The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (22 page)

Then Jim Bagby, the Red Sox pitcher with a harelip who was also an active bench jockey, began yelling out to Greenberg that he was playing Williams too close in at first base. “Hank, you had better get back!” Bagby shouted.
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“You don’t know this guy, you better get back!” Greenberg paid no attention. Finally, Bagby called out: “All right, Hank, if you want to look like me and talk like me, stand right where you are!” Ted, who then lined out to center fielder Barney McCosky, delighted in telling that story over the years.

On his next time up, in the fourth inning, with Joe Cronin on base, York tried to get the rookie off balance by asking him how many home runs he’d hit for Minneapolis the previous year. Ted respectfully said it didn’t matter because York must have hit more when he played for Toledo, the Tigers farm team in the American Association. He worked the count to three and two, then unloaded on a high fastball and drove it on top of the roof in right-center. Gerry Moore reported in the
Globe
that “the most dependable Detroit historians immediately tabbed that blow as the longest homer ever hit here, surpassing previous granddaddies propelled by Lou Gehrig and Sunny Jim Bottomley.”

In the fifth, with one out and Foxx and Cronin aboard, Ted dug in against Bob Harris, a rookie just up from Toledo. Harris’s first three pitches were balls. Now York piped up again.

“You’re not hitting, are you Kid?” the catcher asked.
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“I sure as hell am,” Ted replied, having just been flashed the green light by Cronin.

The pitch came, and Williams crushed a rising line drive. The ball screamed out to right field in a heartbeat, flew over the roof, fair by a dozen feet, and landed across adjoining Trumbull Avenue, bouncing against a taxi garage on one hop.

“The reaction of the Detroit writers, fans and players alike was almost indescribable,” Gerry Moore wrote. “Greenberg looked with positive awe and admiration at the smiling Ted as he rounded first base. York just stood at home plate and scratched his head.” As Williams crossed home, the catcher also muttered: “Darned if you weren’t telling the truth.”

On his last time up, he flied to right after receiving what Moore called “the greatest ovation we have ever heard a visiting athlete receive here.”

The Kid was making his mark. Before the game, Hank Greenberg, then acknowledged as one of the great hitters in the game, had offered to bet Williams that he wouldn’t hit .320 that year. But afterward he sent word into the Sox dressing room through a Detroit writer that he wanted to take the offer back, and asked Ted to come out early the next day at batting practice to give him a few tips. Foxx put the icing on the cake for Ted, calling out to him as they were leaving the clubhouse: “Hey, Kid, wait for me.… I want to see if I can get inoculated with some of that power.… Yes sir, there goes the Kid that makes us a real pennant contender.”
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News of Ted’s show in Detroit rippled through the American League, and at least one rival manager decided to change tactics against him. Bobby Doerr recalled that at the team’s next stop in Saint Louis, Browns manager Fred Haney pointedly told Williams directly that he would be knocked down.

At Sportsman’s Park, visiting players had to walk through the Browns clubhouse to get to theirs. As Doerr and Ted passed through, Haney spotted them. He had managed Doerr in the Coast League, but now he ignored his former player, walked right up to Ted, and said: “I’ve seen how well you hit. Let’s see how you hit sittin’ on your ass.”
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“When the game started,” Doerr told writer Mike Blake, “the first pitch to Ted was right near his ear and knocked the big guy down. Ted got up, didn’t even dust off his uniform, took his stance and on the next pitch, drove it against the right field screen for a double. The next time up, the first pitch knocked him down and on pitch two, Ted drove it into Grand Boulevard for a home run. That was that.”

Ted gained confidence each time he faced a pitcher. “The first time around the league, the first western trip we made, he might have struck out ten times in the four towns, and his average was pretty low,” recalled Cronin. “But he kept saying, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ll hit these guys.’ He kept his confidence.… He knew what he wanted and he knew he was gonna do it. Wasn’t any doubt about it.”
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Williams capped an eventful May by hitting a homer in each game of a Memorial Day doubleheader split with the Yankees at Fenway Park before a packed house of thirty-five thousand people, ten thousand more having been turned away. The first blow, off Red Ruffing, was said by Gerry Moore of the
Globe
to have been the longest home run ever witnessed at Fenway, landing seventy-five feet up in the right-field bleachers, just to the left of the runway separating that section of the park from the grandstand. “Even Ruffing couldn’t conceal his amazement as Teddy
loped around the bases in his usual grinning style, and the crowd went entirely nuts.”
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Ted said later: “It was the longest home run I ever hit. I couldn’t even feel the contact, the swing was that sweet.”
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With June came an extended slump, however, and Ted went into a funk. He told Johnny Orlando that he wished he were back in Minneapolis.

“So I told him right to his kisser: ‘Kid, you’re gonna be all right,’ ” Orlando said. “ ‘You’ll hit .335 for the year. You keep swinging and you’ll have 35 home runs, and if the guys ahead of you keep getting on base, you’ll drive in 150 runs.’ He said, ‘If I do… I’ll buy you a Cadillac.’ ”
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By late June, Ted was still only hitting in the .270s, but he was hitting for power. By the July 4 benchmark, he was leading the league in RBIs with sixty-four and was third in home runs with twelve. Meanwhile, a rare five-game sweep of the Yankees by the Red Sox between July 5 and July 9 in Yankee Stadium had Boston buzzing and pushed any talk of individual disappointments aside. Before the series started, Ted spoke up for the team, telling Tommy Henrich of the Yanks: “It’s all right for you guys to think you’re tough, but it’s about time somebody quit agreeing with you.”
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Williams wasn’t selected for the All-Star team—the only time in his career that would happen. He said he wasn’t sore at the snub, noting that when the team was picked, his average was still under .300. He would use the break to go visit his aunts and uncle in nearby Westchester County, then return to New York to watch the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium from Tom Yawkey’s box, next to the American League dugout.

By mid-July, Ted had worked his average up above .310, and he was feeling frisky. Before a game on July 17 in Detroit, he walked over to Tigers starter Bobo Newsom, one of the league’s leading pitchers, as he was warming up and told him: “I’m going to give you a going over!”
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“Why, you rookie!” snorted Newsom. “You couldn’t hit me with a banjo.”

His first time up, Ted homered and later touched Newsom for a double. When he reached second base, Ted looked in at the pitcher and wagged his fingers, as if to say he’d been foolish to doubt him. “Fresh busher!” said Bobo afterward in the clubhouse.

A few days later, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Williams, after striking out, threw a mini-tantrum, kicking the ground, heaving his bat, and punching the air. As the White Sox fans hooted at him, Ted doffed his
cap and curtsied extravagantly. Seeing home plate umpire Bill Summers whip off his mask and walk briskly toward Ted, Cronin rushed from the dugout and, trying to save his star from being run from the game, screamed at him: “Busher!” followed by a string of other invectives. The dressing-down may have averted an ejection, but didn’t seem to have much effect curbing Ted’s erratic behavior. Later in the game, after another disappointment, Ted punted his glove some fifty feet in the air while walking out to his position in right field. After the game, Williams told
Boston Evening American
columnist Austen Lake that Cronin had taken him aside and said, “Kid, don’t get in uproars. It’ll sour the fans on you. They’ll think you’re a crackpot and start to hoot you. Right now, everybody’s pulling for you. Keep ’em on your side.” Ted said Cronin was right, “but shucks, I was only funnin’!”

Of course this sort of exuberance, color, and candor was music to the press’s ears. Before the first game of a doubleheader on July 18 in Chicago, Ted had told the
Globe
’s Hy Hurwitz, “I’ve got to get a home run out there today. It’s the only western city that I haven’t hit for the circuit so far.” After belting a curveball from Clint Brown more than four hundred feet and collecting five other hits in the two games, Ted said: “That leaves only New York and Washington to conquer and I’ll take care of those towns on my next visit.”
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Similarly, the
Globe
’s Gerry Moore had asked Williams earlier that month in Philadelphia if it wasn’t about time for him to hit his first homer at Shibe Park. “You’re darn right!” he replied. “I’ll hit one for you today.”
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He did, and as he crossed the plate, he waved to Moore in the press box.

He went on to give Austen Lake a series of candid predictions, including that he’d lead the league in hitting and home runs before 1942 and that he was a “cinch” to hit three homers before the end of that very week. He said his greatest satisfaction thus far was the day earlier in July when Cronin installed him as the cleanup hitter—behind Foxx. Lake said that Ted was relishing the attention he was getting from reporters, autograph seekers, and photographers and was gracious to all of them, especially the latter. He was “posturing interminably for the picture men. He loves it!” Lake wrote. Ted admitted as much. “Boy! Maybe this doesn’t give me a kick. I’m a kid from the haystack circuit. I never had nothin’ like this!”
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It was true that Williams was often willing to go to great lengths for photographers, especially those who worked for the Hearst-owned
Daily Record.
Like any tabloid worth its salt, the
Record
knew how to play a
good picture, and when it got one, would offer it up to the rest of the Hearst papers around the country. On May 22, during yet another bout with the grippe, Ted posed for a hokey but endearing page 1
Record
shot in which he was fishing from a goldfish bowl while lying in his bed. Three months later, there was Ted on the cover of the August 4
Record,
dressed as a latter-day Huck Finn: barefoot, wearing overalls over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, standing along the banks of the Charles River with a bamboo fishing rod over his right shoulder, waving happily. He had on a straw hat and had tied a red handkerchief around his neck. Inside the paper, he was shown sitting on the grass, waiting for an imaginary fish to bite while sucking on a piece of honeysuckle.

“We like Williams because he’s regular,” said
Record
photographer Bruce McLean in a copy block that accompanied his Huck Finn photos. “I’m telling you, you just can’t help liking that kid, and every photographer will tell you the same thing.”
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By the beginning of August, Ted was on a tear, hitting .327 with 16 homers and 85 RBIs, as was Jimmie Foxx, who was at .358 with 24 homers and 74 RBIs. The press began to characterize the two sluggers as a mini Murderers’ Row who helped and admired one another while waging a friendly competition to see who could hit the longest homers and knock in the most runs.

Ted accorded Foxx his proper deference and respect. “I’m lucky to be working with such a real guy as Jimmie Foxx,” he said. “You know, a lot of people ask me who I want to pattern myself after. Well, when it comes to hitting a baseball, Jim is the one man I want to follow, but even if he never hit a baseball, he’d still be the one I’d like to pattern myself after as a man.”
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Foxx, for his part, said he had been helped by having Williams hit behind him so that pitchers were forced to throw to him.
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Ted’s effervescence amused Double X, particularly when the rookie engaged in an exaggerated hand-pumping routine when greeting him after a home run. Williams was also giving him motivation, lest Foxx get outhit by someone he affectionately referred to as a “fresh busher.”

Though Ted tolerated that comment coming from Foxx, by now he was getting defensive at any implication that he was still a minor leaguer. His record had proved otherwise, he thought. “I’m not a busher, and I hate that word,” he told the Associated Press for an early August feature.
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“Sure, you’re a busher,” said third baseman Jim Tabor, overhearing the conversation. “What else are you?”

“I’m not a busher!” Ted screamed back. “I’m a big league ballplayer and don’t call me a busher.”

He took more kindly to another traditional baseball term. “Screwball?” He smiled. “Sure, they call me a screwball and say I make wisecracks. But let me tell you, I may be a screwball to some people and I do have a lot of fun. But when I get out there on the field, I’m plenty serious.”

The same day that story appeared, August 8, Williams demonstrated why people were still using both words to describe him.

After popping up with the bases loaded in a 9–2 win over the Athletics at Fenway Park, Ted loped down the line and had only barely reached first base when the ball dropped between two fielders. He should have been on second, so Cronin sent in a pinch runner and benched him. John Gillooly wrote in the
Record
that Williams’s baserunning apathy was the result of being “obviously stung” that Foxx had taken over the lead in their RBI race following two home runs earlier in the game.
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But Gerry Moore of the
Globe
reported that Cronin and Ted had a long talk after the benching, during which Cronin learned that “some outside circumstance of a private nature” had been the cause of his disinterested and lax play.
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Ted made amends in a doubleheader against the Athletics the next day. In the first game, he showed a sense of humor, sprinting to first base after he bounced a ball back to the pitcher. The crowd loved it, laughing and cheering. Then he won the second game with a ninth-inning bases-loaded single off the left-field wall to drive in two runs for a 6–5 come-from-behind victory.