by Dan Gutman
Finding Ted Williams could wait.
In the twenty-first century, I would bet, you can’t get close to an historic building like this one. They probably have barricades all around it, and armed guards. But on this night, in 1941, there was nobody around. I could walk right up to the building and touch it.
I stood on my tiptoes to look inside the window. There were no lights on inside Independence Hall; but from the streetlights and the light of the moon, I could see a faint outline of something that was familiar to me.
It was the Liberty Bell.
There it was. I could even see the crack. I couldn’t make out the words written on it, but I knew what they were because we had to memorize them for a test: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
I stood there for a few minutes marveling at the fact that I was standing with my nose against the window of the building in which our country was born. I was staring at the symbol of America, and the most famous bell in the world. I was so caught up in the moment that I didn’t notice the guy standing next to me.
“It’s a beautiful thing, huh?” he said.
I glanced at him. He was a tall guy, maybe 6 feet 3 or so, and thin. He had long legs and a long neck, which made him slightly goofy looking. I recognized the face.
“You’re not…”
“The name is Williams,” he said, sticking out his hand, “Ted Williams.”
9
The Heebie-Jeebies
I JUST STARED AT TED WILLIAMS’S FACE FOR THE LONGEST time. He probably thought I was crazy.
It was obviously the same guy I had met the first time, in the plane. He had the same curly black hair and bushy eyebrows. But he was so much younger now. Twelve years, I quickly calculated. In 1941, Ted Williams was just ten years older than me.
The biggest difference was that he was so skinny. I recalled his nicknames: the Splendid Splinter, the Stringbean Slugger, and Toothpick Ted. It didn’t look like the man standing next to me was capable of hitting one home run, much less 521 of them. He must have had a perfect swing.
“You look so different,” I blurted out.
Ted looked at me oddly.
“Different from what?” he asked. “Did I meet you before?”
“In the plane…”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized it was a stupid thing to say. For all I knew, Ted Williams hadn’t even had his first plane ride yet.
“What plane?” he asked. “Are you nuts, Junior?”
I could have slapped myself. It’s 1941, idiot! When we crash-landed in South Korea, it was 1953. He’s not going to know about that. It didn’t happen yet.
“I’m sorry,” I said, flustered. “I’m a little nervous. I never met anybody famous before.”
“Forget it,” he replied. “What are you doing out on the streets this late at night? Are you lost?”
He had that same loud voice but seemed a little more soft-spoken than he would become in 1953. He wasn’t cursing as much either.
“No,” I said. “I’m just out…walking around.”
“Do your mom and dad know you’re here?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I mean no. Not exactly.”
“Where are they?”
“In Kentucky,” I told him. “Louisville.”
“Louisville?” Ted asked. “Did you run away from home? You’re gonna get yourself killed, Junior! There are all kinds of nuts roaming the streets at this hour, y’know. I’m sending you home. What’s your name?”
“No, don’t send me home!” I exclaimed. “Look, my name is Joe Stoshack. I’m not lost. I didn’t run away from home. I’m fine. It’s a long story.”
And this wasn’t the time to tell it. I knew that if I told Ted Williams I came from the future and that I can travel through time with baseball cards, he would be sure I was crazy. He might take me to a mental hospital or something. No, I would have to win his trust before telling him the truth about why I was there. I would wait until the time was right.
Famous people, I’d heard, usually care about one thing more than anything else: themselves. I thought it would be best to change the subject—to Ted.
“What are you doing out here so late?” I asked him. “Don’t you have a game tomorrow?”
“Two,” he replied. “A doubleheader. I like to walk at night. It helps me think. You wanna keep me company for a while, Junior?”
“Sure.”
He pulled a shapeless, rumpled hat out of his pocket and put it on.
“I don’t want to be recognized by anybody else,” he said.
I glanced at a sign on the corner and saw that we were on Chestnut Street. Ted seemed to know where he was heading. I followed. He walked quickly with his head down, as if he was looking for change on the sidewalk.
I noticed for the first time that he had a pink rubber ball in his right hand, and he was squeezing it.
“What’s the ball for?” I asked.
“It makes my hands strong,” he replied.
We crossed 5th Street. A park was on the right, and there was a homeless man wrapped in a blanket asleep on a park bench. There was a shopping cart next to him with some bags in it. Ted stopped for a moment in front of the guy.
“Look at that,” he said disgustedly, “a block from the Liberty Bell. How could a country as rich as America have people living like that? It’s a sin.”
Ted pulled a bill out of his wallet and slipped it into the homeless man’s bag. The guy never woke up.
“You said walking helps you think,” I said to Ted as we crossed 4th Street. “So what are you thinking about?”
“I got the heebie-jeebies,” Ted said.
“Huh?” I had no idea what that meant. It sounded like a disease.
“You probably know about the whole .400 thing,” Ted said.
“Yeah,” I said, “your batting average is .399, and tomorrow’s the last day of the season.”
“It’s .3995535, actually,” he said. “If I stopped playing right now, it would be rounded up to an even .400. We’re not fighting for the pennant or anything. The games tomorrow don’t matter. So Cronin said I could sit out the doubleheader if I want to. It would go into the record books as .400.”
I remembered the name Joe Cronin. I had read about him in my baseball books. He was a Hall of Famer who became the manager of the Red Sox after his career was over.
“So that’s why you have the heebie-jeebies?” I asked. “What’s the problem?”
“The problem is, that’s not the way The Kid does things,” he replied. “You don’t become great by sitting on a bench.”
The Kid. That was another one of his nicknames, I remembered, and he used it himself.
I wondered if the athletes of the twenty-first century would feel the same way as Ted. If any of today’s players hit .400 for a season, it would be huge. The guy would be all over the news. He’d get his picture on a Wheaties box. He would make millions of dollars doing TV commercials. And if he was hitting .3995535 going into the last day of the season, I would bet he would sit out that last game rather than risk dipping below an official .400 batting average. His agent would insist on it. The players in 1941 didn’t even have agents. They hardly made any money, anyway.
But as we turned right on 3rd Street around the perimeter of the park, it was obvious that Ted was struggling with his decision about the next day.
“It’s gonna be tough,” he told me. “Unless I have a great day, I blow it. One of the other guys on the team figured it out for me. If I go 1 for 3, or 2 for 6, my average doesn’t get rounded up to .400. I finish up at .399.”
Ted went on to tell me everything he would be up against the next day. The game would be at Shibe Park, which was a terrible field for hitters in September. Shadows from the stands made it so the pitcher was in the sun while home plate was in shadow. So the hitter didn’t get a good view of the ball. And the pitcher’s mound was 20 inches high, one o
f the highest in baseball.
Furthermore, Ted told me, he was not a fast runner, so he hardly ever got any cheap infield hits. He had to hit the ball hard to get it past the infield for every hit and hope he didn’t hit it right at an infielder.
Finally, he told me that over the last ten days of the season, his average had been dropping almost a point a day. Since September 10th, he had only been averaging .270.
I had to be very careful here, I realized. He had given me a lot of reasons why he should sit out the doubleheader but only one reason why he should play: his pride.
I knew that Ted Williams was going to finish the season with a .406 batting average, and I knew what he was going to do in each at-bat. It was in the history books.
But I remembered what my mother had said: What if I stepped on a twig and changed history for the worse? What if I did something, or said something, that made Ted decide not to play the last day of the season? It would change everything. He would finish the season batting .3995535. That’s still an incredible accomplishment. But it’s not an honest .400. And it would be my fault.
I couldn’t put myself in Ted Williams’s shoes, of course, but I had an idea of what he was going through. There had been nights I would lie in bed with my eyes open trying to decide what I should do or what choice I should make. I remember when my next-door neighbor Miss Young paid me to throw out all the junk in her attic and I’d found a valuable Honus Wagner baseball card in there. I really struggled over whether I should keep the card for myself or give it back to Miss Young.
“What do you think you’re gonna do?” I asked Ted as we turned right at the next corner, which was Walnut Street.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been a long season, and I’m tired. Maybe I’ll sit it out tomorrow.”
Uh-oh. This wasn’t good. Maybe I had already said something that changed his mind. Maybe I had already changed history. I had to do something.
We were walking back uptown now. As we crossed 4th Street, I decided to tell him what I knew: if he played the next day, he would not only hit .400, but he would even beat .400. If he thought I was crazy and called the cops, well, that was the chance I had to take.
“Mr. Williams,” I finally said. “I really think you should play tomorrow.”
“Why, Junior?” he asked.
I took a deep breath.
“You’re gonna go 6 for 8 in the doubleheader,” I told him. “You’re gonna raise your average to .406.”
Ted stopped walking.
“You sound pretty confident for a kid,” he told me. “How come you’re so sure of yourself?”
“I just have a feeling, that’s all,” I replied. “Sometimes I feel like I can see the future. It’s sort of like a sixth sense.”
We crossed 5th Street and then 6th. Ted wasn’t talking anymore. He was deep in thought.
The park we had been walking around ended at 6th Street, and we continued walking uptown on Walnut. At 9th Street Ted turned right, and after two short blocks we were on Chestnut Street again. We had made a big circle around the park. Ted turned to me.
“I’ll sleep on it,” he said simply.
“Okay.”
He had stopped in front of a big building with a fancy front entrance. A sign above said BEN FRANKLIN HOTEL.
“Where are you going to sleep tonight, Junior?” Ted asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“You can bunk with me,” he said. “I have a feeling you might be my good-luck charm.”
We went inside and rode the elevator up to his room. Ted took a blanket out of the closet and improvised a bed for me on the floor. He put on a pair of pajamas, then got down on the floor and did a bunch of fingertip push-ups. When he stopped, he told me he was trying to make his muscles as big as his teammate Jimmy Foxx’s.
I don’t remember what happened after that because I fell asleep right away.
Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up. There was a noise. I looked around and saw Ted sitting in his pajamas at the little desk next to the bed. He was holding a bottle of alcohol.
A lot of ballplayers had problems with booze, I knew. Especially back in the old days. But I had never heard anything about Ted Williams being a drinker. I could hardly believe he would be hitting the bottle before this game, of all games.
“You’re drinking booze?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
“Booze?” he said, and then he looked at the bottle and laughed. “I never touch the stuff. I’m not drinkin’ this !@#$%! I’m cleanin’ my bat with it!”
I sat up and saw that he had a rag in his hand. He poured some of the alcohol on the rag and then wiped his bat with it. He told me he did it every night, because a bat will pick up dirt and moisture during a game, which can add an extra half ounce.
“Besides,” he added, “I can’t sleep.”
After he finished cleaning the bat, he took out a scale and weighed it to make sure it was perfect.
It was hard to imagine what he was going through. To me, 400 was just a number. 400…406…399…who cares? When you get down to it, it doesn’t really mean anything.
“How important is it for you to hit .400?” I asked him.
“I never wanted anything more,” he told me. “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’”
At some point I fell back asleep to the gentle background music of Ted Williams grinding his teeth in the dark.
10
The Kid
“WAKE UP!”
I woke up.
Ted Williams was screaming at me. For a few seconds, I didn’t remember where I was or when it was. I thought that maybe I was late for school. But my mom never yelled at me like that. It was like a bomb had gone off.
“What time is it?” I asked, bolting upright from my makeshift bed on the floor.
“Eight thirty!” he shouted. “What, are you gonna waste your life away? Let’s go get some grub.”
The guy was amazing. He could go from being perfectly nice to a screaming maniac and then back again in an instant. It was as if he could turn it on and off like a light switch.
I pulled on the same shirt I had been wearing the day before and went to the bathroom. There was some toothpaste in there called Pepsodent, which I had never heard of. On the tube were the words “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.”
I used my finger as a toothbrush. The Pepsodent stuff didn’t taste bad. Then Ted and I went to a little coffee shop around the corner from the hotel.
I decided not to ask him whether he was going to play or take the day off and finish the season at .3995535. I was afraid I had already said too much and that I had influenced his decision. But he brought up the subject himself.
“I’m going to go for it,” he said quietly as we waited for the waitress to get to our table. “You want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Because if I sat on the bench today,” he whispered, “for the rest of my life I would know in my heart that I took the easy way out. And The Kid never takes the easy way out.”
The Kid. I had never met anybody before who talked about himself as if he was another person. It was a little strange.
“You’re making a good decision,” I told him.
“I made another one too,” he added as the waitress arrived. “You’re coming with me.”
We ordered eggs and toast, but I could barely taste them. I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky I was. I was sitting across the table from one of the two greatest baseball players of his age (the other one being Joe DiMaggio), and I was going to be a witness to the greatest day of his career.
I would wait until later to bring up Pearl Harbor, I decided. And hopefully, there would be time after the game to talk him out of enlisting in the military so he wouldn’t lose all those years of playing ball. It was all good.
Ted gobbled down his eggs as if he thought somebody would
steal them off his plate. He no longer seemed to care about where my parents were or why a thirteen-year-old kid from Louisville was hanging around Philadelphia all by himself. He was focused on the task at hand: to hit .400 for the season. While he ate, I noticed that his fingernails were chewed down to the quick.
Nobody recognized Ted in the coffee shop. Either that or they pretended not to. He paid the bill and we stepped outside. It was a gray day. That could be good for a hitter, I thought—no shadows.
It was Sunday, so there weren’t a lot of cars on the street. But when Ted put his hand up in the air, a taxi almost magically appeared.
“Shibe Park,” Ted said as we climbed in.
The driver recognized Ted.
“I’m an A’s fan,” he said, “but today I’m rootin’ for you, Mr. Williams. Good luck out there.”
“I’m gonna need it,” Ted replied.
We drove through the streets of Philadelphia, passing all kinds of stores. I noticed the movies that were playing in the theaters: Citizen Kane. Abbott and Costello in the Navy. Dumbo. Million Dollar Baby, starring Ronald Reagan. I laughed to myself when I saw a sign on a movie theater that boasted WE HAVE AIR-CONDITIONING!
In about fifteen minutes, we pulled up to a big building at the corner of Lehigh Avenue and 21st Street. It filled the whole city block, but it didn’t look like a ballpark at first. There was a dome at the corner that made it look a little bit like a church. But there was a sign that said SHIBE PARK.
A smaller sign said TODAY: ATHLETICS VS. BOSTON RED SOX.
It looked almost like a church.