The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (78 page)

Ted had been very strict with Bobby-Jo when she was growing up, but he had hardly any time for her. He was always on the road. When he called her he’d ask about her weight and how she was doing in school. He wanted to be sure she was thin.

“Barbara never got enough of his time, and she resented that. She went along with the program of, ‘Yes, Daddy, no, Daddy.’ She probably wanted to hug him. She was always trying to gain his approval but never quite made the grade. When he called, she’d get really nervous and run for her cigarettes and her Diet Pepsis.”

Steve found his early life with Bobby-Jo difficult. First, she quickly became pregnant, which should have been a happy occasion, but she
always seemed stressed-out. She hated to go to bed and hated to get up. She began abusing the Darvon she’d been prescribed by Dr. Warner at Pennsylvania Hospital. “I had to watch the bottle, because she’d think nothing of taking three or four pills at a time,” Steve said. “She overdosed at least two times and had to be hospitalized. She’d call me at work and want me to come home for lunch. If I couldn’t, she’d threaten to take a handful of pills unless I did. Once, I came home and found her unconscious, and I had to call the rescue squad.”

Bobby-Jo had inherited a temper, though in her case it led to depression as opposed to ferocity. She would do drugs; not care; not eat.

“I always found myself like an investigator with Barbara,” Steve explained, “probing, trying to find the truth. I used to spend countless hours questioning [her].” Much of the questioning concerned what he quickly came to discover was her promiscuity. “I counted seven or eight relationships she had when we were married,” Steve said. “It was obvious how she acted. Sometimes with my friends.”

He didn’t tell Ted about that, of course, and he found that Williams was of little assistance when it came to Bobby-Jo besides being a ready source of money. “Whenever we talked about Barbara’s problems with Ted, he’d always tell her, ‘Jesus Christ, it cost me seventy thousand dollars for all that time you were in the hospital. You should be better by now.’ That’s what he expected. I think he saw her as a thorn in his side who couldn’t stand on her own two feet. It was always, ‘She’s asking me for something.’ ”

T
hree days after Bobby-Jo and Steve got married, Ted would find out whether he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame.

It was widely assumed that he would easily receive the required 75 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. The only question would be his margin, and whether some writers would nix him from their ballots out of spite to avenge his shabby treatment of them over the years. A minority felt it was possible Ted would fall short, simply because even the greats don’t always get in the first year they are eligible. Joe DiMaggio, it was noted, failed twice before he made it.

The
Traveler
’s Tim Horgan, responding to a story in his own paper headlined
WILL SCRIBES PAY TED BACK?
, said he would be voting
for
Ted. “I’d rather help reserve T.W. for posterity than get embalmed myself,” Horgan wrote. “The inference is clear. This isn’t an election. It’s a grudge match. And if the scribes don’t vote Teddy into the Hall, tar and feathers will be among the many public terms applied to them.… We’ll become the Knives of the Keyboard.”
¹

Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
called for a unanimous selection of Williams and warned his brethren against any vengeful behavior. “If the Baseball Writers let pettiness or spite imperil them to default on a solemn obligation, they would stand revealed to the world of sports as men too small-minded to be worthy of the trust imposed in them,” Daley wrote.
²
Williams guru Harold Kaese of the
Boston Globe
opined that a first-ballot induction was a given, and that the only real question was whether the vote would be unanimous—unlikely, since no previous player had gotten a unanimous vote.
³
(Ty Cobb had been the highest rated, at 98 percent, followed by Ruth and Honus Wagner at 95 percent and Bob Feller at 94.
⁴
)

John Gillooly of the
Record-American,
heir to Colonel Egan, told his readers he had voted for Williams but gave voice to the wounds still nursed by many of the writers who had felt Ted’s lash: “This of course, is not a popularity contest, but it is a little difficult to go into the booth, pull the curtains and put an X after the name of a person who has often gone out of his way to demean your profession.”

Gillooly thought it possible that the writers might make Williams cool his heels for a few years. “DiMaggio had to wait, wait and wait some more before the room clerk found him a space at the Inn of the Immortals,” Gillooly wrote. “So don’t be startled if the Kid is asked to sit in the lobby for a while.” And, noting that the Hall voting instructions required writers to judge a candidate’s “playing ability” and his “contribution to the team,” he reprised the essence of Egan’s critique: “I’m trying to tell you that Williams, a great buster, was shy of several essential talents (running, fielding, throwing) and that the Red Sox record of Williams’s era (one flag) indicates that he wasn’t a tremendous leader, a team-man as was Joe DiMaggio. Yes, The Kid could be put on a stand-by basis.”
⁵

Just after 10:00 a.m. on January 20, Williams walked into the Fenway Park press room before a throng of writers, cameramen, commentators, and assorted courtiers. (“The lamb in the lion’s den,” Ted cracked, smiling, as he surveyed the majority before him.) The
Globe
’s Hy Hurwitz, who had sparred with Williams many a time over the years, called the proceedings to order in his capacity as secretary of the Writers’ Association. He took out a manila envelope, ripped it open, and announced that Ted had been elected to the Hall of Fame with 282 votes, or 93.3 percent.

No other player had been elected on that cycle. Of the 302 ballots cast, twenty writers had not included Ted’s name in what was seen as a token protest. Hurwitz said the 282 votes were the most that any player had received since Hall of Fame balloting began in 1936.

Williams took to the microphones, clearly touched. “This completes everything a ballplayer ever dreams about or hopes happens to him,” he proclaimed. “I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am to have been elected to the Hall of Fame. My only regret is that some great ballplayers couldn’t make it at the same time.” He cited in particular Red Ruffing, the old Yankee whom Williams had faced in his first major-league at bat at Yankee Stadium. Ruffing had received 68.8 percent of the vote. Then Ted thanked the writers he had once scorned for electing him, especially in the first year he was eligible. Inevitably, he was asked to comment on
his tumultuous relationship with the newspapermen. “My ‘feud’ with the baseball writers?” he said with a grin. “A great, great majority of the press was always with me, on my side. It was the small minority which was against me. If anything, their criticism helped. It irritated me and spurred me on.”

Assessing his career, Ted rated the 1941 All-Star Game home run as his biggest thrill and the loss of the 1949 pennant to the Yankees as his lowest point. “The longest train ride of my life was that one, returning to Boston.” And he declared that hitting .388 in 1957 gave him more satisfaction than hitting .406 in 1941. “I was an old man and near the end of it all when I hit .388,” Ted said. “It was a real struggle for me all the way—yet I think I really hit the ball better that year than when I hit .406.”
⁶

Reaction to Williams’s ascent among players, public, and press was almost universally favorable. A notable dissenter was Jim Murray, the gifted
Los Angeles Times
columnist, who broadened the Egan-Gillooly critique to the national stage. Ted was an objet d’art who belonged in the Louvre, not Cooperstown, Murray felt. He wrote that Ted was “probably the greatest pure striker of the baseball who ever lived. But this translated out into exactly one pennant for his team in 19 years.… His main adversary was a decimal point. He fought the public, the press, the Marine Corps—but not necessarily the New York Yankees. He was a stylist, not a struggler.

“I know it would be easier to keep snow out of Alaska than Ted Williams out of the Hall of Fame,” Murray continued. “I wouldn’t if I could. As I say, he was unique. I only hope they keep his trophy case well aloof from that of the rest of them in there, well away from the Frankie Frisches, Lou Gehrigs, Joe DiMaggios, Ruths, Robinsons and Cochranes—so that nobody will get the idea he’s part of a team, and will know that it’s just another All-Star appearance.”
⁷

But Murray was decidedly in the minority. Generally, Ted was showered with kudos, and the newspapers were filled with fawning tributes, series, and retrospectives on his career. Soon, Williams would also be hailed for his forward thinking and his surprising decision to leverage his induction to help right a wrong.

The ceremony was held six months later, on July 25, a Monday. Ted hadn’t been in Cooperstown since 1940, his second year, when the Red Sox played an exhibition game against the Cubs on June 13. He had belted two home runs, one of them landing on the porch of a house on
nearby Susquehanna Avenue. Still a boy, dreaming, he’d thought that day how great it would be to have a career that would make him worthy of the Hall of Fame. Now he was about to be inducted, along with Casey Stengel, who had been voted in separately by the Veterans Committee as a manager.
^*
The Stengel-Williams relationship was a mutual admiration society. “I don’t think anybody contributed more to baseball than Casey Stengel,” Williams wrote in his book. “He ranks right there with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Judge Landis. He was in baseball 50 years and caused as much copy to be written about the game and about himself as anybody.”
⁸
And Stengel, for his part, loved Ted. “I wouldn’t let my pitcher throw to Mr. Williams, because he could see the ball better standing sideways than the umpires could standing straight ahead,” said Casey, who was about to turn seventy-six. “Williams was the most aggressive hitter I ever saw.”
⁹

On Sunday, the day before the ceremony, Ted, in his capacity as a Red Sox executive, joined farm director Neil Mahoney in Oneonta, New York, about twenty miles south of rustic Cooperstown. Williams had originally planned to watch the Sox’s minor-league club play a game, but he begged off and decided to stay in his room at Oneonta’s Town House Motor Inn. He began writing his acceptance speech on the hotel’s stationery.

That night, Ted rendezvoused for dinner with about twenty friends, as well as with his quite pregnant daughter and her husband, at the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown. The Otesaga, with its thirty-foot columns and striking federalist architecture, is located on the southern shore of Otsego Lake—the Glimmerglass of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels. It’s the grande dame of Cooperstown, where all the immortals stay when they’re in town.

The Williams circle included old teammate Bobby Doerr; war pal Bill Churchman of Philadelphia; Ted’s accountant, Paul Brophy; and his agent, Fred Corcoran. Sometime girlfriend Lynette Siman of Islamorada made the cut, along with her husband. Bobby-Jo wore her hair up in the then-fashionable beehive. Ted had to excuse himself early from dinner to continue working on his speech. “I’ve never seen him so nervous,” Doerr remarked to a reporter.
¹⁰

Some seven thousand fans turned out the following morning on a hot, cloudless day, swarming the village of Cooperstown in what was
said to have been the largest crowd ever to come to an induction. The ceremony is usually held on the front steps of the museum and spills over onto Main Street. But that year the stage was set in Cooper Park, behind the museum, where there was more space—though, it turned out, still not enough to accommodate everyone. People sat in folding chairs and packed the slopes overlooking the lawn; others hung from the nearby elm and oak trees to get a better view of the platform. The spillover crowd in front of the building could hear the proceedings via loudspeakers but could not see the goings-on.

Williams, characteristically tieless despite the august occasion, was dressed in a white knit polo shirt buttoned to the throat, slacks, and a plaid sport jacket. He had requested to speak before Stengel, not wanting to follow the eccentric, comical former manager. Prior to the ceremonies, Hall of Famers Joe Cronin, Joe McCarthy, Bill Dickey, and Bill Terry were introduced to the crowd from the platform. Williams had connections to all four. Cronin and McCarthy were two of his managers, Dickey had been a Yankees rival, and Terry one of his childhood heroes with the New York Giants. Also introduced were the widows of Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, and Eddie Collins, who had scouted Ted for the Red Sox.

William Eckert, a former Air Force lieutenant general who had been named commissioner of baseball the previous year, introduced Ted and was forced to stop and wait several times as the crowd erupted in cheers when he cited Williams’s litany of hitting accomplishments. “He gave five years to the service of his country and if he hadn’t, probably would have hit one hundred and fifty more home runs,” Eckert said. A voice from the crowd yelled, “Two hundred and fifty!” “Okay, two hundred and fifty,” Eckert replied, laughing.

After Eckert handed Ted his Hall of Fame plaque and the crowd roared its approval, the photographers called for him to hold the plaque up in triumph. He obliged. Finally, after a suitable interval, he approached the microphone.

“Mr. Commissioner, baseball dignitaries, and fans, I’m happy and I want to emphasize what a great honor it is to have the new commissioner of baseball here, General Eckert,” Williams said. “The general and I have at least one thing in common. We each did some flying. He was in the Air Force and I was a Marine, and I want you to know that no matter what you might have heard, there were many times when the Air Force went out first and the Marines had to go out and hit the targets they missed.” The crowd erupted in laughter.

“I guess every player thinks about going into the Hall of Fame. Now that the moment has come for me, I find it difficult to say what is in my heart. But I know that it’s the greatest thrill of my life.

“I received two hundred and eighty–odd votes from the writers. I know I don’t have two hundred and eighty–odd close friends among the writers.” Again there was laughter and applause, and Ted chuckled. “I know they voted for me because they felt in their minds, and some in their hearts, that I rated it. And I want to say to them, ‘Thank you. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.’ ”

And then Ted stepped into dicey terrain for the Hall of Fame. He had come to thank—but also to chide.

“The other day, Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty-second home run. He has gone past me and he is pushing ahead, and all I can say to him is, ‘Go get ’em, Willie.’ Inside this building are plaques to baseball men of all generations, and I’m privileged to join them. Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel—not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game, and I’ve been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform; to have struck out or hit a tape-measure home run. And I hope that someday, the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the Negro players that are not here only because they were not given a chance.”