The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (30 page)

“School kids grew up learning their geography by knowing the ten cities and sixteen teams in the American and National Leagues,” Dom DiMaggio wrote in his memoir of the 1941 season,
Real Grass, Real Heroes.
“It was that wonderful sameness, year in and year out. We could always count on baseball to be the same warm and sunny game, on the same fields, in the same cities. We loved baseball not only for itself but for the secure feeling of community it gave you. We felt a loyalty to baseball, because it was loyal to us.”
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Players were still leaving their gloves on the field at the end of an inning, before they came in to bat. They’d be tossed in the shallowest part of the outfield, just beyond the infield, and when play resumed, the gloves were obstacles that the players had to contend with while ranging under pop-ups.

All travel was still done by train, and teams could take between ten days and two weeks to go only as far west as Saint Louis and only as far south as Washington, just below the Mason-Dixon Line. The major-league teams would lease three cars on a train, and the hierarchy of the players was evident in who was assigned to be in what car. Rookies were assigned to the third car, the one that swayed the most when the train went around a bend.

“If you were assigned an upper berth in the third car, you knew you had a long way to go before you acquired any seniority on that ball club,” wrote Dominic. “Your goal was to progress to the point where you could be assigned to Lower 7, Car A. Car A was the front car, the one that remained the steadiest of the three. A lower berth was always preferable to an upper, and the seventh Pullman berth was in the middle of the car, the smoothest riding part of the car because it wasn’t over the wheels. When you were assigned Lower 7, Car A, you knew you had established yourself as an important member of the team.”
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Generally, the players loved train travel. “Ballplayers from the 1940s will tell you to a man that when baseball teams started flying, a certain bonding that held teams together went out of major league baseball,” Dominic added. “We got to know each other as only you can when
you’re on a train together for 24 hours, or 36 or more. You came together as a group, and when you went out onto that field, you came together as a team.… We were heroes on those trains. We’d roll into a station and look out the window and see kids yelling up to us and pointing out to their buddies, ‘There’s Williams!’ Who wouldn’t be happy to sign autographs in that kind of enthusiasm?”
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Most of the trains would leave around midnight. The dining cars were formal: tables for four were set with white tablecloths and a centerpiece of fresh flowers; waiters wearing white jackets served fine food. Air-conditioning was just being introduced, so more often than not a large block of ice was stationed at one end of a car in front of a fan.

The trips strengthened the bond between Dominic and Ted, the precursor to what would become an even stronger lifelong friendship when their playing days were over. During Joe’s streak, when the Red Sox were playing at home, Ted would get updates from the Fenway scoreboard operator, Bill Daley, on whether the Clipper had gotten his hit yet, then he would shout out the news to Dominic over in center field.

Even in the absence of Joe DiMaggio news, Ted would usually keep up a running repartee throughout the game with Daley, who would poke his head through an opening in the scoreboard. The Fenway telegraph operator, Hartwell McIsaac, knew that the Kid liked to keep up on who was doing what around the majors, so when something of interest happened, McIsaac would call Daley, who would then relay it to Williams. Williams would chatter with delight after he hit a home run or mutter in frustration if a pitcher had good stuff and he was having a hard time handling it. If Daley posted a number showing how many runs the Yankees or some other team had scored in an inning, Ted would ask him how they’d increased their tally.

Dominic became a keen observer of Ted. He noticed, for instance, that when a relief pitcher was brought in and Williams was next up, he would—against the rules—inch in as close as he could to the batter’s box while the reliever was warming up, the better to size up his stuff.

And Williams was always quizzing Dominic about what the opposing pitcher was throwing. “If I led off the game by making an out, I would be headed past Ted on my way back to the dugout while he was on his way to the on-deck circle. As Johnny Pesky stepped into the batter’s box, Ted would be giving me the third degree: ‘Where was that last pitch, Dommie? What’s he throwing? What did you hit?’

“His timing was always the worst in that situation. I was fed up with myself and in no mood to talk about it, so I’d tell him in my disgust, ‘I
don’t know.’ To Williams, ignorance was worse than not getting a hit. ‘How the hell can you not know?’ he’d bark. ‘What kind of a dummy are you? No wonder you didn’t get a hit. Don’t be so damned dumb!’ ”
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Williams probably spent more time that summer with his roommate, pitcher Charlie Wagner, than with anyone else—which meant that no one else had as intimate a sense of Ted’s obsessions. “Ted was a very intense guy and he used to psych himself up for games,” Wagner recalled. “The better he hit the moodier he’d get because he was psyching himself. In the room the morning before a game he’d walk around talking out loud about the pitcher and what he was going to do to the guy. He loved to stand in front of a mirror like he was swinging a bat.”
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He’d get up early, listen to the radio, then get the papers and study the box scores. Williams would pay special attention to what the pitchers did, how long they lasted, how many runs and walks they gave up. Then he would do fingertip push-ups, telling Wagner that he could do twenty-five more than however many Broadway Charlie could do. Some days, Wagner and Ted would go fishing together at a lake in Framingham, about twenty miles west of Boston, a relaxing way for Ted to contemplate the contest to come before getting to the park at noon for a three o’clock game.

As it happened, the Red Sox began the second half of their season in Detroit, so Ted, still dining out on his All-Star heroics, didn’t have far to report for duty. But on July 12, he reinjured his right ankle sliding back into first base. X-rays showed no new chip or break. Still, it was sore, so Williams was confined to pinch-hitting duty for the next ten days.

When he returned to the lineup on July 22, his ankle heavily taped and his average down to .393, Ted learned that Joe Cronin had shifted him from batting third in the order to cleanup. Williams was happy with the change—hitting fourth figured to boost his RBI chances. Batting third with Cronin and then Foxx behind him, he’d seen good pitches. But at cleanup, with Foxx in decline as a power hitter batting fifth, pitchers opted to be more selective with the pitches they threw Ted. This was a mixed bag in his quest for .400—he got fewer chances for hits but more walks, thus keeping his total number of official at bats down.

The next day, July 23, at Fenway Park, White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes unveiled the first-ever shift against Williams to try to plug holes on the right side of the field, where the pull-hitting Ted smacked the ball most often. The outfield tilted way right: the third baseman played where the shortstop normally played, the shortstop swung around to the right side of second base, the second baseman moved deep in the hole onto the
outfield grass, and the first baseman hugged the line. Ted saw the new alignment and started laughing. “Dykes, you crazy son of a bitch, what the hell are you doing?” he yelled.
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Ted hit one down the left-field line and went 4–10 in two games against the shift, and Dykes abandoned it.

Williams stayed hot, and by August 13 he was hitting .413. He was full of confidence when he held court with a group of writers around the batting cage at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. “I’ll tell you why I’m hitting .400,” Ted said. “It’s a cinch. I got confidence this year for the first time. When I came up two years ago, I thought it would be swell if I could have a pretty fair season. You know, hit around .300 and get a homer now and then. Before I knew it, I was hitting .330, but I really didn’t think I was that good. I finished that first year at .327, I led the league in runs batted in and I hit more homers than DiMaggio, but I still did not feel sure of myself. Last year I missed the batting title by six or eight points, and I found myself wondering if I was as good as DiMaggio, Appling, Greenberg and those other guys. I told myself I was a sap for thinking that way, and I guess it worked. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a natural hitter. If that’s all there was to it, a guy could lay off all winter and come back in the spring as good as he was the previous midseason. Nobody can do that. Natural hitter, my ass.”
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It was the kind of stark, introspective quote that made Williams such good copy, and it was something that the painfully shy, inarticulate DiMaggio would never say.

Ted held steady for the rest of August, dipping only slightly to .407 at the end of the month, when he celebrated his twenty-third birthday.

As the final month of the season began, and the excitement built over whether Ted could maintain the .400 plateau, there was a spate of national attention on Williams. He appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine and was featured in a photo spread inside that amounted to a baseball cheesecake layout. He was pictured bare-chested, in undershorts, doing a frame-by-frame breakdown of his famous swing as his washboard abs and long, rawboned arms strained.

The Boston papers began running house ads requesting readers not to call in asking how Williams did that day, because the switchboards were getting jammed. “We’ll give you all you can possibly read… and more!” said the
Post.
The
Globe
ran a daily feature showing day-by-day comparisons between Ted that year and Bill Terry in 1930, when the latter had hit .401.

Feisty and having fun, on September 1, Ted appeared at Fenway early,
showing off a new .22 revolver and a Zipper rifle to his teammates.
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When the park was empty, he walked out to the field and, standing in front of the Red Sox dugout, took aim at one of the red lights under the word
strike
on the scoreboard, which was positioned on the left-field wall about 350 feet away. He fired, and the glass shattered. He went on to hit three home runs against Washington that day in a Labor Day doubleheader to take over the American League home-run lead with thirty-four.

In a back-to-reality moment that same day, President Roosevelt announced that the United States was prepared to join the Allies at war.

Momentous events that summer, such as Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the sinking of the
Bismarck,
had even penetrated baseball’s cocoon to become a prime topic of clubhouse conversation. Throughout that month, FDR made more strident denunciations of Hitler and his “insane forces of violence,” but the country wasn’t at war yet, and many remained absorbed by baseball and Ted’s chase for .400.

The day after the Washington doubleheader, a fourteen-year-old from South Brewer, Maine, Billy Kane, hitchhiked 250 miles to Fenway Park to see Williams play only to find that there was no game scheduled. He was found sleeping in an aisle of the park by police officers. Back at the station, when the kid told his story, a few cops went over to the Shelton Hotel and got the almost-ready-for-bed Ted to come down to the station and meet the boy. The next day, Billy was Ted’s guest for a game against the Yankees. The papers loved the story and played it big.

When the Yankees clinched the American League pennant early, on September 4, it only focused more attention on Williams as the fortunes of the Red Sox and other AL teams became irrelevant. And as the Sox came into Yankee Stadium on the sixth for their final series of the year, Ted was again baldly honest about his goals and ambitions, speaking in a manner that would be unusual for a player today.

“I’ll be the happiest fellow in the world if I hit .400,” he told the writers. “I want to be talked about. I want to be remembered when I leave baseball. Who are the players they talk about and remember: Babe Ruth because he hit 60 home runs, Rogers Hornsby because he hit .424. Hack Wilson because he batted in 190 runs, and DiMaggio because he hit in 56 straight games. Those are the best, top performances in baseball. They’re what I’m aiming at.”
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The following day, Yankee Stadium fans gave Ted a standing ovation after he came to bat for the four hundredth time of the season, thereby qualifying for the batting title. By now it seemed like fans of every
team—including the most intense haters of the Red Sox—were rooting for the Kid to break the barrier. Indeed, the previous month, when Ted singled and then was walked four times by Yankees pitchers, they had booed the home team lustily.

On an off day, September 11, Williams drove down to Providence, Rhode Island, from Boston for a batting exhibition, and four thousand people turned out to cheer him on. The night before, the retired Babe Ruth had attracted twelve hundred. Yet occasionally the bad-Ted persona from last year slipped out.

Asked by the
Globe
’s Louis Lyons how he felt about Boston fans now, Ted said: “They’re like any other fans. They follow what the baseball writers say.”

Williams was not just leading the league with his average but contending for the Triple Crown as well. On September 15, he smacked a three-run homer at Fenway off John Rigney, his thirty-fifth of the year, giving him 116 RBIs—tied for second with Joe DiMaggio and six behind the leader, Charlie Keller of the Yankees.

The next day, Ted flew off to New York to appear on the nationally syndicated
We the People
radio program. On Ted’s arm when he appeared at the airport for the afternoon American Airlines flight was Doris Soule, who had spent the summer under the radar, working as a cashier at Boston’s Parker House hotel, but now was making her public debut. The writers and photographers on hand to record Ted’s every move swarmed around Doris, the first girl to be seen accompanying the Kid, but the couple flew off before anyone could determine who she was.