Cronin decided he had to address Williams’s darkening mood. The manager told the Boston Globe’s Gerry Moore that Ted’s fixation with hitting was adversely affecting his “hustle and concentration” and therefore the team’s chances at the pennant. “Nobody wants to see the Kid become a great star more than I do,” Cronin said. “That’s why I must impress on him that all great stars… first of all have been great team players.… Ted is still only a boy and I know he wants to win as much as anybody on our club. He’s just so wrapped up in hitting, that he forgets himself now and then.”6
Not that Williams wasn’t hitting. As of May 21, he was batting .347, but he only had two home runs, none yet in Williamsburg. The failure thus far to meet the fans’ power expectations—and those he himself had so publicly set—was probably the chief source of Ted’s problem. But whatever it was, Cronin thought it had to be nipped in the bud. He told Harold Kaese in a May 22 story that he had decided to bench Ted.
“I didn’t want to do this,” Cronin said. “I don’t want Williams to get this kind of reputation, but there’s no other way.”7 Kaese added that owner Tom Yawkey had become “sick and tired of watching the Kid go through the motions. He as well as nearly every player and coach on the team talked to him and tried to wake him up. It was no go.… If it continues, if he sulks and complains on the bench, one of his teammates undoubtedly will punch him on the nose. The players, an ideal group of hustlers, are down on him.”
After listing the possible causes of Ted’s gloom—his bad start at home, the booing by some Fenway fans, his low home-run production, and the likelihood that he would lose any chance at the RBI title as a result of hitting third—Kaese concluded his article with a cheap shot: “Whatever it is, it probably traces to his up-bringing. Can you imagine a kid, a nice kid with a nimble brain, not visiting his father and mother all of last winter?”
Kaese himself had second thoughts about that non sequitur and wired his paper to have it removed, but in a composing-room snafu, it was left in. Kaese apologized to Ted the next day and always regretted that the gratuitous remark had run.8 But to Williams, this was an unpardonable sin, representing an unacceptable invasion of his privacy. The Kaese story was a pivot point, turning what had been a simmering feud with sportswriters into a vitriolic campaign that he chose to wage his entire career.
Still, Ted couldn’t seem to stop talking with reporters about almost anything that popped into his mind—an undisciplined habit that would always cause him difficulty. Speaking with syndicated writer Harry Grayson in late May about all the pressures he was feeling, Williams contrasted his lot with that of his uncle John Smith, the Westchester County fireman whom Ted had visited several times. Being a firefighter wouldn’t be a bad life, Ted said, thinking out loud. It was a throwaway line, offered in jest, but Grayson took it and snidely played it straight—that Williams would rather chuck his baseball career and become a fireman—as part of a larger piece about the Kid’s malaise.
The Grayson story focused further attention on Ted’s state of mind and gave rival bench jockeys plenty of ammunition. At a June 3 game at Fenway, for example, Chicago White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes screamed when Williams came to bat that “Teddy wants to be a fireman!”9 Dykes then had his players whistle to imitate siren noises. When Williams finally hit his first home run into one of the new bull pens at Fenway, the Globe took caustic note with a banner headline: TED LOCATES WILLIAMSBURG.
Nevertheless, on June 4, perhaps realizing that was going too far, the Globe’s Victor Jones wrote what would become the first of several sympathetic columns penned by various Boston writers over the next several weeks that seemed an attempt to save Williams from himself. “This sure is a mighty tough world for a kid of 21, particularly a sensitive kid like you, if he can’t get in the dumps occasionally,” wrote Jones in what was effectively an open letter to the struggling Red Sox star. “The trouble is that a guy in your position, no matter what his age, can’t afford the common luxury of a sulk or a ‘mad.’ Whether you like it or not, you are a public character, and as such you’ve got to stand the gaff.… You’re a great kid, a great ballplayer with maybe 20 years of major league ball ahead of you. Don’t go and spoil it all.”
But Ted seemed bent on doing just that. The morning of August 13, he was in the clubhouse at Fenway Park, packing his equipment and getting ready to fly down to New York to meet his teammates for a doubleheader against the Yankees later that afternoon. He’d been out of the lineup for several days with lower back pain and had stayed home while the team was on the road. He was hitting .333 with 14 homers and 68 RBIs. The Red Sox, who in mid-June were in first place, had long since faded from contention.
Austen Lake, the Boston Evening American columnist, walked into the clubhouse. Trying to avoid Lake, Ted, dressed in blue overalls, walked out toward the field and sat down in a box seat. Lake followed him outside. Williams seemed in a foul mood, and Lake asked, “What’s the matter with you, Ted?” Then it all poured out.
Venting for the next twenty minutes, he said that he had asked Cronin and Yawkey—many times—to trade him. He couldn’t stand Boston’s fans, its press, and the city itself. He also said he would have to be paid “plenty” more next year than the $12,500 he was making now, declaring that he’d earned it. “And you can print the whole rotten mess just as I said it,” Ted insisted. “I don’t like the town. I don’t like the people and the newspaper men have been on my back all year. Why?”10
The headline on the story was TED WILLIAMS BLASTS BOSTON, WANTS TO BE TRADED TO YANKS. The first paragraph said: “Young Ted Samuel Williams, adolescent Red Sox outfielder, detests Boston!” The second paragraph: “Theodore wants to be traded to some other major league town.” He rejected Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago as cities where he might go, saying he’d hold out first. Asked if he wanted to go to New York, Ted fell silent, and Lake inferred that was his destination of choice.
“Plainly,” Lake wrote, Ted had been “nursing his torrent of spleen” during the week that he had spent alone in Boston while injured. “He felt what he did with a vast conviction. He didn’t like Boston’s streets, the way the houses were built, the parks, the people, the Riverway. Phooie! But most of all he didn’t like the human crows who perch on the rim of the ballpark and write typographical sneers.”
Lake said he had considered not printing what Ted had told him, so that he and the team might work out their differences in private, but decided that “the situation is such that inevitably the ulcerous condition will have to be lanced publicly.” Williams’s private behavior and thoughts were his own business, Lake wrote, “except where he wants to get away and is saturated with that desire, or where he detests the uniform he wears and abhors the people he represents. That is a public matter.” Lake said he had nonetheless offered to let Ted take whatever he wanted back, and have it be off the record, but again Williams said that everything could be printed.
“They pay you on your record,” Ted said. “The bleachers can boo, the newspapers can sneer, but right out there [pointing to the field] is where you get the dough or you don’t, and I’m going to get mine.”
Not surprisingly, the story reverberated. Tom Yawkey—furious with Williams—denied that Ted had ever asked to be traded. “No player in baseball is greater than the game itself, and Teddy Williams will discover that fact to his sorrow unless he mends his way,” Yawkey said.11 He also let it be known that Ted was essentially on his own in dealing with the press. “While I don’t condone his feud with newspapermen and any fans away from the ballpark, I’ve decided to let him work out the situation on his own after talking to him once on that matter and getting no results.”12
Ted thought the team could have done more to help him deal with the writers, though it was debatable how much the Red Sox could actually control their volatile star. And some critics would conclude that Yawkey and the team’s management had no interest in helping Ted with the press, especially in the second half of his career, since his ability to co
mmand headlines and dominate coverage served to deflect attention from the consistently poor teams the Red Sox fielded in the 1950s.
After the Lake story appeared, Cronin, like Yawkey, also denied that Ted had ever approached him demanding a trade. And Jimmie Foxx told the writers he thought Ted was “a spoiled boy. How long it will take for him to grow up remains to be seen. But he’ll have to grow up the hard way now.”13
Doc Cramer, who’d had a rocky relationship with Williams, nonetheless tried to give him a boost. “You know who’s the best, don’t you?” Cramer told Ted privately. “You know who’s the best in the league? You are.”14 But then Williams made another intemperate remark, telling Associated Press writer Eddie Brietz that if there were free agency in baseball, and if each team made him the same offer, he’d sign with the Dodgers. “I know I’d be a hero in Brooklyn,” Ted proclaimed.15
The Red Sox played out the string, gliding toward what would be a fourth-place finish. On a lark, Cronin decided to have Williams pitch the last two innings in a 12–1 loss to the Tigers at Fenway Park on August 24. He allowed three hits and one run, walked none, and struck out Rudy York on three pitches. The move seemed to be an attempt by Cronin to placate angry fans with some pure entertainment in one of the worst losses of the year.
On September 4, Ted probably reached his nadir during a doubleheader at Fenway against the Athletics. The Sox won both games, but Williams was pouting again. He’d misjudged a liner that went over his head for a double, got picked off first base, and failed to run out a fly he thought would go foul but dropped in safely. In the seventh inning of the afternoon game, Ted decided to take out his frustrations by picking up a foul ball he had retrieved and throwing it as hard as he could at a bunch of photographers, who in those days were allowed on the field to take up positions in foul territory. The group was huddled near third base, and the ball Ted threw hit one of them in the back. None was expecting it because the ball had been out of play. “As it happened, no damage was done and Ted was merely shown up as about the most unattractive ballplayer we’ve had here in a long, long while,” wrote the Globe’s Vic Jones, who had written Williams the sympathetic open letter in June.16
Reflecting back years later on his dealings with the press that season, Ted wrote in his book that he was “still a kid, high strung and prone to tantrums,” and he felt like he was being “persecuted.… If there were eight or ten reporters around my locker, I’d spot a guy who’d written a bad article about me and I’d say, ‘Why should you even come around me, that crap-house stuff you’ve been writing.’ So that would embarrass him, and he’d get mad, and then off we’d go.… Before this, I was willing to believe a writer was my friend until he proved otherwise. Now my guard’s up all the time, always watching for critical stuff. If I saw something, I’d read it twenty times, and I’d burn without knowing how to fight it.”17
Ted finished 1940 with more than respectable numbers: a .344 average, with 23 home runs and 113 RBIs. His average was 17 points higher than it was in his rookie year, but his power production was off, with eight fewer homers and 32 fewer RBIs compared to 1939. Of his 23 homers in 1940, only nine were at Fenway and just four of those went into the new bull pens.18 But the story of 1940 was not a set of numbers that, however good, came in below expectations. The story of the year was Ted’s psychic tailspin, an evolving public meltdown that had played out in, and been shaped by, Boston’s newspapers.
It marked the first season of what would become a career-long jihad waged by Ted against the baseball writers—his so-called Knights of the Keyboard. In fact, this was not a feud as such but a conflict largely manufactured by Williams to fuel his drive to excel. Though his press was overwhelmingly positive, he would seize on a negative story or column to portray all writers as a contemptible lot bent on invading his privacy and stirring up public opinion against him. The newspapers became a bogeyman that Williams constructed to feed the fire of antagonism that was central to his ability to perform well. He always said he hit best when he was angry, and that was generally true.
The interplay between Ted and the writers would become an important window into his character and one of the longest-running dramas in his career. Now, reporters who had fawned over Ted during his rookie year and even for part of the 1940 season had to recalibrate their relationship with him. In the process, the rules of engagement between newspapers and baseball began to change.
Between 1939 and 1960, the years spanning Ted’s career with the Red Sox, Boston had eight major newspapers, or nine if one counted both the morning and evening editions of the Boston Globe, which had separate staffs and circulations. The morning papers were the Post, the Herald, the Record, the Daily Globe, and the Christian Science Monitor. The evening journals were the American, the Transcript, the Traveler, and the Evening Globe. Two of the papers folded while Williams was still playing: the Transcript in 1941, and the Post in 1956.
The Record and the American were tabloids owned by the Hearst chain, and they operated out of the same building. The papers competed against each other but on Sundays jointly published the Boston Sunday Advertiser. The Herald owned the Traveler.
The Post and Record dominated the city in 1940, with circulations of 369,000 and 329,000 respectively. The Traveler ranked third with 211,000, while figures for the others ranged between 117,000 and 168,000—except for the Transcript, which had only 28,000 customers.
But those 28,000 were highly prized by advertisers, representing as they did the vanguard of Boston’s dwindling but still disproportionately influential and moneyed Brahmin elite. The role of the Transcript in the city’s life was celebrated by Cleveland Amory in his classic novel about the blue bloods in the most class-conscious city in America, The Proper Bostonians. “Daily except Sunday, just at tea-time—when the Proper Bostonian mind is traditionally at its most receptive stage—the Transcript was quietly laid, never tossed, on the doorsteps of the best people in Boston,” Amory wrote. “Not to read the Transcript was unthinkable. It was never a newspaper in the vulgar sense of the word.… The loyalty of its readers was proverbial. In the wind of its editorial opinion they swayed, said the poet T. S. Eliot, ‘like a field of ripe corn.’ ”
Legend had it that when three reporters showed up one day to see the owner of a grand Beacon Hill town house, they received this introduction from the attending servant: “Two reporters from the papers, sir, and a gentleman from the Transcript.”
The Transcript saw itself as a bulwark against the encroaching yellow journalism flaunted by the Post and the Record. “The Transcript marches in the van of progress without sacrifice of dignity and self-respect…,” the paper said when marking its centennial edition on July 24, 1930. “It differentiates solids from froth, the permanent from the passing, substance from shadow.”
Just eleven years later, however, the Transcript closed its doors, its circulation down to 15,788 Proper Bostonians, only nine of whom chose to heed the paper’s final appeal to send $500 to the National Shawmut Bank if the journal were to be kept afloat. But Boston then was still one of the most competitive newspaper cities in the country. The battles for circulation were intense, the journalism shallow and parochial.
The Post—which in its heyday in the late 1920s had a circulation of 628,000, larger than any other broadsheet in the country at the time—set the sensationalist tone for Boston at the start of the ’40s with a steady diet of crime, sex, and sports, pushed hard in the same direction by Hearst’s Record and American. The Post had supplanted the Globe as the favored paper of the Boston Irish by aggressively courting Catholics, who had become a majority in the city by the 1920s.
The Post, Record, and American were militantly Democratic. The Herald and its Traveler in the evening catered to a more upscale, suburban Republican clientele. The Globe tried to position itself as an enlightened, middle-of-the-road paper serving both the upper and the working classes. It saw itself as the Post and Hearst antidote, and adopted an aloof, don’t-rock-the-boat line geared tow
ard the family, which often cost it scoops. The Globe took the somewhat self-deluding line that Post and Hearst scoops were suspect to begin with, not to mention here today and gone tomorrow, at least as far as the more refined sensibilities of Globe readers were concerned. It stressed features, sports, and politics.
The Christian Science Monitor emphasized foreign news, and most of its circulation was outside New England. It was not a competitive factor locally, but the Monitor’s longtime Red Sox beat writer Ed Rumill was respected and influential, not least because he was one of the few writers Ted liked and favored.
From 1851 to 1956, the Boston papers were concentrated downtown on a two-hundred-yard stretch of Washington Street, along what was called Newspaper Row. The row was known as the “Fleet Street of America” but had more journalists per square foot than its London counterpart and teemed with traffic through the horse-and-buggy era, then trolleys and cars. Before radio and through the late ’30s, up to fifty thousand people would pack the area on Election Night to get results. Office boys and artists posted the latest news on blackboards or bulletin boards. If the night ran long, the papers provided music, entertainment, and political analysis over loudspeakers. Candidates would hop from paper to paper giving interviews.
Entertainers would also work the row during the day, hoping to attract publicity. In the ’20s, Houdini performed for a lunchtime crowd, drawing gasps and cheers when he freed himself from a straitjacket and chains while hanging by his feet. There were many other attractions and distractions, ranging from watering holes aplenty to indulgences of the flesh. Reporters wanting sex were accommodated by a prostitute who nominally worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon headquartered in one of the Post’s buildings.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 19