“I tried to tell myself a little later that I must be mistaken: that if Williams was the extraordinary prospect I believed him to be, he’d be playing regularly instead of infrequently as a pinch hitter, and there’d be an army of scouts present with his name on their lips. But my judgment wouldn’t listen to that argument. So I decided to have another peek at the kid in action and then began making inquiries about him.”
In his mind’s eye that first day, Collins told an interviewer in 1950, Williams had stood out “like a white horse in a herd of black ones.”33
Another person impressed by Williams in that Portland series was Johnny Pesky, the future Red Sox shortstop who would become Ted’s lifelong friend. Pesky was then the clubhouse boy for the Beavers. He shined Ted’s shoes and watched in awe as Williams took batting practice, belting balls out of the park against a smoke-belching foundry in the distance. “He was just a kid, small, skinny, gangly,” Pesky remembered. “I don’t think he weighed one-sixty by then. I remember he had a great swing.”34
Collins followed the Padres down to San Francisco for a series against the Mission Reds and then arranged to meet Bill Lane in Los Angeles to discuss his pending options for Doerr and Myatt. Collins said he would take Doerr, even though he’d watched the second baseman make four errors in the first game of the August 8 doubleheader against Portland. (Doerr said he was unnerved, knowing the GM was in the stands.) Collins passed on Myatt and also acquired the rights to Padres catcher Gene Desautels. When Lane asked if there was anyone else on the team who interested him, Collins said he was intrigued by Ted.
“Williams?” asked Lane incredulously. “Why that’s preposterous. He’s just a child, only a couple months out of high school. He couldn’t be more crude.… He looks pretty good at bat at times. That’s why I’m keeping him around. But he’s years away and may never make it. I wouldn’t think of sticking you with him.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” said Collins. “Name your price and I’ll take him.”
“To be perfectly frank about it, Eddie, I can’t sell him at this time. I promised his parents when I signed him up that I’d keep him this year. And I would anyway. You see, he’s not shown anything to date which would warrant me asking a good price for him. I feel, though, as you apparently do, that he may become a standout. So I want to keep him until I can get some real money for him. However, I promise you that I’ll let you know and give you a chance to bid before sending him to the majors.”35
That was good enough for Collins, who thought Lane was a man of his word. Collins called Joe Cronin, the player-manager for the Red Sox, to tell him he’d bought Doerr and reached an understanding with Lane on a kid named Ted Williams. “The… boy is only seventeen, but he’s got the most beautiful swing I ever saw,” Collins told Cronin.36
Ted played sparingly the rest of the month, but on August 31, in a benefit game at Lane Field against a local semipro All-Star team, he hit a home run, a double, and two singles.37
The next day, the regular left fielder, Ivey “Chick” Shiver, suddenly announced he was quitting the team—and baseball—to take a job as a football coach at Georgia College. Shellenback decided to have Ted take Shiver’s place for the remaining two weeks of the season.
Williams, who had just turned eighteen, responded, hitting .305 the rest of the way, with six doubles and two triples. He played with exuberance. His hat often fell off as he ran the bases, and he found it hard to conceal his delight whenever he tagged one. “When he connected, you could count his teeth from second base,” wrote Monroe McConnell in the Union.38
Ted was still raw, but he was improving. Though the Padres were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs against the Oakland Oaks, Ted hit his first professional home run in that series—on September 15, off Wee Willie Ludolph, who was also known as the Oakland Ghost. Williams’s average for the season was .271. He had appeared in forty-two games and got twenty-nine hits in 107 times up.39 He wasn’t selective enough at the plate, Shellenback thought—too eager to swing at whatever was thrown up there to him, especially the soft stuff favored by some of the older Coast League pitchers who’d lost their fastball but could still change speeds effectively.
Herm “Old Folks” Pillette, an archetypical junkballer for the Padres who was known for starting the day with a half cup of whiskey, gave Ted a valuable lesson on how to hit pitchers of his ilk: wait for the off-speed pitch, then tee off on it.
“Here is where being surrounded by older players helped me,” Ted said.40 “The opposition pitchers, they were starting to slow up on me a lot, a little slow ball and I’d be out in front and hit a ground ball or something. I just wasn’t waiting on the ball. So Herm Pillette, who pitched for the Detroit Tigers in the 1920s—he was on the Padres, he said, ‘What are they throwing you?’
“I said, ‘Some little crappy curve ball.’
“He said, ‘Why don’t you go up there and kind of lay for one of those, just kind of lay for it a little bit?’
“Well, I did—and I got a line drive to right field. I said, ‘Hell, if this keeps up…’ Pillette got me thinking at a young age about having an idea about what the pitcher was throwing. Then once you hit one of those slow curves the pitchers say, ‘I can’t do that anymore.’ So you get the pitch you want. I could never forget what happened when it went right for me. Like for example, looking for the curve ball, here it comes. Bang!”
It wasn’t just the tip from Pillette; it was Ted’s hunger to receive it that was striking. He had an innate baseball curiosity. He was constantly pumping pitchers about what they would throw in certain situations and pressing other hitters about their experiences against a given pitcher. He would absorb the information, process it, then use it.
Durst and other Padres were amazed by Ted’s ability to read pitchers’ tendencies. After a few times around the league, Durst recalled, “Ted was predicting what so and so would throw in a given situation: ‘He’ll get two and nothing on me, and then he’ll throw me a slow, inside curve and I’ll murder it.’ Here was a kid just out of high school telling us things like that. He wasn’t bragging. He was thinking out loud.”41
Reflecting back years later, Durst concluded that “Ted was the greatest hitter I ever saw and that includes Babe Ruth. When it came to day in and day out hitting, I’d have to take Ted. I never saw anyone who had the memory of every pitch a pitcher threw like Ted did.… He’d say, ‘Next time I hit against that guy, I’ll knock the ball out of the park,’ and sure enough he would.”42
Besides Durst and Doerr, Ted also learned from a variety of other Padres, including pitchers Wally “Preacher” Hebert, Bud Tuttle, and Howard Craghead, first baseman George McDonald, second baseman Jimmie Reese, shortstop Myatt, outfielder Vince DiMaggio (Joe’s older brother), and catcher George Detore. They retained vintage Ted stories for the rest of their lives, many of which were mined by San Diego writer Bill Swank for his colorful oral history of the Padres, Echoes from Lane Field.
Tuttle, who was Ted’s roommate in 1937, was something of a Renaissance man. He would go on to dabble in sportswriting, serve as a publicity agent for Jayne Mansfield, and crank out scores of forgettable books and screenplays. He recalled that on train trips to Portland and Seattle, the train would stop in the small Northern California town of Dunsmuir for fifteen minutes. “There was a lady on the platform with a small wagon. She had home-made ice cream and everyone wanted some. As we pulled into the depot, Ted would climb out the window and drop to the platform and get ice cream for both of us. It sure was good on hot days as there was no air conditioning on the train at that time.”43
Williams introduced Tuttle to his father after Sam went to see the Padres play when they came through Sacramento in 1937. Sam was still based in the state capital then for his job as a jail inspector. “He was proud of Ted,” Tuttle said. “He was thrilled. Ted hit a home run when he was there at the Sacramento stadium and oh, his father was just so happy and he reached clear over the fence to shake Ted’s hand when
he came by afterward.”44
Howard Craghead, who was nicknamed the Professor because he had a degree in philosophy from Fresno State College, once asked Ted what pitches he had difficulty with. “Can’t tell the difference,” Ted said. “They all look like they are hanging out in front of the plate on a string.”45
“[Ted] had the prettiest swing of anybody I ever saw!” said George McDonald, who had dropped out of high school in 1935 with Bobby Doerr to join the Hollywood Stars. “When I saw him later, when he was hitting .400, his swing wasn’t as pretty as when he was young.”46*
Jimmie Reese, who played for the New York Yankees in 1930 and 1931 and roomed with Babe Ruth, remembered that Ted enjoyed his own reflection. “Ted Williams used to stand in front of a mirror in the clubhouse and take different poses with the bat. He went to take those poses and everybody said, ‘Look at what that busher’s doing.’ But it turned out he wasn’t crazy.”47
Doerr also recalled the shadow hitting and that once, while demonstrating his technique on the slippery marble floor of a San Francisco hotel lobby, Ted swung so hard he fell.48
George Detore, the Padres catcher in 1937, taught Ted some of the rites of the game and a lesson about team play. Once, in Portland, Ted was outraged when Padres pitcher Dick Ward bowled over the Beavers catcher on a play at the plate, hurting him. Ted shouted at his teammate Ward: “That’s just dirty baseball and you ought to have your block knocked off! I won’t stand for that kind of work!”
“You won’t stand for it?’ piped up someone on the Padres bench. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ll show you right now,” replied Williams, the next man to bat, consumed with a need for fairness. “I’m going up there and strike out.”
Detore told Williams that if he did so, he shouldn’t “come back to the bench; just put on your street clothes and go home.”
With a different sort of fairness on his mind, the Portland pitcher tried to bean Ted, who ducked out of the way. Williams shouted at the pitcher, asking him why he did it, since Ted hadn’t done anything. The pitcher said he’d do it again, which he did. Ted dusted himself off and knocked the next pitch more than four hundred feet over the right-field fence. Back on the bench, Ted asked again why he’d been thrown at if he didn’t do anything wrong.
Detore explained: “Oh yes, you did. You were wearing the same uniform as the rest of us. Whenever one of us gets in a jam, you’re involved, remember that. And when you get into trouble, we’re all for you. The uniform’s the thing, kid. You can’t get out of it when a quarrel starts. Always keep that in mind.”49
As the new year began, Padres beat writer Earl Keller raised expectations for Ted in the 1937 season. “If you want to make a little extra money to put in the old sock,” he wrote, “bet it on young Teddy Williams to be taken as the outstanding major league prospect after this year’s Pacific Coast League baseball race is finished.… There wasn’t a manager who didn’t say Williams had the makings of a great slugger after they saw him in action the later part of the 1936 season.”
Keller interviewed May Williams for his story, and May reported that “Teddy is drinking more milk and putting on weight steadily. Every night after he comes home from school he gets a bat and practices swinging for 30 or 40 minutes. The boy really is confident of making good and we all are sure he will go places.”50
May’s reference to her son coming home from school served as a reminder that Ted really was still a boy who hadn’t graduated from Hoover High yet. After the 1936 season ended, as his Padres teammates—all grown men—fanned out to various jobs, Ted had headed back to Hoover to finish up his final semester.
Before the ’37 season began, the Padres sold Vince DiMaggio to the Boston Bees, the National League franchise that would soon be renamed the Braves and that ran a distant second to the Red Sox in the hearts and minds of Bostonians. The DiMaggio move might have been expected to make Ted a lock as a starter, but Frank Shellenback decided to stick to his go-slow program for Williams. So Ted began the year on the bench, behind Cedric Durst, Tommy Thompson, and Hal Patchett.
Ted grew restless and bored. At a game in Seattle early in the year, he noticed in the clubhouse that the visiting batboy had a kit to blow bubbles through a pipe. Languishing in the dugout, Ted asked the batboy for his kit. Together, they soaped up some water in a bucket and Ted began blowing huge bubbles onto the field. When the umpires finally determined the source of the distraction, Ted was tossed from the game.51
Lefty O’Doul, who had touted Williams to Earl Keller, helped get Ted’s confidence back on track. O’Doul, who had hit .398 with thirty-two home runs for the 1929 Philadelphia Phillies, had been managing the Seals in his hometown of San Francisco since 1935. He’d sent Joe DiMaggio up to the Yankees, and by 1937, O’Doul had another DiMaggio on his team—Joe’s younger brother, Dominic. By 1940, Dominic would be playing center field for the Red Sox alongside Ted, and the two would become lifelong friends.
O’Doul was known as a great teacher of the game, especially of hitting. He’d seen enough of Williams in 1936 to be impressed, and now, early in 1937, at Lane Field against the Padres, O’Doul left the visitors’ dugout to get a close look at Ted taking batting practice.
Dominic DiMaggio remembered the moment clearly more than sixty years later. “Lefty O’Doul left our dugout in San Diego,” DiMaggio said.52 “He was our manager, who I had a great deal of admiration for. Ted was batting in batting practice. He said, ‘I’ve got to talk to this kid.’ He ran off to the other side and waited for Ted to get through hitting. He took more than his allotted swings, and when he got through, Lefty called him over and talked to him, said something to him. Then of course [he] came back to the dugout.
“That was a no-no. You didn’t fraternize with the opposition. Especially the manager with the opposing player. He came back in the dugout and all the old-timers were like, ‘What the heck is this all about, Lefty? What did you say to the kid?’ He said, ‘I just told him to never let anyone ever fool around with his batting style.’ He said, ‘He’s going to be one of the greatest hitters we’ve ever seen.’ That was it.”
O’Doul kept up his drumbeat for Ted. When the Padres visited San Francisco, and he was mired in a slump, Ted picked up a paper at the Pickwick Hotel. Its headline declared, WILLIAMS GREATEST HITTER SINCE WANER, Ted recalled in his book. “At first I wondered who the Williams was that it was talking about.”53
He later asked O’Doul if he had been the one who’d spoken to the reporter.54 “ ‘Yes,’ he told me, ‘I said it, and I meant it, kid. You’re the tops. You’re headed straight for the majors and you’re going to knock ’em dead up there with your hitting. That goes, though, only if you stick to your present style. Don’t let anybody change your stance and your swing. Attempts will be made to, you can bet on that. Ignore them.… Just go on the way you are.’ ” Ted told the Boston Evening American’s Cashman that until that point, he felt he had ability but lacked confidence. “I might never have acquired it, either, if O’Doul hadn’t given it to me.”
Through eighty games into late June, Ted was playing irregularly, batting .259 with two homers in just 116 at bats. Then he went on a tear, cracking six home runs over the next week, including an inside-the-park job on June 22 to the deepest part of Lane’s vast center field. By July, Shellenback had made him a regular, and Ted continued to hit. By the end of August, he had seventeen homers and was batting .283.55
Then on August 31, with O’Doul and his Seals in town, Ted hit a prodigious home run in the eighth inning to break open a tight game and lead the Padres to a 4–2 win. Ted’s homer “fairly screamed” as it went over the right-field fence, recalled the Union’s Monroe McConnell.56 Then “the ball cleared the railroad tracks beyond bordering Pacific Highway, took one hop into a railway freight house, and was retrieved by workmen who ran far back into the shed and indulged in a wild scramble to retrieve it. There have been some mighty homers at Lane Field since, but none in the memory of veteran
scribes that has even closely approached that one for sheer power.” After the game, O’Doul told Earl Keller of the Tribune he’d like to have Ted play for him next year. “That kid is the best prospect this circuit has seen since Joe DiMaggio,” O’Doul said. “I would like to be his teacher.”57 The next day, Ted hit two more homers as the Padres beat the Seals again, 10–5.58
The Padres finished the year strong, sweeping Sacramento and Portland in the playoffs to win the Pacific Coast League championship. Williams performed solidly in the eight playoff games, batting .333, including a double, a triple, and a home run. He was the hitting star in three of the games. Ted finished the regular season with 23 home runs, 98 runs batted in, and an average of .291. He appeared in 138 of the Padres’ 178 games, collecting 132 hits in 454 at bats. Somewhat predictably, his fielding percentage was the lowest among Coast League outfielders, with seven errors, 213 putouts, and ten assists.
Eddie Collins of the Red Sox had been monitoring Ted’s progress closely during the 1937 season, along with Billy Evans, who had been appointed Boston’s farm director the previous year. Twice during the summer of ’37, Collins had called Lane and asked if he would be willing to deal Ted. Lane had put him off each time, reassuring Collins that he would have the chance to match any bid and that they’d be in touch after the season. Now Williams’s strong showing and promise were generating interest from about twelve major-league teams. The teams’ scrutiny of Ted and courting of Lane came to a head at the midwinter baseball meetings in early December at the Palmer House in Chicago.
Detroit was especially interested, as were Ted’s old hero, Bill Terry of the New York Giants, and Casey Stengel, who was going to be manager of the Boston Bees the following season, 1938. Stengel had been out of baseball in ’37, but had watched many Coast League games from his home in California and was high on Ted. He came up with an offer of cash and several minor-league players for Williams that Frank Shellenback liked, and the Padres manager urged Lane to do the deal with Stengel and the Bees. At that point several other teams also made offers, but Lane told all interested parties that he had promised Collins and the Red Sox the right of first refusal.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 11