The first time Lefty Gomez pitched against him in Yankee Stadium, it was said that Williams hit a tremendous home run that landed about a third of the way into the deep right center-field seats. Gomez went back to the dugout, where Red Ruffing accosted him. “What’d you throw him?” he asked. “My fastball,” said the deflated Gomez. “I’ll be damned if he’ll hit my fastball that hard,” Ruffing said.
The next day Ruffing pitched Williams a fastball, and it landed two thirds of the way up into the right center-field seats. “Just as long as it wasn’t a fastball,” Gomez needled him when they got back to the dugout.
Williams was emotional, and his mood on any given day was directly keyed to how well he has hitting. Lou Stringer, the backup second baseman in 1949, felt he could gauge Williams’s attitude during batting practice. If he was hitting poorly, he would be down, and he would take extra batting practice. Pitch by pitch, as he found his groove, his body and his spirits would lift, like a man climbing stairs, Stringer thought. Once when he had finished hitting, Stringer turned to him and said, “Ted, you look great.” Williams replied, “You’re goddamned right! Did you see that wrist action? Did you see that swing? You see that power? I’m the best goddamn hitter in the world, kid, and you better believe it, the best goddamn hitter who ever lived!”
In 1941, the year he hit .406, he constantly took batting practice with Joe Dobson. Williams wanted not just to hit every pitch but to call it as well. Often they would argue over whether a pitch was in the strike zone, and if Williams hit one to right field, they would argue whether it was an out, a single, or a double. Williams would never give an inch. He wanted nothing less than the best batting-practice average in the history of the game. Even in the locker room he competed. There was a small spittoon filled with sand there, and he liked to bet that he could cast a fly into it eight times out of ten. “Just eight out of ten,” he would say, “any bets?”
Richard Ben Cramer noted with great shrewdness in Esquire that Williams sought fame but could not deal with its fellow traveler, celebrity. Even worse, he had unfortunately picked the most difficult city in America in which to grow up in public. Boston’s newspapering in the late forties and into the late fifties was probably the worst of any major city in America. It specialized in sensationalism, parochialism, prejudice, and ignorance. The Boston tabloid headline in the event of World War III, the standard joke went, would be HUB MAN WITNESSES/ ATOMIC BLAST/ IS LIGHTLY BURNED/ 20 MILLION DEAD. The competition was venomous, and to visiting players, there seemed to be twice as many writers in Boston as anywhere else. “They ought to put numbers on their backs,” Williams once said. “There’s so many of them it’s the only way you could figure out who they were.”
Williams, a young brash kid with rabbit ears, was raw meat to the Boston writers, and in terms of press relations his behavior was often wildly self-destructive. The makings of a war were there. Soon the papers divided between the reporters who liked Williams and those who pursued him relentlessly. The latter might not have practiced good journalism, but it was a living.
In a culture of journalistic scoundrels, the greatest scoundrel of them all was Dave Egan, a columnist for the Hearst tabloid the Record. Egan was known as the Colonel, though it was not known whether he had ever actually been a colonel in anything, least of all the United States armed forces. He was a man of immense talents, considered by many to be the most gifted sports columnist in Boston, but he was also locked in a terrible battle with alcohol, a battle he never won. Gentle and kind when sober, he became, when drinking, a monster, a man with the foulest tongue imaginable. He was nothing if not shrewd, and he soon hit upon the perfect formula, which enabled him to be. distinctive: He became, in an age when most sportswriters were fans, the provocateur. What everyone else was for, he was against. Did Boston celebrate the triumphs of its young undefeated heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano? Well, then Egan ripped him.
What he did, especially to Williams, was not pleasant for anyone who cares about the American press. His coverage amounted to a vendetta. He knew exactly which buttons to push with this sensitive young man. He loved to claim that Williams was not a clutch hitter, and was, in Egan’s cruel phrase, “the inventor of the automatic choke.” There was little real evidence of this, but Egan cleverly picked what he considered the ten most important games of Williams’s life (playoff games, World Series games, etc.) to show that Williams hit only .232 at such critical moments. Though no two games had been more important than the two final regular-season games against the Yankees in 1948, in which Williams had been on base eight of ten times, Egan declined to include them in his stress test. That Williams carried his team for weeks against pitchers who never gave him a decent pitch, that pitchers vastly preferred to walk Williams and pitch to Junior Stephens, did not matter.
What Dave Egan did was brutal and relentless. But it worked. Each day New Englanders had to read what the Colonel had written about Williams. “I knew New England well,” Birdie Tebbetts once reminisced. “I didn’t just grow up there, but I lived there off-season and I knew what happened in New England—I knew that in every small town throughout the region there would be people waiting in the early morning for the delivery of the Record so they could read the Colonel.”
Part of it was sheer talent: At his best he was the most outrageous and talented writer in Boston. He had a nickname for everyone. Fiorello La Guardia was “The Little Flower with the Big Pot”; a local fight promoter named Sam Silverman, who used a variety of small local arenas, was “Subway Sam.” He kept up a running feud with Jim Britt, who for a long time broadcast the Red Sox games. “Meathead Britt,” he called him on occasion. In honor of Britt’s valiant but doomed efforts to maximize the thinning hair at the front of his head, Egan also called him “The Tuft.” On one occasion he wrote of Britt, “He’s putting in his car what he should be drinking, and he’s drinking what he should be putting in his car.”
As Egan and a few other writers provoked, so Williams responded. Soon the fans understood, at least subconsciously, that it was fun to ride Williams because he would react to their taunts. If they went to Fenway, sat in the left-field stands, and diligently baited him, they became momentarily his equals. This was a forerunner to the more complicated relationships of the seventies and eighties among young, talented, and highly paid superstars, the press, and their fans.
The senior executives at the Record were warned by their lawyers that Egan’s writings were so vitriolic and personal that Williams had, with the tighter libel laws of those days, cause for a libel action. “I wouldn’t give those bastards the satisfaction of a lawsuit,” Williams told friends.
Egan was often too drunk to write his column, and had to be taken to his favorite drying-out home, Dropkick Murphy’s (where he was known to smuggle in his own bottles). A group of younger men at the Record would cover for him. Egan would call one of them and begin, “Ted Williams today outdid himself ...” Then there would be a pause, and Egan would say, “Ah, the hell with it, Bill, you fill in the rest.” Soon management became suspicious, and the job of faking it became more complicated. Sammy Cohen, the sports editor, would order the others to make it seem like they were taking dictation from Egan over the telephone while an executive of the paper stood nearby. This called for high theatrics. The writer actually had to write the column while faking a conversation with Egan: “Yes, Dave ... Wait a second, Dave, you’re ahead of me. ... Oh, great, Dave, that’s great stuff. ... Wait ’til Ted reads this one. ...”
Egan had graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He first took a job as a lawyer in one of Boston’s grand firms for ten dollars a week. When he was told that he was not entitled to a paid vacation, he walked out of the world of law and into the world of sportswriting. Egan worked at several Boston papers, and his reputation always preceded him. Editors hired him hoping that they could somehow live with his darker side—the whiskey-fed rages, the disappearances, the hiding of forbidden whiskey bottles in the men’s room�
�because of his talent. But eventually they would decide reluctantly that they could not.
The Record was Egan’s last stop. Hardly Boston’s most prestigious paper, its formula was simple: sex scandals, racing results, and baseball. Its extraordinary efforts, channeled almost exclusively into these areas, brought the paper a circulation of around 500,000, but it did not bring it peer respect. George Frazier, a Boston writer who worked for the Globe for much of his career, once noted of the Record and its successor, the Record American, “When I went to the Record-American as a columnist I was aware that its devotees moved their lips while they read. What I did not realize was that its editors did too.” It was engaged in a never-ending circulation war with other, richer papers. Once Mel Parnell, the Boston pitcher, cornered Egan after a game and asked why he had to be so personal in his criticism. Egan replied, “Kid, it isn’t personal—I’m just selling newspapers.” When another Boston writer criticized Egan, the Colonel asked, “How much mail do you get?” A few letters a week, the writer answered. “I get a barrelful every week,” Egan said, “most of them telling me what a bastard I am. But they write. Maybe they’re right—but I’m the bastard they write to.”
There were those who thought things easily might have gone the other way: that had Williams taken Egan in, made him his insider, then Egan would have celebrated Williams. Williams’s failure to play that game cost him dearly.
That spring, with Boston losing but Williams hitting well, Egan came down on him regularly. He was, Egan wrote in a late-April column, hitting but not the way he used to—his power had disappeared. Soon that was followed by a column attacking Williams for his alleged jealousy toward Junior Stephens. Williams, it appeared to Egan, did not congratulate Stephens enthusiastically enough upon the occasion of Junior’s home runs. Williams would walk, Egan wrote, “stonily” to the bench, “looking more displeased than otherwise, and it must be obvious that victory in itself, however melodramatically won by others, is not important; that his personal role in the victory is the all-important consideration, and that defeat with him starring is preferable to victory when he must stand in the shadow of another.” (If anything, Stephens was somewhat envious of Williams, or more particularly of his salary, which was double his own. From time to time he would complain to teammates. “Junior,” Joe Dobson once asked him, “there are thirty-five thousand people out there today. How many are here only because Junior Stephens is playing?”)
There was another column attacking Williams for hits that were not timely, home runs that were not needed, when the Red Sox already had a healthy lead. “Here are seven runs which he batted in after the battle was over and the issue decided and for my money they’re just frosting on the cake.” By mid-May Williams was hitting around .320 and near the lead in both home runs and runs batted in, but there was no doubt to readers of Dave Egan that he was responsible for the slow start of the Red Sox.
There was a game here, the journalist as cynic. The role of the player was to be equally cynical. But Ted Williams did not play the game. Other athletes who cared not a bit more for the needs of the press were good at pretending that they did. But Williams would not accept writers as peers; he could hit a fastball, they could not. Even for those Boston writers prepared to write generously of him, he did not make it any easier. For he did not disguise his feelings. He scornfully called the writers “the knights of the keyboard.” He would get on the Boston team bus, spot a writer, and say, “Ugh, I smell something rotten. It smells like shit. There must be writers on this bus—you write such shit.”
He made a few exceptions. Though Joe Cashman worked for the Record, which was Egan’s paper, Williams liked Cashman. In late winter, if the Record wanted a long piece on Williams as he prepared for the upcoming season, it would assign Cashman. Cashman would call Williams in Florida. “Joe, if it’s for you and you can make some money off a magazine piece, I’ll do it,” he said. “You come down here, stay with me, we’ll fish, and I’ll give you all the time you want. But if it’s for that damn paper, just forget it. Don’t come down. I’m sorry. You know why.”
The writers paid him back for his disdain in many ways. Some of them withheld their votes for the Most Valuable Player Award; in 1947, a season in which Williams led DiMaggio in every single category, he lost the MVP to the Yankee star by one point. One Boston writer had not even listed him in the top ten players. If he had listed him as even the tenth most-valuable player, Williams would have won the award.
Neither was Williams diplomatic with the fans. He refused the most basic courtesy of the era—to tip his cap after a home run. DiMaggio had the hat-tip down perfectly: He did it lightly and deftly, without looking up, as he moved past home plate toward the dugout. He never broke stride, thus satisfying the fans without showing up an opposing pitcher.
In time Williams’s refusal to tip his hat became a major civic issue. Management and teammates pleaded with him to do it—this was, after all, a small gesture. But he refused. He was nothing if not stubborn. Birdie Tebbetts, the catcher, suggested a compromise: Williams could tip his hat and at the same time say, under his breath; “Go to hell, you SOBs.” The fans, Tebbetts pointed out, would be happy and would not know what he was saying. The idea pleased Williams, but he never followed through on it. Instead, he fought back. If a fan was particularly obnoxious, he would stand at bat and deliberately try to line baseballs at him. On occasion he’d reward obscenities with an obscene gesture of his own. In all, he gave the tabloids just what they wanted: a great hitter, and a great side show as well.
In a way it was too bad because it distracted people from concentrating on his talents, which were spectacular. His eyesight was legendary. Some said that he could see the ball at the exact instant he hit it. Others swore that he could see the signature of Will Harridge, the president of the American League, as the pitcher released the ball; or that he could read the label on a record playing at 78 rpm. He himself thought that the talk about his eyesight was silly. Yes, he had exceptional eyesight—20/10. But his right eye had been damaged when his brother hit it with a walnut in a childhood fight. There were days when he woke up and could not see very well out of that eye.
Then there were his marvelous reflexes. He could wait until the last split second on a pitch and hit it, in the baseball vernacular, right out of the catcher’s mitt, and still pull it. He loved to drive cars because he saw it as a test of eyesight and reflexes. His friends considered him a brilliant driver, a man with a feathery touch who could easily have been a race-car champion. Once he drove with Matt Batts on a long trip through Florida. Williams was obviously impressed by Batts’s driving. “You know, Batts,” he said, “you’re not bad. In fact, you’re the second-best driver in baseball.” “Ted,” said the young catcher, “I’m the best.” “No, Batts,” said Williams. “You use the brake too much. I never use the brake. I’m the best.” Case closed.
But eyesight and reflexes were only the beginning. It was what he did with them that was important. “God gets you to the plate,” William’s would say, referring to the fact that he had great eyesight and physical size, “but once you’re there you’re on your own.” No one ever worked harder to build himself up, and no one took better care of himself in order to play ball. He did not pal around with the other ballplayers because he could not bear late hours, and he did not want to drink whiskey at night. He did not smoke, and he hated the smell of other people’s tobacco. His favorite beverage was malted milk.
When he went to the movies he would take a rubber ball with him and squeeze it constantly to strengthen his hands. He also had a metal contraption with a built-in spring, which he squeezed to build up his hands, wrists, and forearms. When a game was over, no matter what the weather, he would do one hundred push-ups, his feet elevated on a chair in order to make the exercise harder. He supported his body on his fingers instead of his palms to strengthen not just his upper body but his hands as well. Sometimes he would lie down on the locker-room floor, under two chairs on top of
one another and raise and lower the chairs slowly. Gradually he transformed himself into a powerful, muscular man.
Nothing was left to chance. If he was batting and a cloud passed over, he would step out of the batter’s box and fidget until the light was just a little better. He honed his bats at night, working a bone against them to make the fibers harder. He was the first to combine olive oil and rosin in order to get a better grip on the bat. He learned to gradually decrease the weight of his bats as the summer wore on and fatigue set in. That practice began one day when he had gone to the bat rack and picked up a bat belonging to Stan Spence, one of his teammates. It felt like a toothpick made out of banana wood, in his words. He asked Spence if he could use it, and in his first at-bat he went after an outside pitch. It was not even a full swing, more a light flick of the bat, but the ball seemed to jump out of there—a home run to the opposite field. That taught him something: Bat speed, not bat weight, was critical.
Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Page 18