Williams wasn’t selected for the All-Star team—the only time in his career that would happen. He said he wasn’t sore at the snub, noting that when the team was picked, his average was still under .300. He would use the break to go visit his aunts and uncle in nearby Westchester County, then return to New York to watch the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium from Tom Yawkey’s box, next to the American League dugout.
By mid-July, Ted had worked his average up above .310, and he was feeling frisky. Before a game on July 17 in Detroit, he walked over to Tigers starter Bobo Newsom, one of the league’s leading pitchers, as he was warming up and told him: “I’m going to give you a going over!”51
“Why, you rookie!” snorted Newsom. “You couldn’t hit me with a banjo.”
His first time up, Ted homered and later touched Newsom for a double. When he reached second base, Ted looked in at the pitcher and wagged his fingers, as if to say he’d been foolish to doubt him. “Fresh busher!” said Bobo afterward in the clubhouse.
A few days later, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Williams, after striking out, threw a mini-tantrum, kicking the ground, heaving his bat, and punching the air. As the White Sox fans hooted at him, Ted doffed his cap and curtsied extravagantly. Seeing home plate umpire Bill Summers whip off his mask and walk briskly toward Ted, Cronin rushed from the dugout and, trying to save his star from being run from the game, screamed at him: “Busher!” followed by a string of other invectives. The dressing-down may have averted an ejection, but didn’t seem to have much effect curbing Ted’s erratic behavior. Later in the game, after another disappointment, Ted punted his glove some fifty feet in the air while walking out to his position in right field. After the game, Williams told Boston Evening American columnist Austen Lake that Cronin had taken him aside and said, “Kid, don’t get in uproars. It’ll sour the fans on you. They’ll think you’re a crackpot and start to hoot you. Right now, everybody’s pulling for you. Keep ’em on your side.” Ted said Cronin was right, “but shucks, I was only funnin’!”
Of course this sort of exuberance, color, and candor was music to the press’s ears. Before the first game of a doubleheader on July 18 in Chicago, Ted had told the Globe’s Hy Hurwitz, “I’ve got to get a home run out there today. It’s the only western city that I haven’t hit for the circuit so far.” After belting a curveball from Clint Brown more than four hundred feet and collecting five other hits in the two games, Ted said: “That leaves only New York and Washington to conquer and I’ll take care of those towns on my next visit.”52
Similarly, the Globe’s Gerry Moore had asked Williams earlier that month in Philadelphia if it wasn’t about time for him to hit his first homer at Shibe Park. “You’re darn right!” he replied. “I’ll hit one for you today.”53 He did, and as he crossed the plate, he waved to Moore in the press box.
He went on to give Austen Lake a series of candid predictions, including that he’d lead the league in hitting and home runs before 1942 and that he was a “cinch” to hit three homers before the end of that very week. He said his greatest satisfaction thus far was the day earlier in July when Cronin installed him as the cleanup hitter—behind Foxx. Lake said that Ted was relishing the attention he was getting from reporters, autograph seekers, and photographers and was gracious to all of them, especially the latter. He was “posturing interminably for the picture men. He loves it!” Lake wrote. Ted admitted as much. “Boy! Maybe this doesn’t give me a kick. I’m a kid from the haystack circuit. I never had nothin’ like this!”54
It was true that Williams was often willing to go to great lengths for photographers, especially those who worked for the Hearst-owned Daily Record. Like any tabloid worth its salt, the Record knew how to play a good picture, and when it got one, would offer it up to the rest of the Hearst papers around the country. On May 22, during yet another bout with the grippe, Ted posed for a hokey but endearing page 1 Record shot in which he was fishing from a goldfish bowl while lying in his bed. Three months later, there was Ted on the cover of the August 4 Record, dressed as a latter-day Huck Finn: barefoot, wearing overalls over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, standing along the banks of the Charles River with a bamboo fishing rod over his right shoulder, waving happily. He had on a straw hat and had tied a red handkerchief around his neck. Inside the paper, he was shown sitting on the grass, waiting for an imaginary fish to bite while sucking on a piece of honeysuckle.
“We like Williams because he’s regular,” said Record photographer Bruce McLean in a copy block that accompanied his Huck Finn photos. “I’m telling you, you just can’t help liking that kid, and every photographer will tell you the same thing.”55
By the beginning of August, Ted was on a tear, hitting .327 with 16 homers and 85 RBIs, as was Jimmie Foxx, who was at .358 with 24 homers and 74 RBIs. The press began to characterize the two sluggers as a mini Murderers’ Row who helped and admired one another while waging a friendly competition to see who could hit the longest homers and knock in the most runs.
Ted accorded Foxx his proper deference and respect. “I’m lucky to be working with such a real guy as Jimmie Foxx,” he said. “You know, a lot of people ask me who I want to pattern myself after. Well, when it comes to hitting a baseball, Jim is the one man I want to follow, but even if he never hit a baseball, he’d still be the one I’d like to pattern myself after as a man.”56
Foxx, for his part, said he had been helped by having Williams hit behind him so that pitchers were forced to throw to him.57 Ted’s effervescence amused Double X, particularly when the rookie engaged in an exaggerated hand-pumping routine when greeting him after a home run. Williams was also giving him motivation, lest Foxx get outhit by someone he affectionately referred to as a “fresh busher.”
Though Ted tolerated that comment coming from Foxx, by now he was getting defensive at any implication that he was still a minor leaguer. His record had proved otherwise, he thought. “I’m not a busher, and I hate that word,” he told the Associated Press for an early August feature.58
“Sure, you’re a busher,” said third baseman Jim Tabor, overhearing the conversation. “What else are you?”
“I’m not a busher!” Ted screamed back. “I’m a big league ballplayer and don’t call me a busher.”
He took more kindly to another traditional baseball term. “Screwball?” He smiled. “Sure, they call me a screwball and say I make wisecracks. But let me tell you, I may be a screwball to some people and I do have a lot of fun. But when I get out there on the field, I’m plenty serious.”
The same day that story appeared, August 8, Williams demonstrated why people were still using both words to describe him.
After popping up with the bases loaded in a 9–2 win over the Athletics at Fenway Park, Ted loped down the line and had only barely reached first base when the ball dropped between two fielders. He should have been on second, so Cronin sent in a pinch runner and benched him. John Gillooly wrote in the Record that Williams’s baserunning apathy was the result of being “obviously stung” that Foxx had taken over the lead in their RBI race following two home runs earlier in the game.59 But Gerry Moore of the Globe reported that Cronin and Ted had a long talk after the benching, during which Cronin learned that “some outside circumstance of a private nature” had been the cause of his disinterested and lax play.60*
Ted made amends in a doubleheader against the Athletics the next day. In the first game, he showed a sense of humor, sprinting to first base after he bounced a ball back to the pitcher. The crowd loved it, laughing and cheering. Then he won the second game with a ninth-inning bases-loaded single off the left-field wall to drive in two runs for a 6–5 come-from-behind victory.
One issue that vexed Williams and that he decided to speak out about was Fenway Park’s long right field, which he felt was unfairly cutting down on his home runs. He had a point, especially when comparing Fenway to his favorite American League destinations—Yankee Stadium, which was 314 feet down the line in right, and Briggs Stadium
in Detroit, which was 325 feet. But the way he argued his case made it appear that he was more interested in his own well-being than the team’s.
“I should be doing a lot better and I know I would be if I played my home games in another park except Fenway,” Ted told Hy Hurwitz of the Globe. “Why, I’m really delighted to leave Boston, even though the fans, the management, and everybody has just been wonderful to me. Because now that I’m going on the road, I’ll really start hitting that ball.
“I feel that I have a chance to be one of the greatest hitters in baseball, but I won’t unless they shorten right field at Fenway Park. Why, I wanted to be the greatest first year player in the game and I believe I’d have done it easily if I didn’t have to play 77 games in Boston.”61 Ted went on to name the great sluggers and said they were all helped by favorable home fences. He reiterated that he didn’t want to leave Boston, but “I’m the guy that counts most to myself. I’m in this game to make a lot of dough and I want to get it fast. The best way for me to get it is to hit more home runs and drive in more runs than anyone in the game. I won’t do it at Fenway Park if the fence stays out as far as it is now.”
Ted said a shorter fence would add twenty to twenty-five points to his average. He wanted to beat Joe DiMaggio’s rookie records, and said that Fenway was tougher for him than Yankee Stadium was for DiMaggio. If they moved the fence in twenty-five feet, Ted concluded, he’d be “crazy” to want to play for anyone else but Boston.
Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey loved Williams and delighted in needling him or otherwise horsing around with his young star. In a July game at Detroit, Yawkey had stationed himself in the right-field stands, and, masquerading as a Tigers fan, heckled Williams mercilessly. In the clubhouse after the game, Yawkey said to Ted, sympathetically: “That fellow in the bleachers was certainly riding you today.”62 “Yeah,” Ted snapped. “He was plenty loud, the cheap punk. I’d like to have busted him in the puss.” Yawkey broke up laughing and confessed. The following month in Cleveland, Williams had a room directly below Yawkey’s at the Lake Shore Hotel. Yawkey called out the window to him, waited until he looked up, then doused him with a pitcher of ice water.63
But understanding that in the matter of the right-field fence Williams was in no mood to joke, Yawkey agreed with his star and began to take steps to rectify the situation. On September 24, six days before the end of the season, the Red Sox made the official announcement on Fenway Park’s new dimensions: the distance down the right-field foul line would be shortened from 332 to 302 feet, and bull pens for the home and visiting teams would be moved from the sidelines to right and right-center field, thereby shortening the fence at the base of the right-field bleachers from 402 to 380 feet. It would still be a poke even at that range, especially as the new fence would angle out gradually as it approached the deepest point in the ballpark in right-center, 420 feet from home plate. In making the announcement, the Red Sox said nothing about the purpose of the change, but it was widely interpreted in the press as a move to help Ted. The newspapers quickly labeled the shortened right field “Williamsburg,” and Ted seemed to embrace the designation by gleefully posing for pictures with construction workers as they built the new fence in the off-season. “Boy, won’t I be glad to see those shorter fences!” he said following the announcement.
The team finished with a solid season, 89–62, but still ended up in second place, seventeen games behind the Yankees, who won 106 games and captured their fourth straight American League pennant. But the second-place finish took no luster off Ted’s season. He was Rookie of the Year by acclamation at a time when there was no such official award, finishing with an average of .327, 31 home runs (14 at Fenway, 17 on the road), and 145 RBIs. He thus achieved his goal of besting the great DiMaggio’s rookie line of .323, 29 homers, and 125 RBIs. Ted’s RBI total topped the American League, the first time a rookie had led in that category, and he finished fourth in the Most Valuable Player balloting behind DiMaggio, Bob Feller, and Foxx. His fourteen Fenway homers were eight more than all other left-handed batters combined hit in Boston.
The day before the season ended with a September 30 doubleheader against the Yankees in New York, Williams reflected on his year by writing to Earl Keller, the San Diego reporter who had covered him when he was in high school and with the Padres.
“Well Earl, I guess there’s no one in the world happier about me having a good year my first year than myself,” Ted wrote on Commodore Hotel stationery. “I hoped all last winter that I’d have this kind of a year. Really though, Earl, the big leagues is easier to play in than the minors, and I really see very little difference in the pitching. There’s a few, like Feller, Bridges, Ruffing, and a few others that are really tough, but outside of that, it’s the same. Everything is just a little better. A little better pitching, fielding, backgrounds. Even the steaks are better up here. Mr. Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, and Joe Cronin have treated me great. So have all the other fellows, especially Jim Foxx.… Boy, a fellow doesn’t realize what cities these are until he’s in them a while. Today I went to the top of the Empire State Building, and as soon as I looked over the hundred-odd stories, I just went ‘Oh!’ The cars look like flies. Well Earl, I guess I’ve popped off enough, so I’ll close. As ever, Ted.”
All in all, Williams felt no one could have had a better, happier first year in the big leagues than he did. “The fans in right field were yelling with me and for me all the time, really crowding in there to see what I would do next, and that year, nobody tipped his hat more than I did,” Ted wrote in his book.64 “I mean, right off my head, by the button. Nothing put on, nothing acted, just spontaneous.”
He also wrote he was “unaware, I suppose, that my troubles were just beginning.”
5
The Writers
There seemed no troubles on the horizon for Ted that winter of 1940, as spring training neared. He had a pleasant off-season, eschewing San Diego to return to Minneapolis and his minor-league glory days. He hunted and fished and stayed in baseball shape by working out at the University of Minnesota’s indoor cage.
He returned to Boston in January to have his tonsils taken out and later to attend the Boston baseball writers’ annual dinner. They had voted him the Red Sox’s Most Valuable Player of 1939, and, to everyone’s surprise, Williams showed up to receive his prize wearing a tuxedo. He spoke off-the-cuff and charmed the crowd. “Thank God I ain’t got any notes,” Ted said. “This is really the greatest and happiest honor I’ve ever achieved in my short baseball career.”1
Meeting later in his hotel room with a reporter, Ted fretted that he weighed only 187 pounds, and he showed off an array of muscle magazines he’d been consulting in an effort to get stronger. But he betrayed no lack of confidence about the upcoming season, and he fairly salivated over those shortened Fenway fences in “Williamsburg.”
“Last year I hit 14 home runs in this park,” Ted said. “This year, at a conservative estimate, and I mean really the most conservative one, I ought to hit at least 20. That fence has shortened the right field bounds by 20 feet, and at least 10 of the balls I hit last year missed being homers by just about that much, do you see what I mean?”2
Everyone did, and expectations were raised higher still on April 13, three days before the Red Sox were to open the season in Washington, when Ted put on a show in batting practice before a rained-out exhibition game against the Boston Braves at Fenway. He hit fifteen balls into Williamsburg, including seven of the first eight thrown to him, despite the cold, foul weather. Further underscoring the perception that the shortened fences were made for him and that he would take full advantage of the new dimensions, Williams posed after the workout for a Boston Sunday Advertiser photographer, pointing to right field. The photo ran prominently the next day under the headline HOWDY, BOSTON—THAT’S MY SPOT.3
Besides Williamsburg, there were two other significant changes for Ted in 1940. First, he would be playing left field, not right. The left fielder the previous year, Joe
Vosmik, had been sold to the Dodgers, and Dominic DiMaggio, Joe’s younger brother, had been acquired from the San Francisco Seals in the Coast League to play right field. Ted would have less ground to cover in left and a shorter distance to throw, the thinking went, and those keen eyes of his would be spared the harsh glare of the sun field.
Second, he would switch places with Jimmie Foxx in the batting order and hit third rather than fourth. Joe Cronin felt Foxx would protect Ted, since opponents would be less willing to pitch around Williams with Double X waiting on deck. But if Cronin thought this would help the team, Ted was thinking more about how the change would affect him: “Heck sakes, there goes my runs-batted-in championship,” he said when the move was announced.4
The comment foreshadowed a fundamental shift in Ted’s mood, and it was not long before the attractive, boyish charm and innocence that Williams had radiated all during the previous season—as well as that winter and spring, right through his batting-practice show on April 13—faded altogether and Williams unveiled his dark side.
He got off to a bad start, getting only two hits in five games the first week the Red Sox were home. After a few fans jeered him for early hitting and fielding miscues, the highly sensitive Ted overreacted and told a few teammates that he would never tip his cap again.
When some reporters wrote that he was not hustling on every play, Ted was outraged and started a vendetta against the writers. He began to brood and sulk and complain that he was underpaid. Some teammates got angry with him. Fans also reacted negatively to this churlish behavior, and when more than a month passed without Ted hitting even one home run into Williamsburg, resentment grew among some of the patrons. A faction decided that Williams was a spoiled child undeserving of the special treatment the Red Sox had accorded him.
On the team’s first western trip, Ted confessed to Harold Kaese of the Boston Evening Transcript that he was in a funk. “I wish I had a disposition like Jimmie Foxx’s,” Williams said. “I’ve got a rotten disposition.”5
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 18