The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  After Ted signed with the Padres, Lane told him: “I know you were a pitcher in high school, but you can forget pitching from now on,” Ted recalled for Joe Cashman in 1941.3 “I’m taking you because I think you’re going to be a great hitter. So concentrate on your hitting.”

  Williams was thrilled. He’d always wanted to be known as a hitter anyway, not a pitcher.

  On Saturday, June 27, 1936, two days after signing his Padres contract, Ted appeared inside the clubhouse at brand-new Lane Field. Carrying a battered suitcase in his right hand, he stopped, looked around at his new teammates—a combination of up-and-coming hotshots and former major leaguers on the wane—then slowly closed the door behind him.

  Many of the players stopped to size Williams up as he made his entrance. He was still only seventeen years old, tall and reed-thin, a Huck Finn–Li’l Abner amalgam who was the rawest-looking rookie imaginable.

  Manager Frank Shellenback greeted the kid and introduced him around. Finally, Ted sat himself down next to Bud Tuttle, a left-handed pitcher, and said, “When do we hit?”4

  There was a carnival atmosphere at the ballpark that day as Ted dressed for his first game as a pro. The Padres, playing the Sacramento Solons, were trying to create a fun, family-oriented environment for their new fans. They staged a fungo-hitting contest; the opposing catchers took turns seeing who could throw the most balls from home plate into a barrel at second base; and shortstop George Myatt ran a seventy-five-yard race against Sacramento second baseman Joe Dobbins.5

  Ted was all wide-eyed as he walked around Lane Field, which was 339 feet down the left-field line, 355 to right, and 480 to dead center. The prevailing winds were favorable for a left-handed power hitter because they blew off San Diego Bay out toward right field.

  After signing his contract on the twenty-fifth, Ted had gone down to the University Heights playground and invited some neighborhood kids out to the ballpark to see his first game. Now he spotted the group in the stands, preened for them in his new uniform—which had the number 19 on the back—waved, and yelled, “Hi, gang! Look at me!”6

  The game started, and before long Shellenback sent Ted up as a pinch hitter against the Solons’ Henry “Cotton” Pippen. He took three strikes right down the middle, too “petrified” to swing, as he recalled.7 That showing could not have inspired much confidence in Ted on the part of the manager, so for the next several days, Williams found himself relegated to throwing batting practice.

  Then on July 3, in Los Angeles, the Padres were getting blown out by the Angels, 12–3. San Diego was using up its pitchers quickly and was facing a doubleheader each of the next two days, to boot. Ted overheard Shellenback rather desperately ask one of his coaches, Eddie Mulligan, “Damn it, Eddie, who am I going to put in there? I’m using up all my pitchers.”8

  Ted saw a chance to play, even though Bill Lane had just told him in June his pitching days were over. Williams sidled up to Mulligan and said, “Tell him to put me in, Eddie. I can pitch. I’m ready.” Mulligan relayed the suggestion to Shellenback. Lacking a better option, the manager agreed to have the kid go warm up.

  Rather than just take the mound, Ted entered the game pinch-hitting for the pitcher he would replace. Facing the Angels’ Glen Babler, Williams cracked a long single off the right-field fence at Wrigley Field for his first hit as a professional. That started a rally, and the Padres scored five runs to make it 12–8. Then Ted went in to pitch the seventh inning—his catcher was Harold Doerr, Bobby’s older brother—and retired the side in order.

  Williams got up again in the top of the eighth and hit another single to right, but when he went back out to pitch the bottom of the eighth, he gave up two screaming home runs (“I can still hear the swish of the line drives past my ears,” he said in 19419) before Shellenback came out with the hook. “Skip, I think you’ve got me playing the wrong position,” Ted told his manager.10

  As he neared the dugout after being lifted, Ted took off his glove and flung it. He aimed for the bench, but the glove sailed into the stands, according to Bobby Doerr. “Ted fought embarrassment all the time, and he was embarrassed he didn’t do better pitching,” Doerr said.11

  But the pitching fiasco was just a blip on Ted’s screen, dissolving before the overarching reality that he was now a pro ballplayer taking his first road trip, a boy on a train with men, lapping up new sights, smells, and experiences like the exuberant naïf he was.

  Mondays were usually off days in the Pacific Coast League, a day when a team would take the train to the next city, where they would sometimes play as many as seven games. Doerr remembered the image of Ted the Monday after his first game in San Diego. He showed up at the train station, nervously waiting as the Padres prepared to leave for Los Angeles and then Oakland. “There’s Ted, prancing up and down the platform, all excited,” Doerr said.

  Doerr was only eighteen, but he already had two years of pro ball under his belt. He’d grown up in Los Angeles, dropped out of school when he was sixteen, and joined the Hollywood Stars in 1934, two years before Bill Lane moved the team to San Diego. Ossie Vitt, Doerr’s manager during his first season, had taught him how to order and tip in a restaurant.12 Vitt had said it was important to act like a big leaguer and use fifteen cents of his $2.50 daily meal allowance as a tip. Now Doerr passed on to Ted some of the baseball savoir faire he’d learned.

  Williams needed all the road wisdom he could get. The first time he walked into the train’s dining car on the way to Los Angeles and had to order from a menu, he didn’t know what to do. He’d never been to anything fancier than a coffee shop or malt shop, where the selections were posted on a wall. This first dining-car experience left an indelible impression on Ted, according to Louise Kaufman, his lover for more than forty years, who was living with Ted when she died in 1993. “Part of The Natural where the kid was on the train in the dining car, going to where he was going—that was taken from Ted Williams’s life right there,” Kaufman told the writer Ed Linn in an unpublished interview.13 “It’s one of his favorite stories. He says, ‘My God, and here I was on the train in a dining car.… And my God, to read a menu. Who knows how to read a menu if you never saw one?’ He was a child.”

  Cedric Durst had his hands full tamping down the boy’s rough edges. He found his roommate over the top and loud but likable and good-natured. Durst would watch in amazement as his charge entered a restaurant, screamed out a greeting to a teammate on the other side of the room, gave another a friendly but pulverizing slap on the back, and lifted a piece of bread off the plate of a third. When Ted ordered food, he always acted as if he were in a hurry, Doerr said, often telling a waitress he had a train to catch. Doerr was never sure what the rush was.

  Ted ate like a horse. “My God, he’d put away two T-bone steaks and a platter of rolls for breakfast,” recalled teammate George Myatt. When the Padres arrived in Oakland, Bill Lane confronted Ted in the lobby of the Hotel Leamington.

  “Kid,” said Lane, “you’re leading the list!”14

  “What list?” said Ted.

  “The overeaters’ list,” the owner said, explaining that Williams was consistently signing for more than his $2.50 daily meal allowance.

  Ted waved the owner off. “Well, I just can’t eat on $2.50 a day. Take it out of my check.” Lane never did.

  As a roommate, Ted had his eccentricities. One morning at six thirty, Durst was awakened by a great hullabaloo. “Jeezem, I was almost scared to death,” he told Time magazine’s Ed Rees in 1950.15 “Ted was jumping up and down on his bed and shouting. ‘Christ!’ I said, ‘What’s the matter, kid?’ Ted just smiled and said, ‘Boy, it’s great to be young and full of pep!’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but not so early in the morning.’ ” Then Durst rolled over and tried to go back to sleep as Ted roared with laughter.

  Another quirk Durst discovered was that Ted would talk in his sleep—about hitting, of course. “What a hit!” he would say, or “Boy, what power!” Or, “Big arms are what I need. Big arms!”16
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  Ted liked to go to the movies on the road, usually westerns with Gene Autry, but only the team batboy, Ralph Thompson, would go with him, because Ted would often act out and cause a scene himself. “If the theater didn’t start the movie on time, he’d get up on his feet and start hollering and raising hell,” Thompson recalled.17 “As a kid, I didn’t care. I was happy to go. His actions didn’t bother me any. He was always good to me. He paid my way in. The other players wouldn’t go anywhere with him, though. They’d be embarrassed.”

  Ted also discovered pinball machines and played them too much for his mother’s liking;18 May had the Padres stop her son from using his meal money for such frivolous pursuits. Durst said Ted would also generously use what cash he had to front for other players if they were broke.

  Other rules of the road that Ted learned on that first trip included the fact that on the train, the starting players got the lower births and the scrubs got the uppers. And the veterans felt it was their right to haze rookies, especially such an inviting target as Ted. Doerr recalled that on an early trip, several of the older players with a few drinks under their belts decided to grab, tug, and aggressively horse around with the sleeping rookie. Finally Ted escaped by taking his bedcovers and going into the women’s bathroom, left vacant in the car the Padres had taken over. When he played for the Red Sox, Ted would continue this ladies’ room maneuver on train trips, but by then it was to assert a star’s privacy prerogative.

  Yet Ted didn’t mind the hazing—he was having the time of his life.

  “I never had so much fun,” Ted remembered.19 “It was like a fairyland to me. Everything was new. The train ride was new. The Pullman. Riding up to Sacramento, riding up to Oakland and to Frisco, and riding up on the train to Portland, all through the Cascades, Mount Shasta, and Jesus, going into Seattle. And seeing all the players and seeing them up close and getting that experience to be a professional ballplayer. Oh, Jesus, yes, I thought I was in fairyland. It was all like a dream for a year and a half.”20 He was beginning to experience the perks of his chosen profession and see some of America doing it. After always worrying about how he would afford his next bat, he could soon order his own bats whenever he wanted to and would have an endless supply of baseball’s most vital piece of equipment.21

  Frank Shellenback was impressed early on by Williams’s work ethic, drive, and determination. After home games Ted would ask Shellenback for a couple of old baseballs. When the manager asked what he did with them, Ted said he used them for extra batting practice after dinner at the park near his house. Shellenback found that hard to believe, having seen Ted come in to Lane Field at ten in the morning for extra hitting in addition to the regular workout every day. As Shellenback told the Boston Herald’s Arthur Sampson in 1949, one evening he drove to Williams’s neighborhood to investigate and saw the rookie “driving those two battered baseballs all over the field. Ted was standing close to a rock which served as a plate. One kid was pitching to him. A half dozen others were shagging drives. The field was rough and stony. The baseballs I had given him were already showing signs of wear. The stitching was falling apart. The covers were rough as sandpaper. Blood was trickling from Williams’s hands as he gripped a chipped bat. But he kept swinging. And hitting. Ted made himself the great ballplayer he is today.”22

  Williams’s dedication to his hitting far surpassed the attention he gave to his fielding—which was to say, none at all. His “When do we hit?” remark to Bud Tuttle the day he started with the Padres reflected Ted’s one-dimensional view of the game as well as a sense of arrogance on the part of a rookie so young, coarse, and inexperienced.

  Ted would balk at shagging, taking ground balls, or otherwise working on his fielding. “He did little more many times than simply wave at balls hit to left field in the San Diego park,” recalled Jack Orr, a sportswriter for the San Diego Evening Tribune.23

  The first time Ted started a game in left in 1936, George Myatt, the Padres’ shortstop and captain, caught the rookie with his back to the infield.

  “I’d see the signs… and give the signs to the outfielders,” Myatt said. “Once, right after the sign had been given… I turned around real fast. There Ted is, standing with his back to the hitter. He had his glove in his hands and he was swinging his glove like it was a bat. I called time and went out and called him a few names, told him there was something else to this game besides swinging a bat.”24

  When a ball skipped through Ted’s legs, and he just casually jogged after it early that first season, his manager benched him. “I didn’t speak to him about it at the time,” said Shellenback, a former spitball pitcher who compiled a 296–177 record in nineteen Pacific Coast League seasons.25 “I merely took him out of the lineup the next day. For five days in a row he came to me in the morning and followed me all over the field. ‘Am I going to play today, Skipper?’ he would inquire. When I’d say ‘no,’ he would add, ‘How about tomorrow?’ I’d say, ‘Maybe,’ and walk away. At the end of about five days of this, Ted was about ready to burst a blood vessel. I knew that I had punished him severely by keeping him out of the lineup.… So I finally put him back in the lineup with the comment that he could stay there as long as he hustled. And he never gave me any cause to criticize him again.”

  Ted’s hustle may have improved after that incident, but his fielding skills, and fundamental indifference to the defensive part of the game, generally did not. Shellenback would order him to report early for spring training in 1937 so that Durst could work with him on improving his fielding. Durst also arranged for a track coach to try to improve Ted’s speed on the bases.26

  But after the season got under way, Ted’s poor fielding persisted, causing the veteran players to grouse and warn him to shape up. Earl Keller, the beat writer for the Tribune, got wind of the grumbling and decided to publicly scold Ted. “If Ted Williams, 18-year-old outfielder with the San Diego Padres is to make the grade in the diamond sport, he has one thing to learn,” Keller wrote. “Ted must get it in his head that fielding is just as important as hitting. The young flyhawk believes all he has to do is get up to the plate and hit the ball, but that’s where he’s wrong. The veterans on the Padres team are trying to convince Ted of this fact, and the sooner they do, the sooner the youth will make good.”27

  Keller, who would stay on as a Tribune sportswriter for forty-six years, probably intended those words to serve more as paternal advice than as harsh rebuke, for he was a reliable Padres booster and a friend to most of the players—especially Ted, whom he’d been tracking since high school. There was not even a hint of an adversarial relationship between Williams and the writers who covered him in San Diego. Boston would be a different story.

  “There was no particular pressure on me playing in San Diego,” Ted said later, reflecting on his first season. “I didn’t know what pressure was. I was nervous—not because I was born there, but because it was a whole new experience playing before crowds, professional baseball.”28 After getting two hits in the game he pitched in on July 3, Ted went up as a pinch hitter in the first game of the July 4 doubleheader against Los Angeles. Then he started the second game, going 1–5 on the day. He also played both games of a doubleheader the next day and went a combined 0–6. He only got up seven more times the rest of the month, collecting one hit. Shellenback was opting to bring him along slowly.29

  Then in early August, when the Padres were playing in Portland, Cedric Durst went down with a groin injury, creating an opportunity for Ted. He played in three consecutive doubleheaders between August 7 and August 9, going 6–17, including two doubles.30 The press took notice. Monroe McConnell wrote in the Union that “young Ted Williams… has been delivering like a veteran and Padre fans probably will see more of him.”31

  Shellenback was probably impressed with this miniburst and display of power, but there was a VIP sitting in the stands in Portland for those games who really took notice of Ted: Eddie Collins. Collins had been a superb second baseman for twenty-five years
with the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox, and was then on the verge of being inducted into the Hall of Fame. In 1933, Collins had advised multimillionaire Tom Yawkey, his old friend from prep school, to buy the Boston Red Sox, and Yawkey, after acquiring the team, had brought Collins to Boston with him as general manager and part owner.

  Collins rarely made scouting trips, but had decided to take the train out to the West Coast that summer and spend some time watching the Padres, with whom the Red Sox had a working agreement. Specifically, Collins had taken options on Bobby Doerr and George Myatt and now had to decide whether to exercise them before they expired. He’d joined the Padres in Seattle for games against the Indians, then come down the coast for a series against the Portland Beavers.

  But in the Portland series, it was Williams, not Doerr or Myatt, who made an impression on Collins.

  “The announcer yelled, ‘Williams hitting for San Diego,’ ” the general manager later recounted.32 “I looked down on the field and nearly broke out laughing when I got a peek at the gawky bean pole who was striding toward the plate. But I didn’t laugh when I saw him swing at the ball and line a double over the first sacker’s head. There was nothing remarkable about the hit. There was certainly nothing impressive about the appearance of the hitter. But there was something about the way he tied into that ball which all but shocked me out of my seat. It was as though a shock of electricity had just passed through my body. In that fleeting moment, as he swung at that ball, I became so convinced that here was one of the most natural hitters in baseball history. I’d have staked my life on it.