The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (18 page)

LeFebvre was amused by Ted’s eccentricities. Williams would suggest that they go for a ride in his convertible, then would suddenly pull over and want to eat. He’d order a chicken sandwich, smell it, then call the owner over and demand to know if the chicken was fresh. Assured that it was, Ted would then inhale the sandwich and stand up to leave before LeFebvre had barely touched his food.

Then there was the time a champion Minneapolis softball team challenged the Millers to a softball game. “Ted laughed at them and said it was a kids’ game,” LeFebvre said. “We went to play them and Ted said to the pitcher, ‘I’ll bet you five dollars that you can’t strike me out.’ The
pitcher said, ‘You’re on.’ The guy struck him out. So the next time up, Ted bets him ten dollars that he’d hit a home run. The pitcher said, ‘You’re on.’ Well, he hit that softball three hundred ninety feet, over the fence. He jumped around the bases like a jackrabbit.”
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Ted’s on-field behavior could have been written off as merely wacky and colorful as long as it didn’t hurt the team, but sometimes it did.

In a home game on July 23 against the Toledo Mud Hens, he had his back turned and was gazing at the scoreboard when a ball was hit right to him. Center fielder Stan Spence, seeing that Williams was otherwise occupied, raced over and made a great catch, nearly colliding with his teammate. “I never saw the ball, just heard Stan Spence’s footsteps, and he almost knocked me down making a hell of a play on a ball that should have been mine,” Ted admitted.
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Donie Bush yanked Williams from the game immediately and chewed him out. In the clubhouse later, Millers third baseman Jim Tabor grabbed Ted and threatened to beat the daylights out of him, but Bush intervened and told Tabor: “Leave him alone. He’s only a kid.”
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Two days later, at home against Columbus, Ted went out to the outfield without his sunglasses and promptly dropped a fly ball after losing it in the sun, leading to three runs for the Red Birds. An enraged Bush ran out from the dugout, handed the Kid his sunglasses, and dressed him down for all to see. Humiliated, Ted went into a sulk. For the rest of the game, he merely jogged after base hits to right field and would lob the ball back in, allowing runners to take an extra base. In one case, he again wasn’t paying attention when a ball was hit, and he didn’t even realize it had gone past him until fans and teammates started screaming at him. When the Millers trailed by thirteen runs, he was laughing with Red Birds players and failed to run out a fly ball. By the time he came up to bat in the ninth, Ted was roundly booed by the home crowd, and the papers gave him hell the next day.

Ted was now too far along in baseball, one step from the majors, to pretend that defense didn’t exist. Even Rogers Hornsby, as an aside to his lectures on hitting, had warned the Kid that hitting was not the only part of the game. But as Dick Johnson and Glenn Stout put it in their elegant coffee-table book on Williams,
Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures,
“Ted was like some strange, slugging idiot savant: hitting was everything.”
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Reflecting on these mental lapses in his autobiography, Ted said he was slow to make the transition from viewing baseball with childlike delight to treating it as a serious livelihood. “It takes some guys longer to
find things out,” he said. “I had gotten into some rotten habits.”
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He recalled playing a sandlot game on Mission Bay when he was fifteen and watching a flock of geese fly by and thinking how beautiful they were, when all of a sudden a fly ball landed right behind him that he never saw. “By the time I got to Minneapolis, I had these lapses of concentration pretty much built in. Playing the field was too much like being a spectator to suit me. If I wasn’t slapping my butt and yelling, ‘Hi-ho, Silver!’ chasing a fly ball, I was sitting down between batters or talking to some fan and the crack of the bat would catch me looking the wrong way.”

His temper was an issue, too. One afternoon against Saint Paul, hecklers were giving him a hard time in right field. After catching a fly ball for the third out of the inning and before running into the dugout, Ted went over to the offending fans and whipped the ball at them, only to strike an innocent bystander. Owner Mike Kelley later told Sid Hartman of the
Star Tribune
that he had to pay out $1,500 to the injured fan.
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On September 4, after popping up a ball he thought he should have crushed, Ted, in a grand show of disgust, flipped his bat end-over-end, dangerously high into the air. (“It’s all in the wrist,” Ted quipped later.
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) But that outburst was only the beginning. When Ted reached the dugout he smashed a five-gallon watercooler with his left fist, sending shattered glass and water everywhere. “His wrist was all cut up and bleeding,” outfielder Fabian Gaffke said. “He was lucky. If he’d ripped an artery, his career was over.”
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Other gaffes had happy endings.

Ground balls were never Ted’s forte in the outfield, and one afternoon he let two skip through his legs, then struck out twice, to boot. After the second strikeout, with the Millers trailing in the late innings, Ted was so mad he went right to the clubhouse and started to take his uniform off, thinking he wouldn’t get up again. “I was half undressed when the batboy came running in yelling for me to get back out there,” Ted wrote in his book. “We had staged a big rally. The score was 6–4, two men on, two out and I was due up. I was still fumbling with my buttons when I got there, and wouldn’t you know it, I hit the first pitch out of the park and we won, 7–6. It was that kind of year.”
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Of course dealing with the zany, mercurial Williams would have been enough to tax any manager, and Donie Bush was no exception. At one point, Bush grew so frustrated that he went to Mike Kelley and threatened to resign if Williams wasn’t shipped out. But Kelley, reinforced by the Red Sox, quickly called that bluff and let Bush know that a choice between letting go the greatest hitting talent to come along
in years and a highly replaceable manager was no choice at all. Apart from that minicrisis, Bush handled Williams skillfully and shrewdly.

After one midseason slump, Ted told Bush he was fed up and needed to go home to San Diego to chill out for a while. The manager thought the best way to deal with this outrageous request was by humoring the rookie, so he told him to go ahead and leave.

“Donie Bush got so he could get to me with a little psychology,” Ted wrote, recalling the incident.
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“When I was having my troubles and packed my trunk one time and told him I was going home, he didn’t blow up at all, he just said, ‘OK, Ted, I’ll line up the transportation and when you’ve had a nice visit you can come back.’ I went right to my room and unpacked that trunk.”

Ted had a breezy, irreverent relationship with his manager. One day, after hitting a double and getting fed up with Bush’s constant screaming from his third-base coaching perch about how big a lead to take, Ted finally yelled: “Take it easy, Skip. I got here by myself. I’ll get home by myself.”
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“What a headache he was!” Bush later said of Ted. “He did some daffy things.… But you had to like him.”
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“If Donie hadn’t put up with me as a raw kid in 1938, I wouldn’t be here today or perhaps even in baseball,” Ted would say twenty years later on a trip back to Minneapolis in the off-season. “He was great to me, and I’ll never forget him for going along with me.”
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In 1939, Ted’s first year with the Red Sox, Bush was in a Saint Louis hospital recovering from major surgery. Though visitors were barred, every time the Red Sox came to Saint Louis to play the Browns, Ted would come by the hospital and try, unsuccessfully, to visit him. Ted wrote Bush a letter after one failed visit, saying he had tried to see him, then added: “I guess you saw enough of this busher last year, eh?”
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Overriding all Williams’s bizarre behavior was his astonishing hitting. He finished the season with an average of .366, 43 home runs, and 142 runs batted in to win the American Association’s Triple Crown. He also led the league in runs scored (130) and total bases (370).

In addition to posting those gaudy numbers and maturing at least a little, Ted thought two other important things had happened that summer to fuel his development as a hitter.

On August 3, in Milwaukee, he was struck in the head with a ball thrown by the Brewers’ “Wild Bill” Zuber. This was apparently the first time Ted had been beaned. He was knocked out cold, sustained a concussion,
and had to be carried off the field. There seemed little doubt it was a purpose pitch, as he had been 2–2 with four RBIs to that point against Zuber.

After being hospitalized for two days, he returned on August 6 in Kansas City, intent on proving to himself that he could dig in again without fear. Facing Kemp Wicker, who had pitched for the Yankees the year before and was considered one of the best left-handers in the American Association, Ted grounded out his first two times up, then hit a home run and a double, knocking in four runs. “That was when I knew that I would never worry about how I was going to react to a beaning,” Ted said. “I was proud of myself.”
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Another revelation that season was the value of using a lighter bat. This went against then-conventional wisdom, which held that power hitters by definition always used heavy bats. Williams would pioneer a countertheory: it was not the weight of the bat but the whip and speed at which it collided with the ball that generated power. Using a lighter bat could generate more whip as well as conserve a hitter’s energy and strength in the dog days of summer.

“It was real hot in Minneapolis, hotter than anything I had been used to on the West Coast,” Ted said. “I was on base all the time, an average of two and a half times a game, just swinging and sweating all the time, and as thin as I was, began to get tired. One muggy hot night in Columbus, I happened to pick up one of Stan Spence’s bats. Geez, I thought. ‘What a toothpick. Lightest bat in the rack…’ ”
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He asked Spence if he could borrow it, then got up with the bases loaded. Behind on the count two strikes, he swung at a pitch low and away and hit it 410 feet over the center-field fence.

“That really woke me up. From then on, I always used lighter bats, usually 33 or 34 ounces, never more than 34, sometimes as light as 31. In the earlier part of the year I’d go for the heavier ones with better wood. You’re stronger then, the pitchers are still working to get their stuff down, to get their control.”
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Toward the end of his sensational season, the press was full of speculation about what he would do with the Red Sox the following year, but Ted shocked local reporters with a counterintuitive comment: maybe he wasn’t ready to leave just yet. “I want to stay right here in Minneapolis with the Millers for another year at least,” he said. “I’m not ready for the major leagues. Another year under Donie Bush will do me a lot of good.”
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The Millers finished the season with a 78–74 record, in sixth place and out of the playoffs. To try and recoup some of the money they would
have earned in the postseason, the older players organized a barnstorming tour for two weeks. They would travel to backwoods towns in Minnesota and the Dakotas, following the trail of festivals and carnivals, challenging the top local talent. The veterans asked Ted to join them, knowing he’d be the top draw, and Williams agreed.

Ted “did that for us,” catcher Otto Denning told Ed Linn. “We made twenty dollars a game, and in those days twenty bucks was like a thousand now. He was one hell of a wonderful person.”

The first game was in Worthington, Minnesota, and when the Millers arrived, there was a full house screaming for Williams’s head. It seems Ted had told a local sportscaster that the first stop of the barnstorming tour would be “some jerk town called Worthington.”

“Everybody was booing him,” Denning said. “You know how he quieted them? He hit a home run in his first time at bat that went out of the park and over some cow barns. It must have gone 500 feet. For the rest of the game they cheered every move he made.”
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Lefty LeFebvre was on the trip, along with Ted’s landlord, pitcher Wally Tauscher, and Stan Spence. They rode with Ted in his red Buick.

One day as they were traveling to the next stop, LeFebvre remembered, Ted asked Tauscher to drive his car while he sat in the front passenger seat. He’d brought his shotgun on the trip, along with a case of shotgun shells he’d been given by a Millers sponsor. He propped the shotgun up between his legs and rolled the window down. As they sped through the countryside, if Ted saw an animal of some kind that he deemed a suitable target, he’d whip the gun out the window, take aim, and blast away at it.

“I think we were in South Dakota, way out there, and Ted was firing away out the window,” LeFebvre said. “Boom! Boom! Boom! He’d stop for a while, and then he would see something, and boom again! I thought we were going to get pinched. I think he killed a couple of cats, a dog on a farm, maybe a cow, too. He was a wild man.”
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At one stop, Ted bet and lost $400 at a carnival wheel game, but the operator of the game was apparently controlling the wheel with his foot. According to Otto Denning, Tauscher insisted that Ted go to the local district attorney and report the sharpie, and he was able to get $200 of his money back.
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Ted drove home to San Diego for the winter, eager more than anything else to show off his new car to friends. Joe Villarino and the boys were duly impressed, as were the regulars at Ted’s neighborhood fire station, where he’d take the car to hose it down and buff its sheen.

As for where he’d be playing baseball next season, if there had been any doubts, the Red Sox removed them on December 15, 1938, by announcing that they had traded their starting right fielder, Ben Chapman, to Cleveland for Denny Galehouse and Tommy Irwin. Ted was bound for Boston to replace Chapman.