The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (69 page)

Cobb and Williams had a prickly relationship. The Georgia Peach had been critical of Ted earlier in his career for failing to hit to left field more often to beat the shift, and he’d written him private letters offering to counsel him on his hitting technique. In addition, Cobb had been outspoken in arguing that the players of his era were superior to those in Ted’s time, a contention Williams considered ridiculous.

But Ted and Ty seemed to patch things up at a pleasant photo op around the batting cage in Scottsdale. Cobb, then seventy-two, leaned on his cane, wrapped his left arm around Ted’s right shoulder, and both men beamed. The photographers, in their captions, wrote that the two legends “discussed hitting.”

Williams had a pal out for spring training whom he knew would be thrilled to meet Cobb. Joe Lindia owned a restaurant in Cranston, Rhode Island. In the winter of 1955, Lindia’s brother and his wife had been vacationing in Islamorada and chanced to meet Ted, who invited them out fishing with him. That night back in Cranston, Joe, a huge Williams fan, received this news in a phone call from his brother. Beside himself with jealousy, Joe said he would beat it down to Islamorada as quickly as he could. Williams was waiting for him in good cheer: “So you want to go fishing, Bush?” A friendship developed, and before long Joe was hosting annual fund-raisers for the Jimmy Fund at his restaurant with Ted as the star attraction. Sometimes, Ted would invite Joe to go on a road trip with the Red Sox, and the two men would room together at various hotels. Joe was thrilled.

Back in Scottsdale, Ted and Joe were walking one evening when Ted said he had someone he wanted Joe to meet. They got in the car and drove to a seedy motel nearby. Then they knocked on a door to one of the rooms, and Ty Cobb appeared—dressed only in his boxer shorts. He seemed happy to have some company, and within minutes, Cobb and Williams were talking baseball, arguing about which era was better, and debating the relative merits of this pitcher or that hitter. Invariably they disagreed, and frequently they would turn to Lindia and ask him what he thought. Joe thought he was in heaven.
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There was a new face on the Red Sox that spring—a very different face: Elijah Jerry “Pumpsie” Green, a switch-hitting infielder from California who also happened to be the first black player ever to play for Boston, the last major-league team to integrate. Tom Yawkey and Joe Cronin, who had left the team earlier that year to become president of the American League, had long denied any racist intent and weakly insisted they had been unable to find a suitable black player.

Green was still being forced to live in different quarters from the white players in Scottsdale because of the segregation policies of the day, and the Red Sox were unable or unwilling to leverage their new presence in town in support of Pumpsie. One obstacle was the manager, Mike Higgins, who did little to disguise his antipathy to blacks, telling a Boston writer, Al Hirshberg, sometime after being named manager in 1955, “There’ll be no niggers on this ballclub as long as I have anything to say about it.”
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After arriving in Scottsdale, Williams had gone out of his way to introduce himself to Green and to make him feel welcome. One of the ways he did this was by asking Green to warm up with him before games, a gesture Pumpsie remembered fondly.

“He treated you like you should be treated,” Green said of Ted. “He didn’t put stuff on it that shouldn’t be. He wasn’t forcible or anything. He was a friendly person. I found him to be a very well-liked person among the ballplayers.”
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Spring training ended, and Green appeared to have made the team, but as the club headed back to Boston, Higgins suddenly announced that he was cutting Green. “Another season or half season in Minneapolis is what this boy needs,” Higgins said. The Boston chapter of the NAACP and two other local groups charged the Red Sox with racism and asked the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to investigate. It did, but cleared the team of any wrongdoing.

Williams made a sentimental return to San Diego in mid-March for the three exhibition games against the Indians at Westgate Park. Ted grounded out twice and walked in the first game before 7,358 fans, and afterward hosted a party that lasted into the wee hours for about fifty of his childhood friends. The next night he got an infield hit and cracked a double that was inches from being a home run; he went 0–2 in the third game. The series drew more than twenty-two thousand fans, making it a financial success for both teams, but Ted had aggravated the neck injury he’d sustained lazily swinging his bat in Islamorada over the winter.
Returning to Scottsdale, he tried to work out the kinks by throwing some batting practice, but that only made things worse. He went to a Phoenix hospital and was diagnosed with a pinched nerve. It was decided that he would fly back to Boston and be admitted to New England Baptist Hospital, where he would be fitted for a medical collar and put in traction. He ended up staying in the hospital for three weeks, his neck immobilized, and started the season on the disabled list.

Williams made his return at home on May 12 against the White Sox and went 0–5, a performance that would set the tone for the rest of the season. His neck was still killing him, and it was all he could do merely to face the pitcher squarely after he stepped into the box. During the next week, he had one hit in twenty-two times up and was batting .045.

Then on June 13, the unthinkable happened: Williams was benched. He’d brought his average up a bit, but only to .175. Mike Higgins explained that he thought Ted could use a rest. This development prompted Harold Kaese to wonder how and when the Red Sox would eventually get rid of Williams—perhaps by turning him into a manager. In fact, Tom Yawkey did ask business manager Dick O’Connell to sound Ted out on whether he had any interest in the job. “He told me that he would never give the Boston writers the chance to second-guess him,” O’Connell recalled. “I’ve never really been sure whether he understood that the job was really being offered to him.”
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But Ted knew, recalling that Joe Cronin had asked him to manage at the end of the 1954 season. He also knew it was easier to fire a manager than a player, especially one of Williams’s stature. As manager, he could have been dismissed if the team had a lousy record, as seemed likely, or even for blowing up at the writers, which seemed even more likely. He could then have been eased into the front office in some capacity as a gesture of respect, but there would be no hiding the fact that he’d failed.
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Ted returned to the lineup on June 23 and brought his average up to .244 over the next three weeks, enough for Williams booster Casey Stengel to again name him to the All-Star Game. Ted said he appreciated the gesture.

On July 3, the 31–42 Red Sox deflected attention from the Kid’s woes by firing Mike Higgins as manager and replacing him with Billy Jurges. With Higgins gone, it was easier for the Red Sox to finally elevate Pumpsie Green, who was hitting .320 in Minneapolis and had been named a Triple-A All-Star for the second consecutive year. The Sox had finally integrated.

Green was used only as a part-timer, but a week later, another black
player, pitcher Earl Wilson, was also brought up, though neither man had much of an impact, as Boston finished 75–79, in fifth place, nineteen games out. Williams had his worst season ever, hitting only .254 with 10 home runs in 103 games. After the Red Sox’s final game, Tom Yawkey summoned Ted to his apartment at the Ritz. After some chitchat, the owner got to the point.

“What do you think you ought to do next year?” he asked his star player.

“What do
you
think I ought to do?” Williams replied.

“Ted, I think you ought to quit,” Yawkey advised. “You’ve had a great career. You were hurting this year, and I don’t want to see you hurt more. Listen, why don’t you just wrap it up?”

Hearing this “kind of burned my ass,” as Williams put it later. He had no intention of quitting on a sour note. He knew he could still hit. He had posted averages of .345, .356, .345, .388, and .328 in the five seasons previous to 1959. Now he’d hit .254 while clearly hurting. “Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. Yawkey,” he said. “I’m going to wait until next spring to decide. I still think I can hit. If I feel I can’t do it by spring, I’ll let you know.”
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A few days later, Yawkey fired Johnny Orlando in a move that the writers speculated would infuriate Williams and perhaps influence his decision to retire. The reasons for the dismissal were not announced, but Orlando’s drinking had gotten out of hand, and he was showing up late to work, generally neglecting his duties, and leveraging his position for personal gain—getting the players to sign autographed balls and then selling them, for example.
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Ted seethed at Orlando’s firing but kept his feelings to himself. Nevertheless, he grew less certain that he would come back if the team didn’t want him. When he returned to Boston for the sportsmen’s show in January, he stopped in unannounced to see Dick O’Connell at Fenway Park to discuss his 1960 contract. “Dick, if there are any doubts the club wants me back this year, hell, I’ll quit,” Williams told him. “I think I can still play. I told Mr. Yawkey I’d go to spring training and find out. But I don’t want to play unless the management
wants
me to.” O’Connell was surprisingly reassuring. “Aw, Ted, don’t be silly,” he said before pulling out a contract calling for the same salary Williams received in 1959: $125,000, with $65,000 of it deferred.

Ted was relieved, but he had a different idea: he would take a pay cut. “Dick, look. I had a lousy year, the worst I ever had. I was injured and
suffered for it, but I don’t deserve what I made last year. I’ve had the biggest raises a player ever had. I’ve gone up from nothing on this club to $125,000 a year. I want to take the biggest cut ever given a player.”
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He agreed to play his final season for $90,000—$60,000 on the books and $30,000 deferred—nearly a 30 percent drop.

When he arrived in Scottsdale on March 1, Williams was not exactly exuding confidence. He complained to the writers that his neck still hurt him and declared that if the pain didn’t subside, he doubted he could play that year after all.

The day after that pessimistic assessment, manager Billy Jurges announced that in addition to his duties as a player, Williams would also become a batting instructor. This of course fueled speculation that the Red Sox were preparing a soft landing for Ted if he no longer could take the field.

One of the rookies Jurges wanted Williams to mentor was a twenty-year-old named Carl Yastrzemski. Yaz (as he was known) found Ted moody and his teaching style esoteric. “I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,” Yaz would recall. “I’d listen and not say a word, hoping he’d get finished soon.” The rookie’s theory of hitting was simply to wait for a good pitch and try to hit it, and he was baffled by Williams’s talk of hip rotation and the like. When Ted asked him questions about what he’d just said, Yaz remained silent, fearing he’d give the wrong answer. When reporters would ask him what Ted was teaching, Yaz would just vaguely respond that he was learning a lot. Fearful of reprimands, he tried to avoid Ted, but that was impossible because they were assigned adjoining lockers.
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In retirement, when Williams would return to the Red Sox as a spring training instructor, Yaz remained largely unresponsive to the Kid’s teachings. Future team CEO John Harrington remembered witnessing a Williams-Yaz tutorial in the ’70s: “Ted was giving Yaz a lecture about his bat being too long and big. Ted was talking physics and bat speed and calling Yaz a dumb Polack for not grasping the intricacies of the aerodynamics. It was Greek to Yaz.”
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But, in 1960, Ted liked what he saw of Yastrzemski and commended him to Ty Cobb, who lingered at the Red Sox camp, still annoyed that Williams wouldn’t take his hitting counsel.

A week into camp, Ted’s neck loosened enough to let him pop a long homer in an intrasquad scrimmage, prompting encouraging headlines
and reportage. “There is still plenty of zing in Ted’s swing,” wrote Bob Holbrook of the
Globe.
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Over at Hearst’s
Evening American,
there seemed no doubt the Kid would have a prosperous season, as the paper sprung Johnny Orlando from his forced retirement to write a twelve-part ode to Ted, as told to Mike Gillooly, who just two years earlier had weighed in with the fifteen-part “The Case for Ted Williams.” While Ted surely missed Orlando, he apparently viewed the
American
series as a betrayal of sorts, even though the clubhouse nuggets Johnny dished out were all complimentary, almost fawningly so. A month later, Gillooly’s brother John, who had taken over for Dave Egan as the lead sports columnist for the
Record,
wrote that Williams had yet to contact Orlando: “Now Williams is treating him like one of the Boston press—just because Johnny O had a byline?”
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Ted sought out a favored writer, Milton Gross of the
New York Post,
to further lower expectations for the season: “I keep thinking, ‘Williams, you’re dying hard.’ I keep saying to myself, ‘Your ankle hurts, your neck hurts and your back hurts, and you are dying so damn hard.…’ Playing is still fun, but it’s harder. God, how much harder it is.”
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So why did he continue? Gross asked. Ted said he needed the money, plus he wanted to redeem his lousy 1959 season and attain five hundred career home runs. He had 492 at that point.

Three days after this column appeared, Williams got word that his brother, Danny, had died of leukemia at the family home in San Diego at the age of thirty-nine. Ted had written his brother and Danny’s wife, Jean, a letter from Scottsdale, again complaining how sore he was but hoping for one more good year. Ted said he hoped Danny’s new medication was helping him, and that the summer heat would be therapeutic.

But Danny’s condition had deteriorated rapidly in 1958 and 1959. After getting leukemia, he’d moved back into the Utah Street house where he’d grown up, accompanied by his wife and sons. As he grew sicker and weaker, the living arrangements became untenable for May, and she went to Santa Barbara to move in with her sister Sarah. Danny had wasted away to just ninety pounds at the end.