The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (42 page)

The result was as much a minidocumentary on Ted as it was a T-ball instructional. There were revealing glimpses of Williams’s hitting fundamentals, broken down. His stance, for example, was twenty-seven inches wide, his stride a controlled six inches, and he stood just twelve inches from the plate. A close-up of his hands gripping a cocked bat showed his fingers slightly overlapped, like a golfer’s. When he started his swing, the hands held back until the hips pivoted, then they slashed through the strike zone, the front arm leading the way and the back hand and arm supplying the power. Furthermore, Dunne told Arthur Daley, who had become an admirer of Dunne’s and devoted three of his Sports of the Times columns to him in 1946 and 1947, that Williams consistently hit an outside pitch when it was two inches in front of the plate, a ball down the middle nine inches in front, and an inside pitch fourteen inches in front. Those measurements never changed for low, belt-high, or letter-high balls, he added.
²⁶

In a chapter he devoted to the filming of
Swing King
in
Play Ball!,
Dunne wrote that Ted told him at the time that he feared the Boudreau shift could lower his batting average by as much as fifty points.
²⁷
With teams now likely to pitch Williams inside so that he could more frequently hit into the teeth of the stacked defense in right, Dunne concluded that the only way for Ted to beat the shift would be for him to stand farther back from the plate, draw his back foot away from the plate still more while the pitch was in flight, and take an inside-out swing with the hands ahead of the bat. This way the angle of the bat through the strike zone would naturally drive the ball to left field.
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Dunne’s tutorials flew largely under the radar. But the shift, and Ted’s initial determination to forge ahead and try blasting the ball through it, became such a press cause célèbre that it was not long before some of the Hall of Famers of the era came forward to offer their views.

Babe Ruth rose to Williams’s defense. He recalled that when the Indians had tried to shift against him, he’d taken advantage by hitting five singles to left, whereupon the fans, used to seeing the
Sultan swat, “booed the shit out of me.” He further said it would be “bullshit” for Ted to alter his natural power swing to right by hitting to left.
²⁸
But Al Simmons, long a mainstay of Connie Mack’s A’s who never liked Ted, said the shift merely exposed Williams’s weakness as a hitter, while Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker claimed no team would have dared try that defense on them because they would have hit to left all day.

“Well, Cobb was a great athlete,” Williams reflected, “in my estimate the greatest of all time, but he was an entirely different breed of cat. He was a push hitter. He choked up on the bat, two inches from the bottom, his hands four inches apart. He stood close to the plate, his hands forward. At bat he had the exact posture of the punch hitter that he was. When he talked hitting, he talked Greek to me.… Cobb was up high with his stance, slashing at the ball, pushing at it; I was down with a longer stroke. The arc of my swing was much greater than Cobb’s. I was anything but a push hitter.”
²⁹

Cobb and Williams, both supremely confident and even arrogant, kept up a running dialogue over the issue for the next several years. At the 1947 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers, Cobb, after being introduced to Ted by Grantland Rice, buttonholed him for a talk about the shift outside a stadium restaurant. Cobb had just written Ted a letter on the fine points of spray hitting. As Williams recalled the conversation in his book, the Georgia Peach said: “ ‘Boy, Ted, if they ever pulled that drastic shift on me—’ and he laughed and kind of shuddered, seeing with his mind’s eye the immortal Ty Cobb ripping line drives into those wide-open spaces in left field.”

But Cobb was not content to keep his thoughts private, and in May of 1951 he went public with his criticism of Ted, telling the Associated Press: “Williams has fine ability, but he cannot be classed as a great hitter. No player can be called a truly great hitter unless he can hit to all fields.” Then that July, Cobb wrote Williams another letter, perhaps wanting to tone down his public remarks but continuing his lecture about combating the shift.

Bobby Doerr was with Ted when he received Cobb’s letter, around the time of the All-Star Game in Detroit. As the two were riding from the airport to their hotel the day before the game, Doerr said Ted pulled the letter from his pocket and read it out loud, but again rejected Cobb’s advice. “I don’t want to do anything to change what I’m doing now,” Doerr recalled Ted saying. “I’m hitting .340 now. Why should I change something and then lose something that I’ve got?” Then, Doerr said,
Ted took the letter “and crumpled it up and threw it out the window of the cab.”
^30
*

The bottom line for Williams was that he would not fundamentally change or overhaul his classic swing; he was paid to slug, and a player has to do what he does best. And he was getting increasingly frustrated at other advice he was receiving from mere mortals: “advice from newspapermen who can’t hit, from pitchers, and from .250 hitters.”
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But Bert Dunne, former Pirates great Waner, and several others convinced him that he at least had to adapt; he had to go to left often enough to make the defenses more honest. He began following their advice in 1947, and by the end of that season, Boudreau was praising Ted for being “cute” enough to go to left at least occasionally, and he predicted that opposing teams would have trouble “getting Ted’s goat from now on. The whole idea of the shift was to bother Williams psychologically. He was stubborn in 1946.”
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By the early ’50s, Ted was proving he could go to the opposite field on a regular basis, and opponents reconsidered the shift. The Yankees were the first to abandon it, in 1951, and others gradually followed suit over the course of the decade, as Ted’s bat speed declined slightly with age and he became less of a natural pull hitter anyway.

Williams guessed that without the shift, his lifetime batting average of .344 would have been up to fifteen points higher; he said it was the second baseman playing in short right field who caused him the most difficulty and erased most of his hits. But he noted that he still won four batting titles after the shift was implemented, lost another by just two-tenths of a percentage point, and lost a sixth because he lacked the requisite number of official at bats—a title he would have won had present rules on a walk not counting as an at bat been in effect.

The Red Sox had built a big lead early in 1946 and would never look back. After the halfway point of the season, they were never less than ten games ahead of their nearest pursuer. By early September they were up by sixteen games, and they seemed on track to break the record of 107 wins set by the 1932 Yankees. Then they lost six in a row.

Finally, on September 13 in Cleveland, the Sox clinched their first pennant since 1918 when Ted hit the only inside-the-park home run of
his career. Facing Boudreau’s shift, Williams deliberately drove the ball over the head of left fielder Pat Seerey, who had been playing about twenty feet behind shortstop. The ball rolled all the way to the wall, four hundred feet away, and by the time it was retrieved and thrown back in, Ted had easily scored what turned out to be the game’s only run.

Now Red Sox traveling secretary Tom Dowd could break out the champagne he’d been lugging from Washington and Philadelphia to Detroit and Cleveland, waiting for the team to clinch. Owner Tom Yawkey led the victory party for the players at the team hotel—excluding the writers, for whom the team staged a separate party. This enraged the newspapermen, and when Yawkey made an appearance at the press gathering, Austen Lake of the
American
engaged him in a shouting match. This followed another confrontation earlier in the day between sworn enemies Joe Cronin and the
American
’s Huck Finnegan after Finnegan assured Cronin he’d never win another pennant.

Notably absent from the players’ party was Williams, who, characteristically, had decided to go his own way and meet up with a Cleveland fishing buddy to spend the evening tying flies. When the writers demanded to know why Ted wasn’t celebrating with his teammates, Dowd lied and said the Kid was visiting a dying veteran in a Cleveland hospital. When that story quickly unraveled, Dave Egan pounced and wrote that this was further evidence Ted cared only about himself and not his team; that there was one set of rules for Williams and another for the other Red Sox players.
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Yet there was no doubt that the double standard was reinforced by the press. On August 27, Ted got in a car accident. Williams, accompanied by his wife and two friends, had been driving his new Ford to East Douglas, Massachusetts, near Worcester, where the Red Sox were scheduled to play an exhibition game against the Cleveland Indians. Another car suddenly swerved in front of Ted’s car and struck it head-on. No one was seriously hurt, but the bang-up prompted Pearl Harbor–size headlines in the papers.

Four days later, at Fenway Park, Williams, increasingly frustrated by
the effects of the shift and a lingering slump in which he’d hit only .272 for the month of August, was roundly booed for getting into an unseemly snit after being robbed of a home run by Athletics right fielder Elmer Valo. In the third inning, into the teeth of a fierce east wind, Ted had scorched a ball that Valo had caught in front of the bull pen. The day before, Valo had made a more remarkable catch of another drive by Ted that by all rights should have been another home run. Then, at the start of the sixth inning, with the Red Sox leading the Athletics, 3–2, Williams, still pouting after the second Valo catch, halfheartedly hit a ground ball, which he failed to run out. The crowd let him have it, and Cronin, heading to the dugout from his third-base coaching position, lectured Ted on his way out to left field.

Williams played most of the seventh inning with his arms folded in left, continuing to sulk. When Valo hit a fly ball to him to end the inning, Ted, after catching it, heaved the ball up in the air, then took his glove and threw it after the ball. The wolves naturally howled still louder at this display. Cronin waited for him in the dugout and chewed him out again, but he said after the game he would take no further action.

At least one of Williams’s teammates was angered by his antics and called him on it. Rudy York, the slugging first baseman who had come over from Detroit in the off-season, confronted Williams in the clubhouse.

“We’re about to win this pennant,” York later recalled telling Williams, “and everybody’s in it together. All we got to do is play our best and we got it in the bag. Anybody who loafs on this ball club has got to answer to me. I’m about washed up, and you’ve got a long way to go. I’m not aiming to let a pennant slip away from me now, and I’m not aiming to see you let it slip away, either.”
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York, who liked to chain-smoke Camels in the dugout while studying opposing pitchers to determine when they tipped their pitches, said, “Williams was a good friend of mine, and he took it in the right spirit. I always did say he was the greatest hitter I ever saw step in the box.”

The Red Sox played out the string to finish 104–50, twelve games ahead of Detroit and fully seventeen ahead of the reeling third-place Yankees. Williams remained in the spotlight as the subject of long profiles in the September issues of
Sport, Collier’s,
and
Life
magazines. The
Life
piece did nothing to dispel the notion that Ted cared only about hitting. “They’ll never get me out of the game running into a wall after a fly ball,” he told writer John Chamberlain.
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“I’ll make a damn good try,
but you can bet your sweet life I won’t get killed. They don’t pay off on fielding.”

Ted’s final batting line—a .342 average with 38 home runs and 123 runs batted in—was not enough to lead the league in any one category but would be deemed impressive enough to win him the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. His series of late-season contretemps soon faded in importance as the excitement of Boston being in its first World Series in twenty-eight years began to build.

The National League season ended in a tie for first place between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers, forcing a three-game series to determine the pennant winner.

Williams, in his column, picked the Cardinals to win. He thought the fact that both teams were having to fight to the finish would help keep them sharp for the World Series. The Red Sox had clinched early, and for the last month “just fiddled around,” Ted wrote in his book. “It had been the kind of season that positively breeds overconfidence.”
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With the onset of cool weather in October, Williams had again contracted what had become an almost annual virus. “They never could find out what the hell that was, and they tested me for everything,” he said years later.
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After a course of antibiotics, he felt even more weakened. Like many players returning from three years off at war, Williams would acknowledge later that he was fatigued, his body still not yet fully reacclimated to the rigors of a seven-month season. He had done most of his hitting in the spring and early summer and had tailed off in the late summer and early fall. He hadn’t hit a ball out of the park since September 11 in Detroit.

Waiting for the Cardinals-Dodgers winner, the Red Sox decided to try to keep their edge by playing an exhibition series at Fenway Park against a handpicked group of leading American Leaguers that included Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg. It was a cold, raw day, and only 1,996 people turned out to watch the first game on October 1, when DiMaggio was forced to take the field in a Boston uniform after his Yankees flannels did not arrive on time. In his third at bat, Williams, facing five-foot-eight Washington Senators left-hander Mickey Haefner, was struck on the tip of his right elbow. The pitch wasn’t deliberate—it was simply a curve that didn’t curve. Ted had seen the ball spinning toward him and thought it would break in, but it never did, and he couldn’t get his elbow out of the way in time.