In those days the big hitters traditionally used heavy bats—36, 37, 38 ounces. Williams had been using a thirty-six. He soon met with John Hillerich of Hillerich and Bradsby, the bat manufacturers, and asked for bats styled more on the Spence model, at 33 ounces. “Ted,” Hillerich argued, “that’s too light—you can’t get good wood on the ball with them.” But Williams argued that torque, the whip of the bat, was more important than mere weight, and he was right. Besides, he was losing roughly 10 percent of the weight of the bat; he measured it against the pitcher, who, in Williams’s mind was now losing 10 percent off his fastball. Shortly after his conversation with Hillerich, Williams visited Louisville and talked with an old-timer named Fritz Bickel, who actually took the raw wooden cylinders and meticulously fashioned bats out of them. “Ted, here’s a wonderful piece of wood for you,” Bickel said, holding up a cylinder. “See, it has two knots, and that’s good; it hardens the wooden.” Pleased, Williams gave Bickel twenty-five dollars, and from then on Bickel carefully looked for just the right piece of wood for Williams, and Williams sent him occasional small gratuities. He was glad he had done that; it meant he had light bats that remained strong.
He was also aware that on damp or muggy days, bats picked up extra moisture and became heavier. He would warn his teammates not to put their bats down on the damp grass at night. When some of them argued with him, Williams immediately set off for the post office, where he had a variety of bats weighed. Sure enough, he was right: They had picked up a critical half-ounce from the dampness, an increase of about 1.5 percent. It was important to him, even if no one else cared.
Every advantage helped. In those early days of night baseball, Williams was more successful than most hitters at adjusting to playing under the lights. One reason, he was sure, was the regimen he put himself through. The other players stayed out later, got up later, ate a heavier meal, and then took brief naps. By contrast, Williams woke up early, ate an early light lunch, went for a long walk, and then took a long nap. He was always fresh at the ball park at night.
Fielding did not intrigue him quite as much as hitting did. Only later in his career did he begin to take this aspect of the game more seriously. Once he turned to Dominic DiMaggio and asked him how he managed to charge ground balls hit to the outfield with such aggressiveness. DiMaggio was startled by the question: It was, he thought, so long in coming.
But Williams loved hitting, especially against fastball pitchers. “No one can throw a fastball past me. God could come down from Heaven, and He couldn’t throw it past me,” he liked to say. He loved playing against certain teams: the Tigers because they had great power pitchers—Trucks, Newhouser, Trout, and Benton—who came right at him, and who rarely walked him; and Cleveland because the Indians had Bob Feller, the standard by which other pitchers were measured. When baseball players were talking about another pitcher, they would say, “His fastball is almost as fast as Feller’s,” or, “His curveball is almost as good as Feller’s.” It was Feller, after all, who had caused Lefty Gomez to say, after taking his third straight strike without moving the bat off his shoulder, “That last one sounded a little low.”
“That was the test,” Williams reminisced years later. “He was the best and I wanted to be the best, and three days before he pitched I would start thinking Robert Feller, Bob Feller. I’d sit in my room thinking and seeing him, thinking about him all that time. God, I loved it. That was a personal challenge. I’d always get my rest and I’d weigh my bat that day. I did pretty well off Robert Feller. I hit sinking line drives off him, a lot of top spin on them. Allie Reynolds of the Yankees was tough and I might think about him for twenty-four hours before a game, but Robert Feller, I’d think about him for three days.”
Williams had complete confidence in himself. He was once called out on strikes at a home game in Fenway, and he came into the dugout ranting and raving that home plate was out of line—that was why the umpire had called the strike. Mel Parnell, Tex Hughson, and some of the other pitchers teased him about it, said he was blaming a strikeout on the plate. But he persisted. A great injustice had been done. The next day, just to humor him, Joe Cronin went out and measured the plate, and, of course, Williams had been right. It was out of line. Eleven pitchers on the team, Parnell had thought, and only Williams picked up on it. Somewhere in the record book there is a mistake: He is credited with 709 career strikeouts, but one of those is because of a faulty alignment in Fenway Park. It should read 708.
It was often written that he was disliked by his teammates. That was a canard. He was invariably generous and thoughtful, especially to young players coming up behind him. His colleagues regarded him with an unusual affection long after his playing days were over. There was a feeling on their part that he was devoid of meanness or narrowness; whatever faults he had were simply the inevitable, lesser side of someone so gifted and so passionate. He forged especially long-lasting friendships with three teammates: Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Pesky. He and Doerr shared their love of the outdoors; with DiMaggio, the friendship was based on Williams’s great affection and immense respect for his intelligence; and with Pesky, it was the affection of an older brother and little brother—a fifty-year marathon of playful insults. In 1985 he and Pesky were still needling each other. Pesky would say to him, “You know, Ted, you’ve got a high school diploma, and I’ve got a high school diploma. How come you’re so much smarter than me?” “Because you’re dumb, Needle, you’re just goddamn dumb is why,” Williams would answer.
What such teammates as Boo Ferriss remembered about him more than anything else was the excitement Williams brought to the game—his energy and vitality, and the belief that in any baseball game something marvelous was going to happen. He was, Ferriss thought, always studying the game. Ferriss had one clear memory of Williams: Williams sitting in the dugout on the second step, his head propped on his arms, his elbows resting on the top step. From there he would study the pitcher as clinically as a scientist looks through a microscope. “Hey, look at that. Did you see what he just threw?” Ferriss would hear him say. “He never threw that before.”
Having Williams on the team was like having an additional hitting instructor. “Needle,” he once told Pesky when they were playing New York at the Stadium, “that pitcher on the mound is named Spud Chandler. He throws a sinker. A damn good sinker. A very heavy ball. You keep trying to pull him and you can’t. You’re not big enough or strong enough. I am forty pounds heavier, damn near a foot taller than you, and a hell of a lot stronger, and I can’t pull him, in case you didn’t notice. You’re zero for fourteen against Mr. Chandler this year. Just go with the ball. They are not going to walk you to get to me, believe me. You’re going to get a good pitch. So just slap it by them.” Pesky did. Enraged, Chandler stood on the mound cursing him, so upset that he lost his concentration. Thereupon Williams hit a home run. When Williams reached the dugout he yelled, “Where is our horned-nose little shortstop?” Pesky shook his hand. “Did I tell you how to hit him?” said Williams. “Did I?”
If there was anything wrong with Williams’s advice as a hitter it was his assumption that everyone would get the same pitches he got. Once in a series with Detroit, Mickey McDermott, who was a very good hitter, was sent up to pinch-hit against Virgil Trucks. “Bush,” Williams told McDermott, “just sit there and wait on the slider.” So McDermott did, but Trucks fed him three fastballs in a row. He struck out on three pitches. “Ted,” McDermott told Williams, “there are no Trucks sliders for me—only for you.”
Pitchers were, of course, the enemy, but those who understood the challenge immediately gained Williams’s respect. Eddie Lopat was one, because he threw so many different pitches with such varying speed and because his sequence was never predictable. He and Williams became friends, and they would stand around before games talking about hitting and pitching. Williams even lent Lopat some of his bats. To those pitchers on his own team who paid attention and wanted to learn, he gave brilliant advice. He would explain du
ring a game what a given hitter was expecting, and then, based on his knowledge of the pitcher, project whether or not he was going to get it. He was invariably right.
Parnell, a left-hander, believed that Williams, as much as any man, forced him to become a better pitcher. Williams felt that he never saw enough left-handers when the Red Sox were at home, since most visiting managers were unwilling to let their lefties pitch in a park constructed for right-handed hitters. So he talked Parnell into coming out to the park early to throw special batting practice to him. Williams demanded that Parnell throw his best stuff. If it was helpful for Williams, then it was great for Parnell too, for if he could pitch against Ted Williams, move the ball around on him and surprise him, then he could do it against anyone. There were, Parnell soon learned, no blind spots. If he made a perfect pitch, Williams still managed to get some of the bat on it, and if he was off just a little, then Williams was likely to kill it. But there was some reassurance in all this—if Williams could barely touch a pitch, then the chances were that a mere mortal batter would not be able to touch it at all.
He was forever giving tips to visiting players as well. When Detroit played Boston he would talk endlessly with young Al Kaline about hitting, giving him pointers. Finally Tom Yawkey, the Boston owner, asked him to stop because he was helping the opposition. “Come on, T.A.,” Williams answered, “the more hitters we have in this game, the better it is for the game. Listen, when you’re coming towards the park and you’re two blocks away, and you hear a tremendous cheer, that isn’t because someone has thrown a strike. That’s because someone has hit the ball.” In the end, Yawkey conceded that Williams was right and permitted him to continue his seminars with the opposition.
He was, thought his friend Curt Gowdy, the least bigoted man of his time. He could not comprehend judging a player by his color or background. Baseball, he thought, was a universe of its own—a better one, where talent was the only thing that mattered. Gowdy remembered him as the first person in baseball to predict the coming importance of black athletes in American sports. “Curt,” Williams had once said to him, “they’re the only kids in America who work that hard anymore. White kids drive cars, black kids walk or ride bikes. White kids go off to drive-ins or play tennis, and the black kids spend all their time on sandlots trying to get their fifty at-bats. You’ll see it show up in the majors soon enough—their bodies are stronger.” His speech in Cooperstown in July 1966, when he was elected to the Hall of Fame, is notable for its generosity to Willie Mays: “The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred twenty-second home run. He has gone past me and he’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get ’em, Willie.’ Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as anyone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man, and the name of the game. I hope someday Satchell Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they were not given the chance ...”
Williams intellectualized the game far more than DiMaggio did. This is not to diminish DiMaggio’s own considerable powers of analysis, but a moment would come when he simply played. Williams never stopped thinking, analyzing. This methodological difference led to some practical differences—for instance, over the issue of whether to take certain pitches. Williams would never, no matter what the situation, go for a pitch that was even a shade outside the strike zone. DiMaggio was different: He believed that, as a power hitter on the team, he sometimes had an obligation to swing at imperfect pitches. On certain occasions a walk was not enough; it was a victory for the pitcher. Williams understood DiMaggio’s point, but felt that if, even under duress, he swung at what he thought was a bad ball, then it might cause deterioration of his batting eye. It was all or nothing. For him, to swing at any bad ball was a victory for the pitcher.
Williams’s brain was like a computer. What a pitcher threw in a given situation would be entered permanently into his memory, to be recalled in comparable situations against the same pitcher. His teammates loved watching him take his revenge. In the early fifties he played in an exhibition game with the White Sox. A pitcher named Bob Keegan, pitching against Williams for the first time, got him to hit a giant pop-up off a slider. The Red Sox players watching the scene were amused. They knew that Keegan thought he could now handle Williams with a slider, and that Williams would be waiting for it. Sure enough, a few weeks later in Chicago, Williams faced Keegan again. That day Williams hit three home runs off him. Even as Keegan let go of the ball the last time, he realized he had grooved it and yelled out, “Oh, shit!”
Williams hated for a pitcher to show him up. It was one thing to get him out, but another to embarrass him. Once when Bobby Shantz, the great relief pitcher, was playing for Kansas City, he struck Williams out on a big, fat slow curve. That had happened with the score tied in the ninth inning. Williams did not like being fooled by a slow curve, and he came back to the dugout in a rage. “Hold them until the eleventh,” he told his teammates. “I want one more at bat.” The score remained tied, and when he did get up again, Williams hit a ball off Shantz so hard that as it whistled past the mound it seemed likely to kill the pitcher.
On another occasion he was batting against Hal Newhouser of Detroit. Newhouser, who liked to come over the top, had two strikes on him. He came in sidearm with a cheap curve for strike three. Williams was enraged. Newhouser was a great power pitcher, but Williams felt that this time he had struck him out by cheating. It was a matter of pride, as if he had ruined a no-hitter of Newhouser’s by bunting. “A dinky nickel curve,” he said coming back to the bench. “I’ll bet any son of a bitch on this bench I hit one off him today.” It was a bet that no one cared to take. Inevitably, his next time up he hit a home run.
Williams wanted no interruptions to his concentration on hitting. His marriages always suffered because his real love was baseball. He preferred living in hotels in Boston because it was simpler, and less time was wasted. He never stopped talking about being the best. “Tex,” he would say one day to his friend Tex Hughson, “don’t you think I’m the greatest hitter in baseball?” “Damn right, you are, Ted,” Hughson would answer. But the next day the question would be asked again, this time to Parnell. “Mel, who’s the greatest hitter in baseball?” There was, Parnell knew, only one answer.
In those years there was a photographer in Boston whom Williams liked named Fred Kaplan. Once Kaplan’s two-year-old son said he wanted to go to the ball park. “Why?” his father asked. “I want to see Teddy,” the little boy said. “Teddy who?” the father asked. “Teddy Ballgame,” the little boy said. That was it, the perfect nickname, just how Williams thought of himself, and he adopted it for his own—Teddy Ballgame.
CHAPTER 10
GRADUALLY THE VETERAN YANKEE players were coming to know Stengel. He was shrewd, talkative, and theatrical. He could be arbitrary, and sometimes he seemed a bit odd. When a player swung too hard on a given pitch and missed, he would suddenly jump up, swing an imaginary bat, and yell, “Not too hard, and not too easy. Just butcher boy.” But there was a growing, somewhat reluctant admiration for his instincts. It was not long before the sportswriters started to notice in print how well Casey Stengel handled his team in the face of constant injuries, and how brilliantly he platooned his players, changing the nature of contemporary baseball by ending the set lineup, in which every day the same eight players played and batted in the same order.
In the outfield Stengel platooned Bauer and Woodling, close friends. Both were constantly at war with the manager because each wanted to play every day. Bauer smashed water coolers when Stengel pulled him for a pinch hitter. Woodling on occasion muttered darkly that you had to wear a cross on a chain to play regularly, an allusion to the idea that Stengel favored Catholics. Woodling, a marvelous natural hitter, was sure that if he played more often he would hit even better. He called Stengel “that crooked-legged old bastard.”
In 1949 Woodling and Bauer, between them, batted .271 with 15
home runs and 99 runs batted in; in effect they gave the Yankees, in an injury-filled season, a composite all-star outfielder. Theirs was a constant competition, however. One time a right-hander was pitching, and Woodling, the left-handed hitter, was sure he was going to play. But Stengel went with Bauer, which enraged Woodling. “Hey Gene, you caddy for me today,” Bauer said. Bauer got three hits, but late in the game the other team went to a left-hander. At that point Stengel pulled Bauer and went with Woodling, which enraged Bauer. He returned to the dugout, throwing his bats and screaming at the goddamn old man who would do this kind of thing. When the game was over Stengel said that he wanted to see Bauer and Woodling. Both of them were still steaming when they filed into his office. He turned first to Bauer. “I don’t give a good goddamn what you call me—you can call me a crazy old man, and maybe I am. But it’s my team and I’m going to run it my way. Now I’m going to tell you why I pulled you. You got your three hits, right? So let me tell you something, Mr. Bauer. You’re not a one-thousand hitter. And you’re not a five-hundred hitter. In fact, Mr. Bauer, you’re not even a three-thirty-three hitter. So you had your three hits for the day and that’s all it was going to be. That was your quota. I didn’t think you had any more hits in you. And you,” turning to Woodling, “the same goes for you. So forget all this old-man crap and play your position and do whatever the hell I tell you.” For Bauer, part of the frustration with Stengel’s platooning was his desire to play every day, and part of it was the fact that George Weiss and Roy Harney, his deputy at contract time, exploited the way Stengel was using him. As Bauer’s career progressed, he found himself constantly engaged in battles with Weiss. Bauer would ask for a sizable raise, and Weiss would tell him that no, he could not really give him a major raise, because, sad to say, Bauer was not a regular. Bauer would then cite his considerable contributions to the Yankee success and Weiss would answer, Yes, Hank, I know, but you’re not a regular.
Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Page 19