Over the course of the season, he put up staggering numbers: 43 homers, 142 runs batted in, and a .366 average. Though those totals were good enough for the Triple Crown, Williams wasn’t voted the American Association’s Most Valuable Player. The only award the sportswriters agreed that he should get was the league’s “screwball king.” A pattern was set. Though Williams would later win the AL MVP trophy twice, he was denied the honor in his two Triple Crown years—1942 and 1947. With the exception of Yankee great Lou Gehrig in 1934, no other Triple Crown winner has ever failed to win the MVP, and few other players would succeed in alienating “the knights of the keyboard” as much as Williams.
Williams would eventually lament his lack of “a businesslike attitude” in his pre-Boston years in pro ball. “I mean hitting was so important to me,” he later wrote, “consumed so much of my desire, was so much more exciting to me that I tended to let other things go.” And over the course of his nineteen seasons in the majors, his single-mindedness at home plate would make an indelible mark on the “National Pastime.”
“Cronin’s Big Problem of 1939,” as the Boston Globe referred to the socially maladjusted Williams in the spring of his rookie year, got off to a shaky start. In an April preseason game in Atlanta, after striking out with two runners on base in the top of the eighth, the twenty-year-old can’t-miss prospect dropped a foul pop-up in the bottom half of the inning. With his frustration mounting, the right fielder picked up the ball, turned around, and hurled it out of the stadium.
Fortunately for Williams, Cronin decided not to apply the measure recommended by the Globe, which was to use a screwdriver to force him “not to cut loose with his eccentricities.” Instead, after immediately removing his temperamental rookie from the game, the player-manager—the All-Star shortstop would hit fourth or fifth in the lineup, right after Williams—sat down with him for what would be the first of several “fatherly chats.” “I just can’t understand what goes on in your mind,” said Cronin, who, in the course of his storied career, had never witnessed a similar outburst. “See if you can’t explain it to me.” Though the Kid could not figure himself out either, he apologized. To express his gratitude for Cronin’s patience and understanding, he would use his bat. He started hitting. A couple of weeks later, in his first Sunday game at Fenway, Williams thrilled the hometown faithful by going four for five, including a towering homer into the center-field bleachers, an area previously reached only by the game’s most feared sluggers. In early May, in Detroit, after he belted the longest homer ever in Briggs Stadium, the Globe predicted that he would “become the biggest hitting sensation since Babe Ruth.”
Despite a slump in June, which prevented him from being selected to the All-Star team—from then on, he would be a fixture in the midsummer classic—Williams led the league in RBIs with 145, the first rookie ever to do so. He ended up hitting a robust .327 along with 31 homers. Though his discipline at the plate was impressive—he had 107 walks compared with only 64 strikeouts—his first-year jitters precluded the eye-popping totals that would soon become his trademark. Then, as now, seasons with 100 or more strikeouts were common for power hitters, but he would exceed 50 strikeouts only two more times; his next highest total was 54. Likewise, his OBP for 1939 was .436, lower than any other year except 1959, as his walk totals would typically be much higher (thrice surpassing 150). As Williams would later acknowledge, in his rookie season he was still swinging at pitches an inch above his shoulders. Even so, all the hours of practice at North Park had already paid big dividends. “I can’t imagine,” Williams later wrote, “anyone having a better, happier first year in the big leagues.…Every day was Christmas.” Babe Ruth agreed. At the time, baseball did not yet have its Rookie of the Year award, but the recently retired Sultan of Swat designated Williams “the best rookie.”
The Babe would soon go further and anoint the Kid as his successor, an honor that Williams tried his best to live up to. In their first face-to-face meeting, before an exhibition game in Boston in 1943, Ruth, as the papers widely reported, told Williams, “You remind me a lot of myself. I love to hit. You’re one of the most natural ballplayers I’ve ever seen.” In a recent interview, Mike Epstein, who played under Williams in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a member of the Washington Senators, told me that his manager liked to tell a different version of this story. Attempting to channel Williams, Epstein said, “And the Babe comes up to me and tells me, ‘I used to study Shoeless Joe Jackson [the great left-handed hitter for the Chicago White Sox accused of betting on the 1919 World Series] before games to copy him because I thought he had the prettiest fucking swing I have ever seen. But no, Williams, you’ve got a prettier fucking swing.’” Hearing such praise from the mouth of the Babe just a few years into his career moved the Red Sox outfielder deeply. “I was flabbergasted,” Williams recalled years later. “After all, he was Babe Ruth.” In the early 1990s, when compiling Ted Williams’ Hit List with sportswriter Jim Prime, a book in which he would rank the twenty-five best hitters of all time, the Splendid Splinter would put Ruth at the top, followed by Lou Gehrig. While his findings reflected more than just a “dry statistical analysis,” Williams put a premium on slugging percentage and on-base percentage. And he ended up not ranking himself, sticking a section on his career in an appendix. “But it was clear from our conversations,” stated coauthor Jim Prime in a recent phone interview, “that Ted thought he was second only to Ruth.” Though Williams was in awe of Ruth, the perfectionist could not help but point out his flaws. “Ruth struck out too many times,” wrote Williams, proud that his 709 lifetime total of Ks paled in comparison to Ruth’s 1,330.
With expectations sky-high, his second season in the majors turned out to be a bust. But only Williams could hit .344—just eight points behind the league leader, Joe DiMaggio—and be accused of having an off year. Critics pounced on his inability to hit the long ball; he ended up with just 23 homers, the lowest total of his career for a full season. What highlighted his power outage was that in an effort to help Williams, the Red Sox had shortened the right-field fence in Fenway Park by twenty feet. Frustrated by his performance, Williams popped off, as only he could. Midway through the 1940 campaign, in response to an innocent question from a reporter at the Boston American (“What’s the matter with you, Ted?”), he let loose, saying he hated everything about Boston, its fans, and its writers. After his tirade—minus the F-bombs—hit the newsstands, the war between Williams and his adopted hometown was officially on; Jason was fast becoming Achilles, whose rage knew no bounds. Psychoanalyzing “the problem child,” the Boston Globe argued that Williams had a “repressed desire to dominate the Red Sox and afterward, perhaps, the American League.” But the severity of his case of arrested development didn’t allow for much repression. “Terrible Ted” would be forever mired in the “terrible twos.” “TELL THEM TO ALL GO FUCK THEMSELVES” was the message that Williams asked the rookie reporter at the Boston Record to pass on to his colleagues.3 What the toddler wanted above all was to spend endless hours of quality time with his bat. For Williams, both the writers as well as the fans were intruders; to tip his cap to the fans after a homer, which he stopped doing after his rookie year, would be to acknowledge that he and his bat did not have the right to be left alone. Like Jefferson and other obsessives, to combat his considerable social anxiety, he was prone to pretending that other people didn’t exist.
Rebounding from his “sophomore slump” in 1941, Williams put together his season for the ages. But .406 wasn’t the number that had Americans buzzing about baseball that year; it was 56. From May 15 until July 16, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio did the unthinkable; he got a hit in every game. And after being held hitless in Cleveland on July 17—and thus missing out on the $10,000 that the H. J. Heinz Company was prepared to pay had his record-setting feat reached the magic 57—the Yankee centerfielder started another streak of 17 games. With Joe D. hitting .357 and knocking in 130 runs, five more than Williams, and the Yankees winning the pennant
by 17 games, the Kid came in second in the MVP voting. “Hell,” Williams would later declare, “I’d’a voted for DiMaggio myself.” But Williams was himself guilty of getting caught up in the DiMaggio hype. During his streak, DiMaggio hit only .408; during the same stretch, Williams hit .412; Williams essentially did for an entire season what DiMaggio could manage for only a third. Even more surprising, Williams failed to nab the MVP in 1942, when he won his first Triple Crown with an otherworldly 36 homers and 137 RBIs to go along with a .356 average. That year, the award went to another pennant-winning Yankee, second baseman Joe Gordon, who hit a modest .322 with just 18 homers and 103 RBIs.
Williams did not win the first of his two MVPs until 1946, when the Red Sox led the American League in batting and were in first place most of the season. That September, Life could not help but attribute the team’s stunning success solely to Williams’s hitting, lauding “his monomaniacal attempt to perfect himself in the one thing he really cares about.” For the first time since 1918 and for the only time in his career, Boston won the pennant, finishing twelve games ahead of the second-place Detroit Tigers. But the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals turned out to be a disaster. The highly favored Red Sox lost four games to three, and Williams hit .200, eking out just five puny singles. “I was so disgusted, so unhappy,” Williams later recalled. “Shell-shocked. And so disappointed in myself.” In this instance, his rigidity, rather than being an asset, seemed to work against him. During the Series, the Cardinals employed a “right-shift” against Williams, a strategy devised earlier that season by the Indians manager Lou Boudreau, which featured four infielders on the right side of second base. The day before the decisive seventh game, Williams told the Boston Globe that he would not change his batting style, “now, next year or ever.” Obsessives are addicted to their routines, and the thought of changing his approach on the fly was anathema to Williams. According to his calculations, the shift still left thirty feet of open space between first and second base, and he had little interest in slapping the ball to left field. “Don’t let anyone fill you up with the baloney,” he emphasized, “that the Cards’ defense has me worried and has caused me to press.” But his actions suggested otherwise. Right after finishing that locker-room interview with the Globe, Williams got undressed and picked up a bat, which he toted all the way to the shower. With nothing—not even bat bonding—able to quell his jitters, the third-place hitter in the Sox lineup went hitless in the Series finale. On the train out of St. Louis, he broke down and cried. “I was looking out the window,” he later recalled, “so I had to shut the shade.”
April 30, 1952, was “Ted Williams Day” at Fenway Park. Boston was paying homage to its thirty-three-year-old star because on May 2, he was due to report to a U.S. Navy base in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, to begin a seventeen-month tour of duty. In pregame ceremonies, the left fielder was showered with numerous gifts, including a memory book signed by four hundred thousand fans from across the country, a movie camera, and a light blue Cadillac. “This is the greatest day of my life,” an emotional Williams told the crowd of 24,764. “I’ll always remember it.” In the seventh inning, in what both Williams and the fans assumed would be his last time at bat—he was not counting on a comeback at thirty-five—he parked a curveball eight rows deep into the right-field stands. Despite the wild cheering, the “Hub Kid” failed to tip his cap (as would also be the case on September 28, 1960, when he bid adieu for the final-final time with another long ball).
This would be Williams’s second stint in the armed forces. He had signed up in May 1942 and first got called up that November, a couple of months after completing his Triple Crown–winning season. Of all the branches of the military, Williams enlisted in the most demanding, Naval Aviation—the Air Force was not established until 1947. When asked why he did not seek out something less perilous, he quipped, “Because I like to hit!” For Williams, the bat and the machine gun were first cousins.
His decision to take to the air, as he later acknowledged, was inspired by the exploits of his boyhood idol, Charles Lindbergh. At the age of nine, Williams had seen Lindbergh fêted in a packed San Diego Stadium not long after his return from Paris. “Lindbergh,” he said in the 1960s, “had this great obsession to want to be alone and to want his own life.” (The Splinter was of course no different.) “He [Lindbergh] is still doing great things,” Williams added. “I’d put him among the five men that I admire the most that I’ve ever known in my lifetime.”
Like Lindbergh, the lackadaisical C student turned into an academic whiz once his studies were geared toward a goal that excited him. In November 1942, the high school graduate, who had little idea what a college was—on a visit to Harvard University that June, he had commented, “It’s old, right?”—began a civilian pilot training program at Amherst College. “I’m not batting .400 in this flying course yet,” he told the New York Times after a couple of weeks, “but I’m going to do it.” Williams handled all subjects, including advanced math and physics, with aplomb. “He mastered intricate problems in fifteen minutes, which took the average cadet an hour,” stated his Sox teammate and fellow cadet, Johnny Pesky, who struggled academically at Amherst that winter. And surprisingly, like Lindbergh, the fiercely independent Williams also took to military discipline. As opposed to the outfielder, the cadet was capable of controlling his moods. Squadron commanders considered Williams a model soldier, with one calling him “enthusiastic, industrious and cooperative.”
The following year, Williams began intermediate flight training in Pensacola, Florida. Due to his preternatural hand-eye coordination, he excelled. In aerial drills, he repeatedly tore the sleeve target to smithereens, setting all kinds of records for hits. On May 2, 1944, he earned his wings, becoming a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. That same day, he married Doris Soule, whom he had known since his days with the Minneapolis Millers (she was the daughter of his Minnesota fishing guide). While his bride met his specifications—(1) hourglass figure, and (2) likes to hunt and fish—their relationship would be stormy. Soon after their arrival in the Everglades for the honeymoon, Doris spotted a snake, and she shut herself in the cabin while Williams fished by himself.
Having demonstrated remarkable ability and composure in his new line of work, Williams stayed on in Pensacola as a flight instructor. In mid-1945, he headed to San Francisco, where he began preparing for combat duty in the Far East. After the surrender of the Japanese in August, he was transferred to Hawaii, where he spent the rest of the year playing baseball in a Navy league. Williams was discharged from the Marines in January 1946.
As he left the armed forces, Williams signed up for the inactive Marine Reserves. Like most exiting soldiers, he figured that his military days were over. But six years later, with pilots in short supply and a new war to fight, the Marines came calling. In private, the Red Sox star fumed, but in public, for the sake of his country, he bit his tongue. (Aware of his tendency to pop off, he also repeatedly gave reporters the slip.) The war in Korea he supported; his recall he hated. “I didn’t think it was right,” he later said, “to be called up again.” And this time around, he would go directly to the front.
During his eight-week refresher course in Willow Grove, Captain Williams, as he was now called, chose to work with the new kids on the block: jets. “Easy to fly,” later observed the technology geek, who also liked souped-up cars and cameras, “easier than props because they had no torque, less noise, tricycle landing gear. Wonderful flight characteristics.” Early on, he got a huge scare when a pilot crashed his F-9 near the Pennsylvania base. Rushing to the scene, a horrified Williams saw the only remains of the crumpled soldier, a shoe and a leg. “So I was never a totally relaxed flyer,” he later recalled, “because I knew it was my ass if I didn’t pay attention.”
After completing several months of jet training in Cherry Point, North Carolina, Williams headed for Korea, arriving in early February 1953. The hut in Pohang that he shared with two roommates lo
oked like “a real dog box,” as he later put it. Due to the cold and damp conditions, he would do frequent battle with viral infections as well as with Communists on the other side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. On a busy day, his elite squadron, whose roughly three dozen members included John Glenn, the future astronaut and senator, flew about thirty sorties into enemy territory. “There was certainly nothing ‘bush’ about him [Williams] as a Marine combat pilot,” wrote Glenn in his autobiography. “He gave flying the same perfectionist’s attention he gave to his hitting.” And if Williams had not displayed his characteristic conscientiousness in the cockpit, he might never have made it home alive.
On February 14, after a couple of test flights and some target practice on an old bridge, he flew his first combat mission. Two days later, Williams took part in a massive air attack, in which a couple of hundred planes from several bases pounded a troop-and-supply area twenty miles south of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
February 16, 1953, turned out to be the most harrowing day of Williams’s life.
That morning, soon after dropping a few 250-pound bombs on buildings in enemy territory, Williams noticed that he had been hit. He did not feel a thud, but suddenly nothing worked. The light indicators were out of whack. The stick in his hand was gyrating wildly. The radio was dead.
America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Page 33