by John Updike
He came from California to a dowdy New England metropolis with too many newspapers, and was instant news. The Williams excitement had to do with his personality as well as his prowess; the former was as complex as the latter seemed transparent. He was, like Ty Cobb, a deprived man, hungry for greatness; but, unlike Cobb, he had a sweet smile. The smile can be seen on the old pre-war photos, and in televised interviews now, as the philosophical fisherman from Islamorada fields an especially cute question. Boston wanted to love the Kid, but he was prickly in its embrace. He was hot-tempered and rabbit-eared and became contemptuous of sportswriters and too proud to tip his hat after hitting a home run. And the teams he ornamented didn’t win all the marbles; the spectacular Sox of 1946 lost the World Series, and after that pennants just slipped away, while Williams sulked, spat, threw bats, and threatened retirement. In the end, the city loved him all the more because the relationship had proved so complex; “some obstacle,” as Freud wrote, “is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height.” No sports figure—not Bobby Orr or Larry Bird or Rocky Marciano—had a greater hold over the fans of New England than Ted Williams. From the generous team owner Tom Yawkey he received top dollar—what now seems a paltry $125,000 a season—but he was one of the few ballplayers who all by themselves brought people out to the park. In 1957 the third-place Red Sox drew 1,187,087, and the sportswriter Harold Kaese wrote, “The Red Sox drew 187,087 and Ted Williams drew the other million.”
He had talent: a big man with great eyes. He had intensity, and nobody practiced longer or thought harder about the niceties of the little war between pitchers and hitters. But he also had poignance, a flair for the dramatic. His career abounds with thunder that remained etched on the air: the last-day six-for-eight that lifted his average in 1941 up from .3995; the home run that same year that won the All-Star Game in Detroit; the home run he hit in 1946 off of a Rip Sewell blooper pitch; the home run with which he went off to Korea (he flew thirty-nine missions, crashlanded a bullet-riddled plane, and hit .407 in the two baseball months after he returned); and the one that concluded his career. But behind that thunder stood a multitude of hot days and wearisome nights, games that didn’t mean much beyond the moment, to which Williams brought his electric, elegant best. We loved him because he generated excitement: he lifted us out of our own lives and showed us, in the way he stood up at the plate, what the game was all about.
“Ted Williams”
From The New York Times Magazine
and Due Considerations
Ted Williams
TED took his time leaving this world, and he’s not quite out of it yet. He is cryonically frozen in Arizona, drained of blood and upside down but pretty much intact,* waiting for whatever resurrection technology can eventually produce. This bizarre turn in the Williams saga, which two of his three children claim to be by his own wish, does accord with a general perception among his admirers that there was something very precious about him, worth preserving if at all possible. To those of us who saw him at the plate, he seemed the concentrated essence of baseball: a tall, long-necked man wringing the bat handle and snapping the slender implement of Kentucky ash back and forth, back and forth in his impatience to hit the ball, to win the battle of wits and eye-hand coördination that, inning after inning, pits the solitary batter against the nine opposing men on the field.
For most of two decades—1939 to 1960, with time out for service in two wars—he was the main reason that people went to Red Sox games in Boston. In those decades he made the American League all-star team eighteen times and had the highest overall batting average, .344. The decades since his retirement, abounding in careers uninterrupted by national service and bolstered by a livelier ball and new techniques of physical conditioning, have seen him slip lower in the record lists; his home-run total of 521, third behind Babe Ruth and Jimmy Foxx in 1960, is now tied for twelfth, with Willie McCovey. Just last season, the phenomenal Barry Bonds broke one of Williams’s still-standing records—his on-base percentage of .551, set in 1941. Bonds also, in each of his last two years, exceeded by a good margin a total in which Williams for many years had ranked second only to Ruth, that of walks drawn in a single season.
One Williams statistic, however, gathers luster rather than dust as the years go by—his season average, in 1941, of .406. For over sixty years he has remained the last of the .400 hitters, his .406 nailed down in a double-header in Philadelphia that he could have sat out; he was batting .39955, which rounds up to .400, but he elected to play and went six-for-eight in the two games. In fact, he hit .400 in three seasons, counting the truncated bits of 1952 and ’53, when he was drafted into the Korean War: four hits in ten appearances before he reported for duty, and thirty-seven in ninety-one when he came back the following year. In 1957, he hit .388, including four home runs in as many official at-bats when a bout of flu had reduced him to a pinch-hitter. That year, and then the next, he became the oldest man ever to win a batting title. In the two preceding seasons he had the highest average in the league, but injuries and illness kept him from getting four hundred at-bats. These latter seasons, when he was playing for indifferent teams with an accumulated, underpublicized burden of aches and pains, cemented his claim to be called the greatest hitter of his era, an era that included Joe DiMaggio and Stan Musial.
Yet, when an athlete or opera singer or exhilarating personality dies, it is the live performance we remember, the unduplicable presence, the shimmer and sparkle and poignance, perceived from however far back a seat in the audience. The swing—the coiled wait, the popped hip, the long and graceful follow-through that left his body yearning toward first base—was a grand motion, never a lunge or a hasty fending or a minimalist Ruthian swat; it took up a lot of space and seemed fully serious in its sweep. At six foot three, he was one of the taller men on the field, and we in the crowd brought with us an awareness, like the layer of cigarette smoke that used to hover under the lights, of his dangerous rage to excel—of his on-field temper tantrums, his spats with the press, his struggles with marriage, and his failure, as the years ground on, to make it back to a World Series and redeem his weak performance in 1946. We knew he never tipped his hat to the crowd when he hit a home run, and many of us loved him more for it, not less. He was focusing on the assigned task. Success and failure in baseball are right out there for all to see; his body language declared that he wanted to be the best, that this was more than a game or a livelihood for him. He was paid, toward the end of his career, a record (believe it or not) $125,000 a season, and after his worst season, his only sub-.300 season, in 1959, he asked management for a pay cut.
In the long stretch after 1946, as the excellent Sox teams of the Forties yielded to the mediocre Fifties teams, Ted kept up the show. The intensity, the handsome lankiness, the electric hum as the line-up worked around to his appearance were summer constants. Fenway Park, in those days, was not always full; the advance-ticket crowds from Maine and New Hampshire hadn’t yet materialized in that thinner era, which took its baseball as a homely staple, without luxury boxes. On an impulse, I bought in for a few dollars to his last game, and the park was two-thirds empty. He hit a home run at his last at-bat, an event I wrote about, in part because his departure, taking with it the heart of Boston baseball, had been so meagerly witnessed.
With retirement, slowly, he became what William Butler Yeats called a “smiling public man.” The stern, temperamental baseball perfectionist dropped his concentrated air of work-in-progress and joined us on the sidelines. He managed a team, the Washington Senators, with a middle-aged patience. He faithfully showed up at Red Sox spring training and was generous—in a voice bellicosely loud in part because flying jets in Korea had half-deafened him—with advice and praise, to friend and foe alike. He fished with the same obsessive passion with which he had analyzed the geometry of the strike zone. He continued to serve as the symbol of the Jimmy Fund, which he had animated with a thousand personal encouragements of cancer-stricken children. He used his
Baseball Hall of Fame acceptance speech to plead for the admission of the great players of the old Negro leagues; in a bygone era when the majors brimmed with unreconstructed rednecks, he had welcomed baseball’s integration and befriended the Red Sox’s belated black recruits.
He drew closer to his three children, and the public drew closer to him. The new journalism generated interviews in which his language, long held to the locker room, was revealed as bumptiously obscene and youthfully enthusiastic. Compared now with DiMaggio, he appeared more open, less wary, with nothing to hide and everything to share, as the darkness of failing eyesight, the helplessness of strokes and daily dialysis and the desperate operations that the wealthy and famous must endure closed in. On two occasions his aging body was hauled to Boston and he made a show of tipping his cap to the crowd; but we didn’t need that. The crowd and Ted had always shared what was important, a belief that this boys’ game terrifically mattered.
Praise through the decades for
HUB FANS BID KID ADIEU
“The most celebrated baseball essay ever.”
—Roger Angell
“Updike on Williams is a stirring spectacle. Nothing he wrote can top this astonishing piece.”
—David Margolick
“The greatest writer, in the greatest ballpark, on the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
—Dan Shaugnessy
“No sportswriter ever wrote anything better.”
—Garrison Keillor
“Updike was a baseball writer only once, yet he wrote the finest baseball story I know of. He and Ted Williams shared a singular ambition: to be the best that ever played the game.”
—Richard Ben Cramer
“The piece that changed the way the sport is written. Updike made baseball the lyricist’s game.”
—Peter Gammons
“It has the mystique.”
—Ted Williams
Notes
[←1]
This piece was written with no research materials save an outdated record book and the Boston newspapers of the day; and Williams’ early career preceded the dawning of my Schlagballbewußtsein (Baseball-consciousness). Also for reasons of perspective was my account of his beginnings skimped. Williams first attracted the notice of a major-league scout—Bill Essick of the Yankees—when he was a fifteen-year-old pitcher with the San Diego American Legion Post team. As a pitcher-outfielder for San Diego’s Herbert Hoover High School, Williams recorded averages of .586 and .403. Essick balked at signing Williams for the $1,000 his mother asked; he was signed instead, for $150 a month, by the local Pacific Coast League franchise, the newly created San Diego Padres. In his two seasons with this team, Williams hit merely .271 and .291, but his style and slugging (23 home runs the second year) caught the eye of, among others, Casey Stengel, then with the Boston Braves, and Eddie Collins, the Red Sox general manager. Collins bought him from the Padres for $25,000 in cash and $25,000 in players. Williams was then nineteen. Collins’ fond confidence in the boy’s potential matched Williams’ own. Williams reported to the Red Sox training camp in Sarasota in 1938 and, after showing more volubility than skill, was shipped down to the Minneapolis Millers, the top Sox farm team. It should be said, perhaps, that the parent club was equipped with an excellent, if mature, outfield, mostly purchased from Connie Mack’s dismantled A’s. Upon leaving Sarasota, Williams is supposed to have told the regular outfield of Joe Vosmik, Doc Cramer, and Ben Chapman that he would be back and would make more money than the three of them put together. At Minneapolis he hit .366, batted in 142 runs, scored 130, and hit 43 home runs. He also loafed in the field, jabbered at the fans, and smashed a water cooler with his fist. In 1939 he came north with the Red Sox. On the way, in Atlanta, he dropped a foul fly, accidentally kicked it away in trying to pick it up, picked it up, and threw it out of the park. It would be nice if, his first time up in Fenway Park, he had hit a home run. Actually, in his first Massachusetts appearance, the first inning of an exhibition game against Holy Cross at Worcester, hedid hit a home run, a grand slam. The Red Sox season opened in Yankee Stadium. Facing Red Ruffing, Williams struck out and, the next time up, doubled for his first major-league hit. In the Fenway Park opener, against Philadelphia, he had a single in five trips. His first home run came on April 23, in that same series with the A’s. Williams was then twenty, and played right field. In his rookie season, he hit .327; in 1940, .344.
[←2]
See Ted Williams, by Ed Linn (Sport Magazine Library, 1961), Chapter 6, “Williams vs. the Press.” It is Linn’s suggestion that Williams walked into a circulation war among the seven Boston newspapers, who in their competitive zeal headlined incidents that the New York papers, say, would have minimized, just as they minimized the less genial side of the moody and aloof DiMaggio and smoothed Babe Ruth into a folk hero. It is also Linn’s thought, and an interesting one, that Williams thrived on even adverse publicity and needed a hostile press to elicit, contrariwise, his defiant best. The statistics (especially of the 1958 season, when he snapped a slump by spitting in all directions, and inadvertently conked an elderly female fan with a tossed bat) seem to corroborate this. Certainly Williams could have had a truce for the asking, and his industrious perpetuation of the war, down to his last day in uniform, implies its usefulness to him. The actual and intimate anatomy of the matter resides in locker rooms and hotel corridors fading from memory. When my admiring account was printed, I received a letter from a sports reporter who hated Williams with a bitter and explicit immediacy. And even Linn’s hagiology permits some glimpses of Williams’ locker-room manners that are not pleasant.
[←3]
But he did tip his cap, high off his head, in at least his first season, as cartoons from that period verify. He was also extravagantly cordial to taxi drivers and stray children. See Linn, Chapter 4, “The Kid Comes to Boston”: “There has never been a ballplayer—anywhere, anytime—more popular than Ted Williams in his first season in Boston.” To this epoch belongs Williams’ prankish use of the Fenway scoreboard lights for rifle practice, his celebrated expressed preference for the life of a fireman, and his determined designation of himself as “The Kid.”
[←4]
In 1947 Joe DiMaggio and in 1957 Mickey Mantle, with seasons inferior to Williams’, won the MVP award because sportswriters, who vote on ballots with ten places, had vengefully placed Williams ninth, tenth, or nowhere at all. The 1941 award to Joe DiMaggio, even though this was Williams’ .406 year, is more understandable, since this was also theannus miraculorum when DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six consecutive games.
[←5]
The sweet saga of this beautiful decimal must be sung once more. Williams, after hitting above .400 all season, had cooled to .39955 with one doubleheader left to play, in Philadelphia. Joe Cronin, then managing the Red Sox, offered to bench him to safeguard his average, which was exactly .400 when rounded to the third decimal place. Williams said (I forget where I read this) that he did not want to become the .400 hitter with just his toenails over the line. He played the first game and singled, homered, singled, and singled. With less to gain than to lose, he elected to play the second game and got two more hits, including a double that dented a loudspeaker horn on the top of the right-field wall, giving him six for eight on the day and a season’s average that, in the forty years between Rogers Hornsby’s .403 (1925) and the present, stands as unique.
[←6]
For example: In 1948, the Sox came from behind to tie the Indians by winning three straight; in those games Williams went two for two, two for two, and two for four. In 1949, the Sox overtook the Yankees by winning nine in a row; in that streak, Williams won four games with home runs.
[←7]
Two reasons for his durability may be adduced. A non-smoker, non-drinker, habitual walker, and year-round outdoorsman, Williams spared his body the vicissitudes of the seasonal athlete. And his hitting was in large part a mental process; the amount of cerebration he devoted to such details as pit
chers’ patterns, prevailing winds, and the muscular mechanics of swinging a bat would seem ridiculous if it had not paid off. His intellectuality, as it were, perhaps explains the quickness with which he adjusted, after the war, to the changed conditions—the night games, the addition of the slider to the standard pitching repertoire, the new cry for the long ball. His reaction to the Williams Shift, then, cannot be dismissed as unconsidered.
[←8]
Invented, or perpetrated (as a joke?), by Boudreau on July 14, 1946, between games of a doubleheader. In the first game of the doubleheader, Williams had hit three homers and batted in eight runs. The shift was not used when men were on base and, had Williams bunted or hit late against it immediately, it might not have spread, in all its variations, throughout the league. The Cardinals used it in the lamented World Series of that year. Toward the end, in 1959 and 1960, rather sadly, it had faded from use, or degenerated to the mere clockwise twitching of the infield customary against pull hitters.
[←9]
Shortly before his retirement, Williams, in Life, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, “There’s the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you’re not sure.” Yet his lifetime batting average there is .340, only four points under his median average.