.”
^46
*

Jimmie Reese, who played for the New York Yankees in 1930 and 1931 and roomed with Babe Ruth, remembered that Ted enjoyed his own reflection. “Ted Williams used to stand in front of a mirror in the clubhouse and take different poses with the bat. He went to take those poses and everybody said, ‘Look at what that busher’s doing.’ But it turned out he wasn’t crazy.”
⁴⁷

Doerr also recalled the shadow hitting and that once, while demonstrating his technique on the slippery marble floor of a San Francisco hotel lobby, Ted swung so hard he fell.
⁴⁸

George Detore, the Padres catcher in 1937, taught Ted some of the rites of the game and a lesson about team play. Once, in Portland, Ted was outraged when Padres pitcher Dick Ward bowled over the Beavers catcher on a play at the plate, hurting him. Ted shouted at his teammate Ward: “That’s just dirty baseball and you ought to have your block knocked off! I won’t stand for that kind of work!”

“You won’t stand for it?’ piped up someone on the Padres bench. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll show you right now,” replied Williams, the next man to bat, consumed with a need for fairness. “I’m going up there and strike out.”

Detore told Williams that if he did so, he shouldn’t “come back to the bench; just put on your street clothes and go home.”

With a different sort of fairness on his mind, the Portland pitcher tried to bean Ted, who ducked out of the way. Williams shouted at the pitcher, asking him why he did it, since Ted hadn’t done anything. The pitcher said he’d do it again, which he did. Ted dusted himself off and knocked the next pitch more than four hundred feet over the right-field fence. Back on the bench, Ted asked again why he’d been thrown at if he didn’t do anything wrong.

Detore explained: “Oh yes, you did. You were wearing the same uniform as the rest of us. Whenever one of us gets in a jam, you’re involved, remember that. And when you get into trouble, we’re all for you. The uniform’s the thing, kid. You can’t get out of it when a quarrel starts. Always keep that in mind.”
⁴⁹

As the new year began, Padres beat writer Earl Keller raised expectations for Ted in the 1937 season. “If you want to make a little extra money to put in the old sock,” he wrote, “bet it on young Teddy Williams to be taken as the outstanding major league prospect after this year’s Pacific Coast League baseball race is finished.… There wasn’t a manager who didn’t say Williams had the makings of a great slugger after they saw him in action the later part of the 1936 season.”

Keller interviewed May Williams for his story, and May reported that “Teddy is drinking more milk and putting on weight steadily. Every night after he comes home from school he gets a bat and practices swinging for 30 or 40 minutes. The boy really is confident of making good and we all are sure he will go places.”
⁵⁰

May’s reference to her son coming home from school served as a reminder that Ted really was still a boy who hadn’t graduated from Hoover High yet. After the 1936 season ended, as his Padres teammates—all grown men—fanned out to various jobs, Ted had headed back to Hoover to finish up his final semester.

Before the ’37 season began, the Padres sold Vince DiMaggio to the Boston Bees, the National League franchise that would soon be renamed the Braves and that ran a distant second to the Red Sox in the hearts and minds of Bostonians. The DiMaggio move might have been expected to make Ted a lock as a starter, but Frank Shellenback decided to stick to his go-slow program for Williams. So Ted began the year on the bench, behind Cedric Durst, Tommy Thompson, and Hal Patchett.

Ted grew restless and bored. At a game in Seattle early in the year, he noticed in the clubhouse that the visiting batboy had a kit to blow bubbles through a pipe. Languishing in the dugout, Ted asked the batboy for
his kit. Together, they soaped up some water in a bucket and Ted began blowing huge bubbles onto the field. When the umpires finally determined the source of the distraction, Ted was tossed from the game.
⁵¹

Lefty O’Doul, who had touted Williams to Earl Keller, helped get Ted’s confidence back on track. O’Doul, who had hit .398 with thirty-two home runs for the 1929 Philadelphia Phillies, had been managing the Seals in his hometown of San Francisco since 1935. He’d sent Joe DiMaggio up to the Yankees, and by 1937, O’Doul had another DiMaggio on his team—Joe’s younger brother, Dominic. By 1940, Dominic would be playing center field for the Red Sox alongside Ted, and the two would become lifelong friends.

O’Doul was known as a great teacher of the game, especially of hitting. He’d seen enough of Williams in 1936 to be impressed, and now, early in 1937, at Lane Field against the Padres, O’Doul left the visitors’ dugout to get a close look at Ted taking batting practice.

Dominic DiMaggio remembered the moment clearly more than sixty years later. “Lefty O’Doul left our dugout in San Diego,” DiMaggio said.
⁵²
“He was our manager, who I had a great deal of admiration for. Ted was batting in batting practice. He said, ‘I’ve got to talk to this kid.’ He ran off to the other side and waited for Ted to get through hitting. He took more than his allotted swings, and when he got through, Lefty called him over and talked to him, said something to him. Then of course [he] came back to the dugout.

“That was a no-no. You didn’t fraternize with the opposition. Especially the manager with the opposing player. He came back in the dugout and all the old-timers were like, ‘What the heck is this all about, Lefty? What did you say to the kid?’ He said, ‘I just told him to never let anyone ever fool around with his batting style.’ He said, ‘He’s going to be one of the greatest hitters we’ve ever seen.’ That was it.”

O’Doul kept up his drumbeat for Ted. When the Padres visited San Francisco, and he was mired in a slump, Ted picked up a paper at the Pickwick Hotel. Its headline declared,
WILLIAMS GREATEST HITTER SINCE WANER
, Ted recalled in his book. “At first I wondered who the Williams was that it was talking about.”
⁵³

He later asked O’Doul if he had been the one who’d spoken to the reporter.
⁵⁴
“ ‘Yes,’ he told me, ‘I said it, and I meant it, kid. You’re the tops. You’re headed straight for the majors and you’re going to knock ’em dead up there with your hitting. That goes, though, only if you stick to your present style. Don’t let anybody change your stance and your swing. Attempts will be made to, you can bet on that. Ignore them.… Just go on
the way you are.’ ” Ted told the
Boston Evening American
’s Cashman that until that point, he felt he had ability but lacked confidence. “I might never have acquired it, either, if O’Doul hadn’t given it to me.”

Through eighty games into late June, Ted was playing irregularly, batting .259 with two homers in just 116 at bats. Then he went on a tear, cracking six home runs over the next week, including an inside-the-park job on June 22 to the deepest part of Lane’s vast center field. By July, Shellenback had made him a regular, and Ted continued to hit. By the end of August, he had seventeen homers and was batting .283.
⁵⁵

Then on August 31, with O’Doul and his Seals in town, Ted hit a prodigious home run in the eighth inning to break open a tight game and lead the Padres to a 4–2 win. Ted’s homer “fairly screamed” as it went over the right-field fence, recalled the
Union
’s Monroe McConnell.
⁵⁶
Then “the ball cleared the railroad tracks beyond bordering Pacific Highway, took one hop into a railway freight house, and was retrieved by workmen who ran far back into the shed and indulged in a wild scramble to retrieve it. There have been some mighty homers at Lane Field since, but none in the memory of veteran scribes that has even closely approached that one for sheer power.” After the game, O’Doul told Earl Keller of the
Tribune
he’d like to have Ted play for him next year. “That kid is the best prospect this circuit has seen since Joe DiMaggio,” O’Doul said. “I would like to be his teacher.”
⁵⁷
The next day, Ted hit two more homers as the Padres beat the Seals again, 10–5.
⁵⁸

The Padres finished the year strong, sweeping Sacramento and Portland in the playoffs to win the Pacific Coast League championship. Williams performed solidly in the eight playoff games, batting .333, including a double, a triple, and a home run. He was the hitting star in three of the games. Ted finished the regular season with 23 home runs, 98 runs batted in, and an average of .291. He appeared in 138 of the Padres’ 178 games, collecting 132 hits in 454 at bats. Somewhat predictably, his fielding percentage was the lowest among Coast League outfielders, with seven errors, 213 putouts, and ten assists.

Eddie Collins of the Red Sox had been monitoring Ted’s progress closely during the 1937 season, along with Billy Evans, who had been appointed Boston’s farm director the previous year. Twice during the summer of ’37, Collins had called Lane and asked if he would be willing to deal Ted. Lane had put him off each time, reassuring Collins that he would have the chance to match any bid and that they’d be in touch after the season. Now Williams’s strong showing and promise were generating
interest from about twelve major-league teams. The teams’ scrutiny of Ted and courting of Lane came to a head at the midwinter baseball meetings in early December at the Palmer House in Chicago.

Detroit was especially interested, as were Ted’s old hero, Bill Terry of the New York Giants, and Casey Stengel, who was going to be manager of the Boston Bees the following season, 1938. Stengel had been out of baseball in ’37, but had watched many Coast League games from his home in California and was high on Ted. He came up with an offer of cash and several minor-league players for Williams that Frank Shellenback liked, and the Padres manager urged Lane to do the deal with Stengel and the Bees. At that point several other teams also made offers, but Lane told all interested parties that he had promised Collins and the Red Sox the right of first refusal.

The
Boston Globe
reported at the time that one of the teams chasing Williams was the Yankees.
⁵⁹
That wasn’t surprising, given Bill Essick’s pursuit of Ted while he was still in high school. But another Yankees scout, Joe Devine, had weighed in with a negative report on Ted earlier in the 1937 season. “Williams shows possibilities as a hitter, has good power,” Devine wrote, while going on to say that Ted “is a very slow lad, not a good outfielder now, just an average arm. There is no doubt Williams will never be fast enough to get by in the majors as an outfielder. His best feature now is that he shows promise as a hitter, but good pitching so far has stopped him cold.”
⁶⁰

Lane sent word to Collins, who was in Chicago at the meetings, that he was ready to go ahead with the deal for Ted.
⁶¹
But Collins then ran into a problem with Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Having spent millions of dollars acquiring talent like Joe Cronin and Jimmie Foxx only to fall well short of winning a pennant, Yawkey had decided to change tactics and play for the long haul by developing a first-rate farm system. He said he was through buying other teams’ players and wanted to develop his own. Collins had agreed with this decision in principle. So when Collins now told him he wanted to buy Williams, Yawkey balked, pointing out that this would violate the new policy they were trying to implement. Collins argued that they had to make an exception in this case: Williams was that good. But Yawkey continued his objections, not so much because of the money but because they would immediately be breaking their new policy. Collins went to the mat, stressing that he himself had discovered Williams and tracked him. They weren’t relying on the opinion of some unknown scout here.

Finally, Yawkey yielded—and apparently not a minute too soon. Convincing Yawkey had taken quite a long time, and Lane had grown impatient at not hearing back from Collins. According to writer Arthur Sampson’s 1950 account, Lane decided he’d waited long enough—he’d satisfied his promise to give the Red Sox an opportunity to compete for Williams and they hadn’t responded in time. Lane had started to leave the lobby of the hotel to go upstairs to meet another team interested in Ted when Collins stepped off the elevator saying he was ready to deal. If Collins could give him $25,000 and come up with a batch of players acceptable to Shellenback, he could have Ted, Lane said.

Collins realized the cash would be no problem, but the Red Sox didn’t have any decent minor leaguers at the time. That was why they were going to revamp their entire farm system. So he had Billy Evans quickly acquire the rights to four solid Double-A players who were agreeable to Shellenback—Dom Dallessandro, Al Niemiec, Bunny Griffiths, and Spencer Harris. The deal was apparently finalized at 11:45 p.m. on December 6, just before a midnight deadline that had been imposed by Lane.
⁶²

The Red Sox were thrilled and thought they’d stolen Ted. “One thing I am sure of,” said Evans, a former major-league umpire, in a 1954 interview with the
Boston Globe:
“Williams was the least expensive great baseball player I ever brought into the majors.… We knew it was a steal and would have gone much higher. Anywhere up to $100,000, if necessary. But we didn’t have to. We had friendly relations with the San Diego owner, and he was an honorable man.… The day we clinched the deal we knew for sure we had the best prospect of the era.”
⁶³
Later, Joe Cashman reported that Lane had turned down more money for Ted from other clubs.
⁶⁴
The Tigers, he wrote, had offered $30,000 and the Giants $31,000. Moreover, Collins told Cashman, he had paid Lane more for Bobby Doerr than for Ted, “and Dom DiMaggio cost us far more than Teddy and Bobby together.”