The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  The Boston Globe reported at the time that one of the teams chasing Williams was the Yankees.59 That wasn’t surprising, given Bill Essick’s pursuit of Ted while he was still in high school. But another Yankees scout, Joe Devine, had weighed in with a negative report on Ted earlier in the 1937 season. “Williams shows possibilities as a hitter, has good power,” Devine wrote, while going on to say that Ted “is a very slow lad, not a good outfielder now, just an average arm. There is no doubt Williams will never be fast enough to get by in the majors as an outfielder. His best feature now is that he shows promise as a hitter, but good pitching so far has stopped him cold.”60

  Lane sent word to Collins, who was in Chicago at the meetings, that he was ready to go ahead with the deal for Ted.61 But Collins then ran into a problem with Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Having spent millions of dollars acquiring talent like Joe Cronin and Jimmie Foxx only to fall well short of winning a pennant, Yawkey had decided to change tactics and play for the long haul by developing a first-rate farm system. He said he was through buying other teams’ players and wanted to develop his own. Collins had agreed with this decision in principle. So when Collins now told him he wanted to buy Williams, Yawkey balked, pointing out that this would violate the new policy they were trying to implement. Collins argued that they had to make an exception in this case: Williams was that good. But Yawkey continued his objections, not so much because of the money but because they would immediately be breaking their new policy. Collins went to the mat, stressing that he himself had discovered Williams and tracked him. They weren’t relying on the opinion of some unknown scout here.

  Finally, Yawkey yielded—and apparently not a minute too soon. Convincing Yawkey had taken quite a long time, and Lane had grown impatient at not hearing back from Collins. According to writer Arthur Sampson’s 1950 account, Lane decided he’d waited long enough—he’d satisfied his promise to give the Red Sox an opportunity to compete for Williams and they hadn’t responded in time. Lane had started to leave the lobby of the hotel to go upstairs to meet another team interested in Ted when Collins stepped off the elevator saying he was ready to deal. If Collins could give him $25,000 and come up with a batch of players acceptable to Shellenback, he could have Ted, Lane said.

  Collins realized the cash would be no problem, but the Red Sox didn’t have any decent minor leaguers at the time. That was why they were going to revamp their entire farm system. So he had Billy Evans quickly acquire the rights to four solid Double-A players who were agreeable to Shellenback—Dom Dallessandro, Al Niemiec, Bunny Griffiths, and Spencer Harris. The deal was apparently finalized at 11:45 p.m. on December 6, just before a midnight deadline that had been imposed by Lane.62

  The Red Sox were thrilled and thought they’d stolen Ted. “One thing I am sure of,” said Evans, a former major-league umpire, in a 1954 interview with the Boston Globe: “Williams was the least expensive great baseball player I ever brought into the majors.… We knew it was a steal and would have gone much higher. Anywhere up to $100,000, if necessary. But we didn’t have to. We had friendly relations with the San Diego owner, and he was an honorable man.… The day we clinched the deal we knew for sure we had the best prospect of the era.”63 Later, Joe Cashman reported that Lane had turned down more money for Ted from other clubs.64 The Tigers, he wrote, had offered $30,000 and the Giants $31,000. Moreover, Collins told Cashman, he had paid Lane more for Bobby Doerr than for Ted, “and Dom DiMaggio cost us far more than Teddy and Bobby together.”

  Boston’s acquisition of Williams was announced on December 7, 1937, and Ted himself was given the news by Earl Keller. He was stunned, but provided the Tribune a politic quote: “Go on, you’re kidding me. Boy, this is the happiest day of my life. If the Red Sox give me a chance, I’ll make good.”65

  But privately, he would write years later in his book, “I was sick. The Red Sox didn’t mean a thing to me. A fifth, sixth-place club, the farthest from San Diego I could go. I sure wasn’t a Boston fan. I might have been a New York Giant fan, with Mel Ott and Arky Vaughan and those guys, or a Detroit fan, with Greenberg and Charley [sic] Gehringer, but Boston. Then Eddie Collins came to visit us.”66

  The Williamses steered Collins to the only decent chair in their living room, an old mohair number that, as Ted recalled, had a hole in it through which the springs were visible. (They covered the hole with a five-cent towel.) Collins’s mission was to sell the Red Sox to Ted and his family and to get his name on a contract, which would have to also be approved by his mother and father, since the player was still a minor. Collins said the Sox were on the rise. They’d been spending a lot of Tom Yawkey’s money to build a team. They had Cronin, Foxx, Lefty Grove, Doc Cramer, Joe Vosmik, and now young Bobby Doerr at second. Collins said he was prepared to offer Ted a two-year contract: $3,000 for the first year, $4,500 for the second.

  “I thought to myself, ‘Gee, he wants to give me all this money, and here I’m only hitting .290, and I could do so much better,” Ted wrote. “What if I’d been hitting .320?”67 Still, he wanted to leap at the offer and sign immediately. But Sam Williams began haggling and insisting on a bonus for him and May, at which point an embarrassed Ted left the room.

  May and Sam demanded that $5,000 of the $25,000 the Red Sox were paying Lane be given to them. They said that when Ted first signed with the Padres, Lane had promised them that they would receive a portion of whatever price the boy might fetch from a big-league team. Collins realized this wasn’t his fight. He knew nothing of what Lane may have promised the couple, so he left San Diego with Ted unsigned.

  Lane took the position that he had promised the Williamses nothing, and wasn’t going to give them a penny of the $25,000 now. So May and Sam decided that they were effectively free agents who could peddle their son to other interested teams.

  As Collins told Joe Cashman in 1941, “Ted’s mother and father thought my offer was fair enough, but before accepting, they wanted to make sure they couldn’t do better. You see, they had talked with the Tiger, Yankee and Cardinal scouts before Ted joined San Diego, and they thought those clubs could still bid for their son.”68 But when the Williamses began entering into discussions with other teams, and when some of those clubs prepared to try to sign Ted, American League president Will Harridge and baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis learned of the moves and grew alarmed. If another team were allowed to sign Williams after the Red Sox had duly acquired his rights from the Padres, it would be a fundamental challenge to the game’s bedrock reserve clause. Landis and Harridge ordered Collins to go back to San Diego and do whatever it took to get Williams signed, posthaste. “Don’t come back without the signed contract, no matter what it costs you,” Landis told Collins.69

  Cashman said Collins went back to San Diego and saw Ted and May. Ted was again quite willing to sign, but May persisted in her demands and said her husband had to be satisfied as well. Sam was still living in Sacramento, doing his stint as a jail inspector, so Collins located him for a further to-and-fro.

  But by mid-February of 1938, the issue was still unresolved, and Ted was scheduled to report to Sarasota, Florida, for spring training with the Red Sox in early March.

  On February 15, May raised the stakes, bluntly telling reporters that there was no chance of Ted signing until Lane came through with a $5,000 check for her and Sam.70 After another fruitless meeting with May, Collins emerged to tell the writers gathered outside the Williams house that the “next move is up to the Williams family.… I hate to think that Williams’s career might be ruined because of money. The lad has a brilliant future and, in my opinion, he’s one in a million. He has all the chance in the world to become a great player and I know he will. I have done all I can and I feel everything will turn out okay.”

  Two days later, the impasse was resolved when Collins, under increasing pressure from Landis and Harridge, agreed to pay the Williamses $2,500—from Red Sox funds.71

  All sides seemed satisfied. Lane could say he stood fast and didn’t
have to give up a piece of his payment for Williams, while May and Sam, their marriage dissolving, could nonetheless say they’d received a reasonable compromise. They didn’t care where the money came from. As for the Red Sox, they got their man.

  Ted signed his two-year contract worth $3,000 and $4,500 and went off to chase his dream.

  3

  Sarasota and Minneapolis

  In 1938, the Boston Red Sox spring training headquarters was in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. After Ted signed his contract, Eddie Collins called Bobby Doerr and asked him to chaperone Williams across the country.

  Doerr had played infrequently in Boston the previous season but was projected as the starting second baseman that year. Not even twenty yet, Doerr was mature beyond his years, especially compared to Williams. The two had gotten to know each other on the ’36 Padres. Ted had never been east of California before, and Collins thought it advisable that the voluble rookie have a temperate traveling companion on the long transcontinental train ride. But for several days in late February and early March, just before Doerr and Williams were to meet and embark on their trip, torrential rains swept through Southern California. Bridges and railroads were washed away, lakes formed in the Mojave Desert, communications were cut, more than two hundred people were killed, and property damage exceeded $50 million.

  With the phone lines down, Ted was able to find a ham radio operator in San Diego who contacted a colleague in Los Angeles near Doerr’s home. Bobby decided they would have to go their separate ways and hope for the best. “I said, ‘You go the best way you can go, and I’ll go the best way I can.’ We couldn’t do more about it,” Doerr recalled.1

  Doerr set out on a bus from Los Angeles to the desert city of Indio, in California’s Coachella Valley, and there boarded a train bound for El Paso. Also traveling with Doerr was Max West, a power-hitting outfielder who was joining the Boston Bees as a rookie, and Babe Herman, the former Brooklyn Dodger who had hit .393 in 1930 and whom Ted, while still in high school, had watched take batting practice.

  Carrying $200 he had borrowed from a bank, Williams was able to get out of San Diego by train, and his first connection was in El Paso, where he chanced to meet Doerr, Herman, and West.2

  “We rode together on the train the rest of the way,” Doerr remembered. “We were back at one end. Ted was pumping Babe Herman on hitting. He was so loud that the women at the other end of the car kept telling the conductor to tell him to be quiet. But that didn’t stop Ted. He was swinging pillows for a bat and going on and on talking.”

  When Ted arrived at Payne Park in Sarasota, he was greeted by Johnny Orlando, the irascible Red Sox equipment manager, better known, in the parlance of the day, as the “clubhouse boy.” Orlando had been working in the team’s clubhouse since 1926 and would quickly hitch his surly star to Williams’s, becoming, over the years, Ted’s manservant. Orlando would always remember Ted’s first appearance, the day he gave the rookie his most enduring nickname: the Kid.

  “Sarasota in 1938 was a hayshaker town,” Orlando told the Boston Evening American in 1960. “You could shoot a cannon up Main Street from Five Corners and you’d only hit maybe a rattlesnake. The Ringling Brothers winter training headquarters were almost as big a tourist attraction as the Red Sox in spring training. That is, until 1938 when Ted Williams arrived for his first tryout in the majors.”3

  When Ted walked in, Orlando said, “he’s got a red sweater on, his shirt open at the neck, a raggedy duffle bag. His hair’s on end like he was attached to an electric switch. If anyone ever wanted a picture of a raw rookie, this was the time to take the shot.”

  “Where you been, Kid?” Orlando asked him. Ted mumbled something about getting tied up in New Orleans. It was the morning of March 9. Ted and Doerr had arrived the night before, and though many of the players had been in camp for a week, team officials of course knew of the flood in California, and May Williams had wired ahead of her son’s progress. Also taking the field that day was another heralded rookie, third baseman Jim Tabor of the University of Alabama. Some regulars were still trickling in.

  Orlando said he gave Williams the biggest shirt and pair of pants he had and took him out to the field. But the shirt wasn’t long enough to tuck in his pants. Manager Joe Cronin, sitting in the first-base stands, saw him walk onto the field and yelled: “Hey, busher, this is the big leagues; stick your shirttail in!”

  Ted seethed and asked Orlando, “Who’s the wise guy up there?”

  “That’s Joe Cronin, your manager, Kid.”

  Later that morning, Doerr introduced Ted to Cronin. “I said, ‘Joe, I want you to meet Ted Williams,’ ” Doerr remembered. “Ted’s response was, ‘Hiya, sport.’

  “He was excited, and it just popped out. I thought at the time that would give him his ticket to Minneapolis.” The Minneapolis Millers were the Red Sox’s top farm team in the American Association.

  Cronin, then only thirty-one, was nonetheless starting his sixth season as a player-manager. At the time considered one of baseball’s premier shortstops, he had broken in with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1926 and, in 1928, been traded to the Washington Senators, where he blossomed, hitting .346 with 126 RBIs by 1930. In 1933, Washington owner Clark Griffith named Cronin his player-manager at the age of twenty-six, and Cronin had led the team to the World Series.

  In 1934, Griffith introduced his niece, a team secretary named Mildred Robertson, to Cronin, and they married later that year. But at the end of the 1934 season, Griffith stunned baseball, and presumably his own family, by selling his new nephew-in-law to the Red Sox for the then-unheard-of sum of $225,000. A Hall of Famer and lifetime .301 hitter, Cronin would remain the Red Sox’s regular shortstop until 1942, when he took himself out of the every-day lineup to make way for Johnny Pesky. He remained the manager until 1948, when he joined the front office and succeeded Eddie Collins as general manager. In 1959 he was named president of the American League and served in that capacity until 1973.

  Back in Sarasota, at the end of the morning workout, Cronin called Ted over and told him to step into the batting cage and hit. He hadn’t planned to have Williams bat until the afternoon, but five movie newsreel companies were in camp shooting footage, and they asked to see the rookie hit, so the manager obliged.

  Cronin stood behind the cage and watched as Herb Pennock, his pitching coach, got ready to pitch to Williams. Pennock, who had been a Hall of Fame lefty over twenty-three seasons for the Philadelphia Athletics, Red Sox, and Yankees, told Ted not to hit any balls back through the box.

  “I’ll try and pull ’em,” the Kid said.

  “Yes, but where’s your hat?” one of the newsreel photographers called out.4 He didn’t want to look like a bush leaguer in the newsreels, did he? Strangely, Williams had stepped into the box without his cap, the baseball equivalent of being half naked.

  As he yanked the folded hat from his hip pocket and put it on, a chastened Ted tried to recover with a wisecrack: “Is this all it takes to be a big leaguer? And I thought it was going to be tough.”5

  “Just another college boy,” chirped the catcher, Moe Berg, wryly. The irony and humor of this remark by Berg—a true baseball anomaly who was a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and spoke a dozen languages fluently—was perhaps lost on Ted, who stepped out of the box, glared at Berg, and replied: “Looks like there’s at least one agitator in camp.6 How are ya, Adge?”7 Thereafter Williams would refer to the erudite Berg, who would soon become an acclaimed spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, as Adge whenever he saw him.

  Standing next to Cronin behind the cage was Jack Malaney, Red Sox beat writer for the Boston Post. Cronin and Malaney were friendly, and the reporter would later work under Cronin as the team’s PR man.

  Cronin noticed that most everyone on the field had stopped what they were doing and turned to watch as Williams prepared to hit. Sensing the drama of the moment, Cronin, who had a good rapport with most of the writers and was attuned to their needs
, dictated a mock lead paragraph for Malaney’s morning story:

  “A hush went over the ballpark at the Red Sox training camp this morning. All eyes were focused on one man. Even the veterans stopped and gazed and the photographers got ready to shoot. For Ted Williams, the Pacific Coast phenom, was about to make his first appearance at the bat in a big league uniform.”8

  Malaney used Cronin’s lead verbatim in the March 10 Post, between quotation marks, explaining in the second paragraph that Cronin had then told him: “Now that’s the way I would start my story tonight if I were writing it.” If Malaney was having fun and not playing it straight, the headline over his piece picked up the lead directly, with no apparent irony: WILLIAMS HUSHES WHOLE SOX CAMP, it said. PACIFIC COAST PHENOM CYNOSURE OF ALL EYES IN SARASOTA DEBUT—LONG, LOOSE SWINGER.

  Malaney wrote that in reality, “Skipper Joe” was, in fact, as interested as everybody else in watching the Kid hit, and that “it did seem as if everybody hushed up for the occasion.… Williams did not disappoint. Immediately he smashed three solid blows into right field, one of them a terrific line drive over first base, and another a long fly to right. The young man is to be colorful. He was that as soon as he got into uniform. He is a long string bean with a baby face. He handles the bat in toothpick fashion. He is a big, loose swinger, but he whips that bat. He is a pop-off kid, which the crowd soon discovered.”

  After the morning workout, Ted went into the clubhouse and asked no one in particular: “Now what do we do?” Someone told him to get a sandwich and a bottle of milk, then there would be another workout.