The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (51 page)

The Red Sox again started slowly. Ted wasn’t hitting up to his standard. Mel Parnell and Ellis Kinder were the only pitchers who were even somewhat reliable, and McCarthy soon found himself increasing their workload by using them in relief, between starts.
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But no one else was playing particularly well, either. When the Tigers came to Boston for a doubleheader on May 11, they were tied for first with the Red Sox. In the sixth inning of the first game, Ted dropped a routine fly ball. The error was meaningless in a 13–4 Tigers blowout, but the fans booed Williams as he trotted into the dugout after Detroit was retired. Piqued, the Kid extended the middle finger of each hand and gave the paying customers what for.

In the second game, with the Sox leading 2–0, Detroit had the bases loaded with two out in the eighth when Vic Wertz hit a sharp grounder into left field. Ted charged the ball, trying to keep the tying run from scoring, but it took a bad hop and skidded past him, rolling all the way to the wall. All three runners scored, and at the end of the inning, the crowd of 27,758 jeered Williams mercilessly as he ran off the field. Ted responded by again extending his finger to the fans, this time in three separate dramatic gestures to different sections of the park.

“Ted began, ‘You in left field, fuck you!’ and he saluted,” recalled Walt Dropo years later. Dropo was the six-foot-five-inch, 220-pound slugger who had been called up from Louisville in early April to replace Billy Goodman at first base after Goodman broke his leg. “And then he went to center field and then to right field, and then, ‘You Black Knights of the Keyboard, take this,’ and he gave them the finger.… That day Ted just had had enough. It had been building over a period of time. He just vented his emotions right then and there in front of everybody.”
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For good measure, as he was waiting in the on-deck circle to hit in the bottom half of the inning and the boos continued, Williams turned around and spat contemptuously at the crowd. Boston went on to lose, 5–3.

It was by far the biggest and most extreme tantrum of his career, and the papers savaged him for it. Baseball “never wallowed lower in the muck than it did on a softly wonderful day in beautiful Fenway Park,” wrote Dave Egan, trotting out a new nickname for Ted after his finger display: “the Pantomimist.”
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Austen Lake wrote that Williams had “removed himself from the ranks of decent sportsmen. Yesterday he was a little man, and in his ungovernable rage, a dirty little man.”
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The
Post
said it had pictures of Ted’s crude gestures but wouldn’t publish them “for the sake of the children, ladies and normal persons.”

In the clubhouse after the game, Ted was unrepentant. “I didn’t mind the errors,” he said, “but those goddamn fans, they can go fuck themselves, and you can quote me in all the papers.”

The next morning, Tom Yawkey called in his star for a tongue-lashing. He demanded that Ted apologize and made him promise he would never do such a thing again. The team then issued the following statement: “After a talk with Mr. Yawkey, Ted Williams has requested that this announcement be made to the fans. Ted is sorry for his impulsive action on the field yesterday and wishes to apologize to any and all whom he may have offended.”

The statement would have been more effective if it had dropped the
may have.
Williams was chastened, mortified, and ashamed. It had been a Tourette’s-like outburst that he couldn’t control but regretted immediately. After cooling off, he wanted to apologize, but the circumstances of being called in by Yawkey and the statement being issued in his name rather than in his own words made it look less than sincere. Or, as Gerry Hern put it in the
Post,
it looked “somewhat like a mother dragging a reluctant child to a neighbor’s house after breaking a window.”
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When the din died down a bit, Commissioner Happy Chandler summoned Williams to his office for a private talk, which was kept quiet at
the time. Chandler liked Ted and wanted to see if he could help soothe the slugger’s frayed nerves.

“Ted kept saying about the Boston fans, ‘What do they want me to do?’ ” Chandler said years later. “He said, ‘I hit the ball into the stands for them. I hustle. I make the catches. But they boo me. Or those sportswriters blast me.’ He’s a good boy. Trouble with Ted is, he’s got a persecution complex. He can’t understand why people boo him. That’s why I called him in. I thought I’d try to help him. When a fellow needs a friend, a fellow needs a friend. But I just couldn’t reach him.”
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Jimmy Cannon, the prominent
New York Post
columnist, played off the tantrum story and wrote on June 1 that Ted wanted to be traded—to Detroit. Though Cannon was one of the few writers Ted liked, he panned the story and the next day issued a denial in his own column: “I never said I want to be traded. I don’t want to play baseball anywhere except in Boston, and I don’t want to play for anybody except Tom Yawkey.”

In a seminal piece later that month, Roger Birtwell of the
Globe,
writing from Chicago on June 20, referred to the Red Sox as “baseball’s Country Club Set” who didn’t seem the least bit upset to have just lost five games in a row in Cleveland and Detroit, or to be idling nine and a half games out of first place. “The Country Club boys, who receive half a million dollars a summer to play ball games, were relieved to escape from Detroit and Cleveland—two towns where the players are simply low-brow roughnecks,” Birtwell wrote. “Besides, they play too hard there.” This listless, fat-and-sassy image of the Boston players as pampered and overpaid by Yawkey would linger and define the team for a generation.

As always, Ted was central. The scene on the train ride from Detroit to Chicago was “the picture of contentment.” There was Junior Stephens asleep on a parlor chair, Mickey McDermott sprawled across six or seven seats, and Williams off by himself, sitting next to a porter in a separate smoking car, reading the sports pages and checking on his investments in the
Wall Street Journal.
Wrote Birtwell, “One of the players told Williams some time ago, ‘You buy every newspaper you can get, and spend half your time reading them—just to find someone to get mad at, each day.’ ”
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Sure enough, Ted popped off to Birtwell six days later: “Before the war, I hit .400,” he said. “When I hit 50 points lower after the war, the writers say it’s because I can’t hit against teams like the Yankees. But it could be that the Yankees have better pitching, couldn’t it? A guy can’t hit .400 every year.” Then he added this cruel postscript: “I’ll be able to
retire in a couple of years or so. I’ll be hitting around .350. And I hope the baseball writers are up in the press box with the temperature at 121.… Men die at 120.”
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The
Globe
quoted that vicious remark in an article prominently placed on its front page. The piece ran just beneath the lead story, which reported that North Korea had invaded South Korea the previous day. President Harry Truman quickly ordered a Naval blockade of the Korean coast on June 29 and authorized General Douglas MacArthur to send American troops into Korea. By early July, 6,500 Marines set sail from San Diego, bound for Pusan, Korea.

As the ground commitment escalated, the need for tactical air support also grew. The Marine Corps was short on pilots, so it made plans to activate hundreds of its pilots who had served in World War II and who were still carried in the inactive reserve ranks. One of the pilots who stood to be recalled was Williams. After being discharged from World War II, he had remained in the Reserves and now held the rank of first lieutenant, an appointment he’d accepted in writing on June 30, 1949. He had casually signed up for the Reserves while filling out his discharge paperwork in 1946—and would later assert he did so unwittingly. He had agreed to allow the Corps to use his name to promote recruiting, and he’d recorded radio commercials for the same purpose, but he certainly hadn’t given serious credence to the notion that another war could be on the horizon or that becoming a reservist could make him vulnerable to be recalled to fight in it.

On July 12, Brigadier General Clayton C. Jerome, director of public information and recruiting for the Marine Corps, wrote Williams to tell him that since “the recruiting picture has indeed changed completely,” the Corps would be delaying the rollout of a generic poster featuring Ted’s photo to instead focus on a pitch that encouraged volunteers to join the “service which selects its men.”

Meanwhile, manager Joe McCarthy’s drinking had gotten out of control. He would go off on benders and miss a few games, then the writers would cover for him, reporting that he had the flu. Some days, he’d fall asleep in the dugout. Joe Cronin finally warned McCarthy that if he appeared at the ballpark drunk one more time he’d be sacked. When it happened in Detroit in late June, the club announced that McCarthy was resigning for health reasons. Coach Steve O’Neill took over as manager for the rest of the year.

Boston was eight back at the All-Star break. Williams had started
slowly, but by that midpoint, he was cooking, at .321 with an impressive 25 homers and 83 RBIs. “I was hitting better in the month before the All Star game than I had ever hit in my life,” Ted later said.
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The other Red Sox joining Williams at Comiskey Park in Chicago for the All-Star Game on July 11 were Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Junior Stephens, and Walt Dropo, the rookie who had emerged as a power-hitting force, batting fifth in the Red Sox order behind Williams and Stephens.

In the top of the first inning, Pirates slugger Ralph Kiner hit a deep drive to left-center. Williams raced back for it and made a spectacular one-handed catch before crashing into the scoreboard, bracing himself for the collision with his left elbow. He rubbed the elbow hard on his way into the dugout, and American League manager Casey Stengel asked him if he was all right. Ted said he was.

In the bottom half of the inning, he laced what appeared to be a single to right field, but Jackie Robinson, playing well out on the grass in the Williams shift, grabbed the ball on one hop and threw Ted out at first. In the third, Kiner again smashed a line drive to left, and Ted made another nice running catch, continuing to belie his reputation as a poor, indifferent defender.

Kiner turned the tables on Ted in the bottom half of the inning, making a leaping catch of a scorcher Williams hit to right. In the fifth, with the score tied 2–2, Williams singled in the go-ahead run for the Americans. Stengel kept asking him how his elbow was. “I kept nodding, ‘OK, OK,’ because I wanted to play… but by now the elbow’s a balloon and I’m in great pain,” Williams recalled in his book.
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Ted struck out in the eighth, whereupon Stengel pulled him from the game, which the NL went on to win in fourteen innings, 4–3.

Williams was in agony on the flight home to Boston, Dropo remembered: “Ted was holding his hand in his shirt, and he said, ‘This goddamn thing, I think it’s broken.’ It was a four-hour flight from Chicago to New York, and all that time Ted was sitting there the heat of his body is going out. We got into LaGuardia—we had about an hour layover—and we went upstairs to the rotunda to have a drink. Ted said, ‘Give me a double Jack Daniel’s.… He kept saying, ‘This son of a bitch is broken. It’s killing me.…’ We landed in Boston, and I went to the hotel where I was living. I got up in the morning and I read the paper: ‘Williams’s Elbow is Broken. He’ll be out two months.’ Imagine.”
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On July 13, Ted was operated on, and seven bone chips were removed from his elbow. Williams was praised in the papers for courageously
playing eight innings with a broken elbow—and playing well, at that. It was surprising that he’d violated his own dictum of not crashing into walls in pursuit of a fly ball—they didn’t pay off on fielding, he’d said. Now he wasn’t just out for a few games, he was out for a few months and had placed the balance of his career in jeopardy by breaking his elbow, a key cog in the willowy Williams swing. Ted would later say that the injury was one of his biggest disappointments, and he said that he was never the same hitter again because he would always have stiffness in the elbow, was never able to get full extension in his left arm, and as a result lost some of his power.

After immobilizing his arm for a period, Williams began an exercise and physical therapy regimen for his elbow. On the sixteenth, he told Joe Cashman from his hospital bed that though the Red Sox were now eight and a half games out, he still thought they could catch up and win the pennant without him. He said he hoped to return in five or six weeks, adding: “I would like to play enough games to drive in seventeen runs to reach the one-hundred-RBI mark,” a plateau he hadn’t missed since his rookie year in 1939. The Kid seemed blithely unaware that the rather crass and baldly stated individual RBI goal might appear at odds with the team goal of winning a pennant.

While he was out, Williams would sometimes appear in the Red Sox dugout for home games, but he didn’t travel with the team. He tried to remain upbeat, but he could not have been cheered by a small item in the August 8
Globe,
which reported that he was now eligible to be recalled to active duty by the Marine Corps under its latest reserve mobilization plan. A Corps spokesman was quoted as saying there were no plans to activate Ted “at this time,” but an obviously worried Williams fired off a letter the same day to Major General M. H. Silverthorn, director of the Marine Corps Reserve. “In view of the present situation I believe it important that I have my complete service record at hand,” Ted wrote, using official Red Sox stationery, in case Silverthorn had any doubts that he was receiving a letter from anyone other than
the
Ted Williams. Ted wanted to see precisely what he’d signed and confirm for himself the extent to which he was still on the hook.

Billy Goodman, his broken leg healed, had replaced Ted in left field and went on to have a career year at the plate, hitting .354 to win the batting title. With Goodman hitting for average and Dropo for serious power (he would hit .322 with 34 homers and 144 RBIs on the year), the loss of Williams was concealed. Starting August 15, the Sox won
eleven in a row and sixteen of seventeen at Fenway Park to get back in the race, just two and a half games out of first place.