by Dan Gutman
“What am I gonna do now, Junior?” Ted whispered to me before going up to hit.
“Single,” I said.
The first two pitches were curveballs that missed. 2–0 count. Porter served up another curve, and Ted ripped a bullet up the middle.
“.404!” shouted Dom DiMaggio.
“I told you so,” I yelled to Ted, on first base.
Cronin sent out a pinch runner to take Ted’s place, but Ted waved him back to the dugout.
“No way!” Ted thundered. “I’m staying in.”
The score was 11–4 going into the seventh inning, but who was counting? The only thing that mattered at that point was what Ted was doing. The Red Sox got a runner on first, and it was Ted’s turn to bat again. He looked at me and raised one eyebrow.
“Another single,” I said, simply.
“I’m swinging for the fences,” he replied, “just to prove you wrong.”
“Suit yourself,” I told him.
Vaughan was pitching carefully, and Ted worked the count to 3 and 2. The next pitch was a perfect curveball on the outside corner, a tough pitch to hit. But Ted slammed it over the first baseman’s head—for a single. Ted looked at me from first base. We both laughed.
“I told you so.”
“.4048!” yelled Dom DiMaggio.
The Sox rallied for six runs in the seventh inning to make it 11–10. The game was a real slugfest. Ted was 4 for 4. He, DiMaggio, and Bobby Doerr had nine hits between them.
“What now, Einstein?” Ted asked me before coming to bat in the ninth inning against a new pitcher named Newman Shirley.
“You’re going to hit a grounder up the middle,” I told him, “and the second baseman is going to fumble it for an error.”
“Get outta here!” Ted said.
Then he went up and hit a ground ball up the middle, which the second baseman fumbled for an error.
“I told you so,” I said when Ted got back to the dugout.
“I don’t know what you’ve got, Junior,” he said. “But you’re sticking with me.”
The Red Sox finally pushed across two runs in the ninth to win the game, 12–11. But nobody really cared. The important thing was that Ted had gone 4 for 5. His average was .404, and history had been made.
In the locker room between games, Ted got a sandwich for each of us, and we sat down to eat them. That’s when Joe Cronin came up to him.
“How about sitting out the second game, Ted?” he said. “You got the .400 fair and square. Nobody will fault you if you stop now.”
Ted looked at me. I had told him he was going to hit .406. After the first game, he was only hitting .404.
“No thanks, Skip,” he said. “I want to keep playing.”
I probably don’t need to tell you every little detail about the second game of the doubleheader. Ted singled in the first inning. In the fourth, he hit a ball so hard it dented a loudspeaker horn that was hanging over the field. It went for a double.
Even so, the A’s were ahead 7–1 in the eighth inning when the umpires decided it was getting too dark to see the ball. Instead of turning on the lights, they ended the game right there.
The 1941 baseball season was over.
Ted had gone 2 for 3 in the second game and 6 for 8 for the day, just as I said he would. His final batting average was officially .406. Or to be more precise, .4057.
You’d think that Ted would have been thrilled with a 6-for-8 day at the plate. But all he could talk about when he came off the field were the two at-bats in which he didn’t get hits. For Ted, anything less than perfection was failure. That was probably the secret to his success as a hitter.
When it was all over, fans were jumping over the railings and running on the field to get close to Ted. He grabbed his bat so it wouldn’t get stolen. The other Sox formed a human wall around him so he could make it to the Red Sox locker room in one piece.
Inside, everybody was congratulating him as if they had just won the World Series.
“They should rename us the Ted Sox!” Dom DiMaggio yelled.
Ted was loving every minute of it. After a while, the photographers and reporters were allowed into the locker room, and of course they swarmed all over Ted. I recognized that reporter Dave Egan from The Boston Record who had interviewed Ted before the game.
“How’d you do it, Ted?” Egan asked. “What’s your secret?”
“It’s simple,” he replied. “You just have to know what you’re going to do before you do it.”
Then he looked at me.
Over the next 70 years, I knew, Babe Ruth’s home run records would fall. Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak would be broken. Humans would go to the moon, invent rock and roll, and create the internet; and the world would change in so many ways.
But nobody would ever hit .400 again.
12
The Absolute Truth
BASEBALL SEASON IS LONG. THE RED SOX WERE TIRED BUT happy. Maybe they didn’t win the pennant, but one of them had made history.
After a few minutes of questions, the reporters were shooed out of the locker room. The players could relax, take showers, and get ready to scatter off to Kansas, California, Texas, or wherever they called home. One by one they gathered up their belongings, shook hands all around, and drifted out. Some of them, it appeared, didn’t want to say good-bye. Baseball was their life.
The pile of dirty uniforms in the middle of the floor was high. The only player who hadn’t peeled his off was Ted.
“There are about a thousand fans outside waiting for you, Mr. Williams,” a clubhouse attendant said.
“I’ll leave when I’m good and ready,” Ted replied. “Tell ’em to go home.”
He was in no hurry to go home himself, wherever home was. Ted leaned back on a bench and stretched out his legs, a satisfied smile on his face. Then he started unwrapping the tape around his ankle. He asked me to grab two quarts of milk out of the refrigerator in the corner, and I did. He handed me one and opened the other, tilting his head back and downing the entire quart in one long chug.
“The guys say I have a drinking problem,” he joked after wiping his mouth on a dirty sleeve.
We were alone except for the clubhouse attendant, who was sweeping up. I couldn’t stall any longer. Ted could kick me out any minute. I tried to think of the right way to tell him the main reason why I had come so far to see him.
But I didn’t have to, because Ted brought up the subject himself.
“I need to ask you a question,” he said. “How’d you know what was going to happen out there today?”
My brain froze for a moment. I wasn’t sure how to word it.
“I…”
The clubhouse attendant left.
“Those weren’t just lucky guesses,” Ted continued, looking me in the eye. “You knew in advance that I was going to get those six hits today. You knew what I was going to do in every at-bat, like you could predict the future. Are you some kind of a fortune-teller?”
“Well, I…the thing is…”
Ted had no patience for my hesitancy. He picked up a telephone receiver from the wall near his locker. It was one of those old-time phones I had seen in the movies with a rotary dial.
“Okay, that’s it. I’m calling the cops,” he told me. “You’re either a runaway or you’re crazy. The police can figure out which.”
I didn’t know if he was bluffing or not, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
“No!” I shouted, grabbing at the phone. But he was much stronger than me.
“They’ll take you home,” Ted said, pushing me away. “You said you live in Louisville, right? They’ll take you to your mom and dad.”
“They can’t take me to my mom and dad,” I finally yelled.
“Why not?” he asked. “Are your parents dead?”
“No,” I admitted, “they haven’t been born yet.”
Ted looked at me. He put the phone back in its cradle.
“Explain.”
“This is gon
na sound crazy,” I said. “But what I’m about to tell you is the absolute truth. And the truth is that I come from…the future.”
There. I said it.
“Explain,” Ted repeated.
“I don’t…live in 1941,” I said. “I’m just…visiting. I live in the twenty-first century. I can travel back in time.”
“And how the !@#$%! can you do that, may I ask?”
He was humoring me, I knew. This kind of information was just too unbelievable to comprehend.
“I use a baseball card,” I told him. “I hold it in my hand. Then I can travel back to the year on the card. The baseball card is sort of like a plane ticket for me. A plane ticket and a time machine.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Ted said, waving one hand in the air. “Get outta here!”
I was prepared for him not to believe me. I had learned from past experience.
“Here’s the proof.”
I pulled the newspaper article that Flip had given me out of my pocket and handed it to Ted.
“This is tomorrow’s paper,” he said after glancing at the date at the top of the page. “Where did you get it? This paper hasn’t been printed yet.”
“I told you,” I replied. “I live in the next century. In my time, this isn’t tomorrow’s paper. It’s a Xerox of an old paper.”
“A what?”
Oops. They didn’t have Xerox in 1941. I corrected myself and told him it was an exact copy of the next day’s paper.
Ted skimmed the article and looked up at me. I knew what he was thinking. He had been with me ever since the previous night when we had met at Independence Hall. I couldn’t have faked the paper. There was no time.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you? There’s no other way to explain how you would know in advance what I was going to do in every at-bat.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I Googled all that stuff too.”
“You what?”
“Never mind,” I told him. “Look, I swear, I’m telling you the truth.”
“Y’know, I thought something was strange about you,” Ted told me. “Those sneakers you’re wearing. Pretty snazzy. I’ve never seen anything like ’em.”
“They’re…new.”
Ted leaned back against the wall again, staring at me and trying to wrap his brain around what I had just told him.
“So people in the future can travel through time,” he said, shaking his head.
“No,” I replied. “Not all of them. Just me.”
“I don’t get it,” Ted said. “You traveled to a different century just to convince me to play today? If you already knew I was going to hit .406, you didn’t need to talk me into it. I would have played and hit .406 no matter what you did.”
“You’re right,” I said, lowering my voice in case anyone was still around. “That’s not why I came to see you. I’m here for another reason. It’s about the war.”
Ted looked at me blankly. It was almost like he wasn’t sure what war I was talking about.
“I try not to read the papers too much,” he said. “It’s bad for my eyes.”
“Y’know the war that’s going on in Europe?” I said. “It’s going to become a big deal here too.”
“Those Europeans can have their stupid war,” Ted said. “It’s none of our business. I say, let ’em fight among themselves.”
“It’s going to spread,” I told him. “There’s going to be an attack on Pearl Harbor.”
“Pearl what?”
He had never even heard of it. And he wasn’t a dumb man. It occurred to me that most Americans probably never heard of Pearl Harbor until the day it was attacked.
“It’s a big naval base, in Hawaii,” I told him. “Japan is going to launch a surprise attack. Here, see for yourself.”
I pulled out the other article I had brought along, the one Agent Pluto had given me.
“Japan?” Ted said, surprised. “I thought the war was between the British and the Germans.”
“It’s going to become a world war,” I told him. “Everybody’s going to be involved.”
“We already had a world war,” Ted said as if he still didn’t quite believe me. “They said it was the war to end all wars.”
“They were wrong,” I told him. “There’s going to be another one.”
Ted shook his head with disgust. I knew World War I ended in 1918 and calculated in my head that it was just 23 years earlier—the same year Ted was born.
“This attack on Hawaii,” he said, “how did they pull it off?”
“It’s going to be a total surprise,” I told him. “Sneak attack. They’re going to sink a good part of the navy. More than 2,000 American soldiers are going to die in two hours. The United States is going to declare war on Japan the next day, and we’ll be in the middle of World War II.”
Ted thought about it for a minute.
“Well, if you really come from the future,” he finally said, “then you must be able to answer this question. Who’s gonna win the war?”
I wasn’t sure if I should tell him or not. That wasn’t part of my mission. I remembered what my mother had said about stepping on a twig in the past and causing a chain reaction disaster. But if I didn’t answer Ted’s question, he might think I was some kind of a fraud and he wouldn’t help me at all.
“We’re going to win the war,” I revealed. “But a lot of people on both sides are going to die for it. Millions of people. We’re going to drop an atomic bomb on Japan.”
“Atomic bomb?”
“It’s a new kind of weapon,” I told him. “It can wipe out a whole city in one blast. It’s going to change the world.”
“!@#$%!”
“But none of this has to happen,” I told him. “That’s why I’m here. The FBI sent me to warn the president about Pearl Harbor. If our government knows about the attack in advance, they’ll be ready. They could stop it. It would save lives.”
“So why are you telling me?” Ted asked.
“The FBI gave me your baseball card,” I told him. “They thought you would be the best person to help me.”
“I’m just a ballplayer,” Ted said. “I don’t know anything about war.”
I took a deep breath.
“That’s the other reason why I’m here,” I told Ted. “I need to warn you about something. You’re going to miss four-and-a-half years of baseball.”
“Why?” He looked alarmed.
“You’ll be in the marines,” I said.
“You’re out of your mind,” Ted said. “Me?”
“After the attack on Pearl Harbor,” I told him, “millions of Americans are going to enlist. Regular guys, celebrities, and baseball players too. And because you’ll be in the military, you won’t be playing ball, of course.”
“But I’m just 23!” Ted protested. “This is my time.”
“I know,” I told him. “You’re gonna miss the prime of your career.”
There was a look of panic on Ted’s face. Baseball was everything to him. He looked at the date at the top of the article about Pearl Harbor.
“Today is September 28th,” he said. “This attack is going to be on December 7th.”
“It’s ten weeks from now,” I told him. “We need to talk to the president.”
Ted thought it over for a moment.
“Well, I’m gonna take care of this right now,” he said.
He picked up the phone off the wall and dialed some numbers. He waited impatiently for a few seconds, and then an operator answered at the other end of the line.
“Get me the White House!” Ted barked.
There was a pause. I could only hear Ted’s half of the conversation.
“Yes, the White House in Washington!” Ted shouted. “What other White House is there?”
Pause.
“I need to speak to the president!”
Pause.
“I’m Ted !@#$%! Williams, that’s who!”
Pause.
�
�The Ted Williams who just hit .406!” he yelled. “And I need to speak to President Roosevelt, sweetheart. So make the connection. Right now!”
Pause. Ted was not a patient man.
“This is a matter of national importance, you little !@#$%!” he hollered. “So get the president on the line or I’m going to !@#$%! your !@#$%! Do you hear me? What’s your name? I want to talk to your supervisor!”
Pause. Click. Ted put the phone receiver back in its cradle.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She said, ‘Get lost, creep.’”
It didn’t look like this was going to work out. I would have to think of another plan.
But suddenly Ted jumped up from the bench and began gathering the things from his locker. He stuffed them into a suitcase with a sense of purpose. Still in uniform, he picked up the suitcase and headed for the door.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Why?” I protested. “Where?”
“You and me, Junior,” Ted said, “we’re going to Washington.”
13
On the Road
BY THE TIME TED AND I LEFT SHIBE PARK, IT WAS COMPLETELY dark outside. There were only a few people on the street. The fans that had been waiting for Ted were gone.
It was too late to set out for Washington. Ted said we would get an early start the next morning. I thanked him over and over again for helping me; but he brushed it aside, saying he had a friend he wanted to visit on the way to Washington, anyway. We took a cab back to the hotel, and Ted said I could order dinner from room service.
Have you ever ordered room service? If not, I highly recommend it. You can have whatever you want, and they bring it right to your hotel room! We both ordered steaks, and a guy rolled the food in on a big cart. It was cool.
Ted was in a good mood, still on a high from his historic achievement. And he didn’t even know how historic it was. Just 11 years earlier, in 1930, Bill Terry of the New York Giants hit .401. People probably thought that every 10 years or so somebody would crack the .400 mark. Little did they know that after Ted did it, more than 70 years would go by with nobody reaching that level again.