The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (19 page)

The Red Sox were grateful to Minneapolis for bringing their young star along. At baseball’s winter meetings, Boston owner Tom Yawkey handed Mike Kelley, his Millers counterpart, an envelope. Inside it was a $10,000 check with a note that read: “Thanks, Mike, for making a ballplayer out of Ted Williams.”
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O
n March 1, 1939, Williams set out from his San Diego home in style, climbing into his Buick convertible for the long cross-country drive to Sarasota and the start of his big-league adventure.

It would be a year in which Ted would establish himself as a singular talent on the field and almost as big an attraction off it, as the press—seduced by the Kid’s refreshing, guileless persona—touted him as an American original. Williams professed to be fresh off the “haystack circuit,” even posing as a Huck Finn–like rube for a Boston newspaper and, in a tableau of innocence, delighting Fenway fans by doffing his cap—lifting it right off his head by the button. But he would back up his showmanship by hitting like a seasoned All-Star, weathering slumps and rebuffing pitchers who tried to test him with baseball’s requisite rite of passage: the knockdown pitch.

Ted would establish a beachhead in a Boston hotel and forge friendships with a handful of non–big shots, like a state cop and managers of a restaurant and movie theater. But in his first year, he would rely most on his Red Sox family: clubhouse man Johnny Orlando, Bobby Doerr (his link to California), slugger Jimmie Foxx, catcher Moe Berg, and pitchers Charlie Wagner and Elden Auker. Ted’s bosses—player-manager Joe Cronin and Tom Yawkey, the thirty-six-year-old owner—offered him detached guidance.

Thus far the six-year Yawkey regime had been characterized by failed—and what were then thought to be profligate—attempts to buy a pennant. Yawkey had first purchased two pitchers from the Yankees in 1933 for $100,000: George Pipgras and Bill Werber. Then he acquired
Lefty Grove, Rube Walberg, and Max Bishop from the Philadelphia Athletics for $125,000 and two players. Cronin was obtained from the Washington Senators for a staggering $225,000 and an infielder in 1934; then came Foxx in 1935 for $150,000 and a journeyman pitcher.

In 1934, Yawkey further pampered his players by instituting a bonus system, boosting pay by a certain percentage of their salaries if the club finished third—then double that if it finished second and triple if it won the pennant. Critics called this coddling and noted that the incentives seemed to do little good, as the team finished fourth in 1934, fourth in 1935, sixth in 1936, and fifth in 1937 before improving to second in 1938.

But inspired by the arrival of Williams, Yawkey had high hopes for 1939, and the owner would cap off the spring training season by exercising a personal prerogative. As the Red Sox headed north for the start of the season, he had his team stop and play an exhibition game against the Cincinnati Reds in an unlikely locale: Florence, South Carolina, where there was no suitable ball field and local officials had to fashion one from scratch.

The Florence site was a home game of sorts for Yawkey because it was near his twenty-thousand-acre oceanfront former rice plantation in Georgetown, where he spent most of the year. He brought in several carloads of his high-ranking employees and their families to see his club in action. Not invited were the one hundred or so black field hands who comprised the backbone of the estate or the madam who ran the Sunset Lodge, a high-class bordello in Georgetown famed throughout the South, which Yawkey had financed and continued to patronize himself.

The reclusive Yawkey’s time in Georgetown amounted to a largely secret world in which he lived the life of a gentleman-sportsman perpetually at ease—hunting, fishing, and partaking of the Sunset’s services whenever he wished. Over the years, Yawkey would offer the same pleasures to his guests, including Ted and other favored members of the Red Sox. Yawkey’s hidden life in Georgetown offered a window into the culture of paternalism, generosity, and subtle racism with which he ran his ball club.

Williams didn’t want to make the trip from San Diego to Florida alone, so he asked one of his surrogate fathers, Les Cassie Sr., if he’d like to come along, then stay on in Sarasota awhile to watch some workouts. It’s doubtful Ted even considered asking his own father. But Cassie, the
neighbor who had taught Ted surf casting and given him his only high school graduation present, was delighted, and he arranged to take leave of his job as superintendent of construction for the San Diego schools.

On the road, Ted picked up a virus, as he was prone to do, and when he reached New Orleans he was running a temperature of 102. A doctor advised him to lay low and rest for a few days. So by the time he arrived in Sarasota, March 7, he was two days late and still looking a bit peaked.

The Boston press corps, always lusting for good spring training copy, had been on high alert for the Kid’s arrival. This was the second year in a row that he’d come to Sarasota late, and the writers seemed skeptical of his story that Arizona had been cooler than normal this year and that he’d probably picked up the bug there. Couldn’t he have called or wired manager Joe Cronin to let him know he’d be late? That never occurred to him, Ted said. He offered up the avuncular Mr. Cassie as his alibi witness, who corroborated everything, and the writers seemed mollified.

Ted told a few reporters whom he bumped into while checking in at the Sarasota Terrace Hotel that he was too tired to work out that afternoon. “I’ll be out there tomorrow showing the boys how it should be done,” he said.
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But Cronin, on learning that Williams had arrived, sent a clubhouse boy to the hotel with instructions for him to get over to the park pronto. So Ted pulled himself together, drove to the field, got in uniform, and made his entrance.

“Hi, Joe, how’s the old boy?” Ted said brightly, greeting Cronin.
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“Hello, Theodore; pick up a bat,” replied the manager, disarmed and charmed at the same time.

Ted got in the cage against pitching coach Herb Pennock in a reprise of the scene a year earlier, when he took his first major-league licks. There was less anticipation this time, given Williams’s epic minor-league season and the fact that he was a known quantity. But there was still plenty of curiosity and interest as players and spectators stopped what they had been doing to watch. Pennock was still nervous about being drilled by a line drive. He reminded Williams to pull the ball, and pitched inside to make sure he did.

After the session, in which Ted, peaked or not, cracked several long drives, Cronin took him aside for a pep talk: Circumstances were different this year. He was succeeding Ben Chapman as the regular right fielder and, to symbolize that, he would inherit Chapman’s number, 9. He should be aware that he was going to be playing in a wonderful
baseball town and for a top owner in Tom Yawkey. It was time to bear down and get serious. According to Jack Malaney, the
Boston Post
beat writer who retained his closeness to Cronin, the manager’s exact words were: “You’re in a great city and you’re working for the best man in baseball. You’ve got a lot of ability and have had enough schooling. You know what it’s all about now. This is serious business and there is no place in the game for clowning. I hope you take advantage of the chance you’ve got.”
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Ted assured Cronin that he would.

But there was a fine line between clowning and letting Ted be Ted. It was clear that Williams’s sunny, somewhat daffy persona was central to his emerging stardom, and Cronin found himself criticized by some writers for trying to rein in the color that they craved.

“Peace is repulsive to Williams,” wrote the
Boston Evening American
’s Austen Lake.
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What “the 1939 Red Sox need, more than temperance and dull docility, is a couple emotional buckaroos like Ted to keep life constantly at the boil.”

The writers celebrated color almost as much as ability, and Ted had both. That was a bonanza. One story, headlined
TED WILLIAMS REPLICA OF RUTH
, cheered the rookie’s off-the-field “Ruthian idiosyncrasies” as much as his potential to succeed the Babe on merit.
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Reporters lapped up the Kid’s on-field chatter and locker-room banter and worked it into their stories and notes items. One get-acquainted interview gives a good sense of why he made such rich copy:

Cramer, who had not warmed to Williams, was annoyed by his constant banter when they were in the outfield and threatened to put cotton in his ears.

Yet Cramer and Williams (who early in the season would get into an unpublicized clubhouse brawl at Fenway Park
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) often warmed up together before games and liked to throw the ball as hard as they could.
Harold Kaese, then the beat writer for the
Boston Evening Transcript
and later for the
Boston Globe,
watched this display with interest and noted that they threw harder than some of the pitchers did. Ever the fledgling pitcher, Ted occasionally liked to mix in his knuckleball.

Williams gravitated to Jimmie Foxx, “Double X,” whose eye-popping muscles and long home runs now held the rookie spellbound. Foxx, a right-handed-hitting first baseman who had broken in with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in 1925 and was regarded as one of the game’s great sluggers, went out of his way to be kind and generous to Ted. “Right now I’ll promise you that Teddy Williams will hit,” Foxx told reporters a few days into spring training.
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Knowing that Williams wanted to bulk up and get stronger, clubhouse attendant Johnny Orlando advised him to drink buttermilk. Ted said he couldn’t stand the stuff, but when Orlando told him that Foxx used it, Williams began drinking a pint after every practice.
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Another early adviser was Moe Berg, the Princeton-educated backup catcher and linguist, who’d needled Ted a year ago but had now been asked by Cronin to watch over him and ease his passage to acceptance by the veterans. Ted peppered Berg with questions about the various pitchers in the league and what they would throw in certain situations. Berg became fond of Ted and looked upon him with wry amusement.

“He liked me as a player and a kid,” Ted told Nicholas Dawidoff, author of
The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg.
“I think he liked my young, enthusiastic approach to it all.”
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But Ted thought Berg wasn’t enthusiastic enough. “Moe was only 16 years older than I was, but he was much more subdued than the average guy even of that age. Not a lot of pep or vinegar.”

Berg didn’t play much and didn’t care if he did. “Gentlemen,” he would say, coming off the bench to enter a game, “does everyone still get three strikes out there?” He liked the camaraderie of baseball and enjoyed being on the team, but he was essentially biding his time. Cronin was willing to tolerate Berg’s insubordination and indifference because Moe was a brilliant character whom he could learn from and whose company he enjoyed. It seemed that one of Berg’s roles was to serve as Cronin’s Pygmalion.

An inveterate newspaper reader, Berg would start his days in Boston at Old South News, a newsstand on the corner of Washington and Milk Streets, downtown. He’d buy all of the major Boston papers and several from New York and Washington. Often he’d go out to Harvard Square
in Cambridge and pick up some of the foreign journals.
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Berg was so serious about his newspapers that he would often bring them into the dugout if he hadn’t finished reading a particular story that interested him. One day the Red Sox were on the field warming up before a game when Cronin spotted Berg in the dugout still reading his paper. When the manager asked him what in God’s name he was doing, Berg looked up briefly and replied: “You lead your life and I’ll lead mine, and next year we’ll beat the Yankees.”
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Ted got off to a good start, hitting a triple and a single in each of the first two intrasquad games, followed by a 2–6 showing in a twelve-inning loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in Saint Petersburg. His confidence was high. “I haven’t seen any pitching yet from these big leaguers to scare me,” he wrote home to his parents. “I can see the ball all right and I’ve been hitting it.”
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On a free night, Ted could often be found at the movies—usually at westerns. One night in Sarasota, when the villain had the hero cornered and took out his gun, ready to shoot, Ted stood up in the theater and yelled: “Go on and shoot, you skunk! You just haven’t got the nerve!”
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The story quickly made its way back to Cronin, who received it with a mixture of amusement and chagrin. He was dismayed that Ted would still enter hotel lobbies and do an imitation of a pig squealing or saunter into fine restaurants in an open collar when a tie was required. Cronin thought it high time that Ted stop acting like a rube and master at least some of the big-league social graces.