“Well, Cobb was a great athlete,” Williams reflected, “in my estimate the greatest of all time, but he was an entirely different breed of cat. He was a push hitter. He choked up on the bat, two inches from the bottom, his hands four inches apart. He stood close to the plate, his hands forward. At bat he had the exact posture of the punch hitter that he was. When he talked hitting, he talked Greek to me.… Cobb was up high with his stance, slashing at the ball, pushing at it; I was down with a longer stroke. The arc of my swing was much greater than Cobb’s. I was anything but a push hitter.”29
Cobb and Williams, both supremely confident and even arrogant, kept up a running dialogue over the issue for the next several years. At the 1947 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers, Cobb, after being introduced to Ted by Grantland Rice, buttonholed him for a talk about the shift outside a stadium restaurant. Cobb had just written Ted a letter on the fine points of spray hitting. As Williams recalled the conversation in his book, the Georgia Peach said: “ ‘Boy, Ted, if they ever pulled that drastic shift on me—’ and he laughed and kind of shuddered, seeing with his mind’s eye the immortal Ty Cobb ripping line drives into those wide-open spaces in left field.”
But Cobb was not content to keep his thoughts private, and in May of 1951 he went public with his criticism of Ted, telling the Associated Press: “Williams has fine ability, but he cannot be classed as a great hitter. No player can be called a truly great hitter unless he can hit to all fields.” Then that July, Cobb wrote Williams another letter, perhaps wanting to tone down his public remarks but continuing his lecture about combating the shift.
Bobby Doerr was with Ted when he received Cobb’s letter, around the time of the All-Star Game in Detroit. As the two were riding from the airport to their hotel the day before the game, Doerr said Ted pulled the letter from his pocket and read it out loud, but again rejected Cobb’s advice. “I don’t want to do anything to change what I’m doing now,” Doerr recalled Ted saying. “I’m hitting .340 now. Why should I change something and then lose something that I’ve got?” Then, Doerr said, Ted took the letter “and crumpled it up and threw it out the window of the cab.”30*
The bottom line for Williams was that he would not fundamentally change or overhaul his classic swing; he was paid to slug, and a player has to do what he does best. And he was getting increasingly frustrated at other advice he was receiving from mere mortals: “advice from newspapermen who can’t hit, from pitchers, and from .250 hitters.”31 But Bert Dunne, former Pirates great Waner, and several others convinced him that he at least had to adapt; he had to go to left often enough to make the defenses more honest. He began following their advice in 1947, and by the end of that season, Boudreau was praising Ted for being “cute” enough to go to left at least occasionally, and he predicted that opposing teams would have trouble “getting Ted’s goat from now on. The whole idea of the shift was to bother Williams psychologically. He was stubborn in 1946.”32
By the early ’50s, Ted was proving he could go to the opposite field on a regular basis, and opponents reconsidered the shift. The Yankees were the first to abandon it, in 1951, and others gradually followed suit over the course of the decade, as Ted’s bat speed declined slightly with age and he became less of a natural pull hitter anyway.
Williams guessed that without the shift, his lifetime batting average of .344 would have been up to fifteen points higher; he said it was the second baseman playing in short right field who caused him the most difficulty and erased most of his hits. But he noted that he still won four batting titles after the shift was implemented, lost another by just two-tenths of a percentage point, and lost a sixth because he lacked the requisite number of official at bats—a title he would have won had present rules on a walk not counting as an at bat been in effect.
The Red Sox had built a big lead early in 1946 and would never look back. After the halfway point of the season, they were never less than ten games ahead of their nearest pursuer. By early September they were up by sixteen games, and they seemed on track to break the record of 107 wins set by the 1932 Yankees. Then they lost six in a row.
Finally, on September 13 in Cleveland, the Sox clinched their first pennant since 1918 when Ted hit the only inside-the-park home run of his career. Facing Boudreau’s shift, Williams deliberately drove the ball over the head of left fielder Pat Seerey, who had been playing about twenty feet behind shortstop. The ball rolled all the way to the wall, four hundred feet away, and by the time it was retrieved and thrown back in, Ted had easily scored what turned out to be the game’s only run.
Now Red Sox traveling secretary Tom Dowd could break out the champagne he’d been lugging from Washington and Philadelphia to Detroit and Cleveland, waiting for the team to clinch. Owner Tom Yawkey led the victory party for the players at the team hotel—excluding the writers, for whom the team staged a separate party. This enraged the newspapermen, and when Yawkey made an appearance at the press gathering, Austen Lake of the American engaged him in a shouting match. This followed another confrontation earlier in the day between sworn enemies Joe Cronin and the American’s Huck Finnegan after Finnegan assured Cronin he’d never win another pennant.
Notably absent from the players’ party was Williams, who, characteristically, had decided to go his own way and meet up with a Cleveland fishing buddy to spend the evening tying flies. When the writers demanded to know why Ted wasn’t celebrating with his teammates, Dowd lied and said the Kid was visiting a dying veteran in a Cleveland hospital. When that story quickly unraveled, Dave Egan pounced and wrote that this was further evidence Ted cared only about himself and not his team; that there was one set of rules for Williams and another for the other Red Sox players.*
Yet there was no doubt that the double standard was reinforced by the press. On August 27, Ted got in a car accident. Williams, accompanied by his wife and two friends, had been driving his new Ford to East Douglas, Massachusetts, near Worcester, where the Red Sox were scheduled to play an exhibition game against the Cleveland Indians. Another car suddenly swerved in front of Ted’s car and struck it head-on. No one was seriously hurt, but the bang-up prompted Pearl Harbor–size headlines in the papers.
Four days later, at Fenway Park, Williams, increasingly frustrated by the effects of the shift and a lingering slump in which he’d hit only .272 for the month of August, was roundly booed for getting into an unseemly snit after being robbed of a home run by Athletics right fielder Elmer Valo. In the third inning, into the teeth of a fierce east wind, Ted had scorched a ball that Valo had caught in front of the bull pen. The day before, Valo had made a more remarkable catch of another drive by Ted that by all rights should have been another home run. Then, at the start of the sixth inning, with the Red Sox leading the Athletics, 3–2, Williams, still pouting after the second Valo catch, halfheartedly hit a ground ball, which he failed to run out. The crowd let him have it, and Cronin, heading to the dugout from his third-base coaching position, lectured Ted on his way out to left field.
Williams played most of the seventh inning with his arms folded in left, continuing to sulk. When Valo hit a fly ball to him to end the inning, Ted, after catching it, heaved the ball up in the air, then took his glove and threw it after the ball. The wolves naturally howled still louder at this display. Cronin waited for him in the dugout and chewed him out again, but he said after the game he would take no further action.
At least one of Williams’s teammates was angered by his antics and called him on it. Rudy York, the slugging first baseman who had come over from Detroit in the off-season, confronted Williams in the clubhouse.
“We’re about to win this pennant,” York later recalled telling Williams, “and everybody’s in it together. All we got to do is play our best and we got it in the bag. Anybody who loafs on this ball club has got to answer to me. I’m about washed up, and you’ve got a long way to go. I’m not aiming to let a pennant slip away from me now, and I’m not aiming to see you let it slip away, either.”33
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br /> York, who liked to chain-smoke Camels in the dugout while studying opposing pitchers to determine when they tipped their pitches, said, “Williams was a good friend of mine, and he took it in the right spirit. I always did say he was the greatest hitter I ever saw step in the box.”
The Red Sox played out the string to finish 104–50, twelve games ahead of Detroit and fully seventeen ahead of the reeling third-place Yankees. Williams remained in the spotlight as the subject of long profiles in the September issues of Sport, Collier’s, and Life magazines. The Life piece did nothing to dispel the notion that Ted cared only about hitting. “They’ll never get me out of the game running into a wall after a fly ball,” he told writer John Chamberlain.34 “I’ll make a damn good try, but you can bet your sweet life I won’t get killed. They don’t pay off on fielding.”
Ted’s final batting line—a .342 average with 38 home runs and 123 runs batted in—was not enough to lead the league in any one category but would be deemed impressive enough to win him the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. His series of late-season contretemps soon faded in importance as the excitement of Boston being in its first World Series in twenty-eight years began to build.
The National League season ended in a tie for first place between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers, forcing a three-game series to determine the pennant winner.
Williams, in his column, picked the Cardinals to win. He thought the fact that both teams were having to fight to the finish would help keep them sharp for the World Series. The Red Sox had clinched early, and for the last month “just fiddled around,” Ted wrote in his book. “It had been the kind of season that positively breeds overconfidence.”35
With the onset of cool weather in October, Williams had again contracted what had become an almost annual virus. “They never could find out what the hell that was, and they tested me for everything,” he said years later.36 After a course of antibiotics, he felt even more weakened. Like many players returning from three years off at war, Williams would acknowledge later that he was fatigued, his body still not yet fully reacclimated to the rigors of a seven-month season. He had done most of his hitting in the spring and early summer and had tailed off in the late summer and early fall. He hadn’t hit a ball out of the park since September 11 in Detroit.
Waiting for the Cardinals-Dodgers winner, the Red Sox decided to try to keep their edge by playing an exhibition series at Fenway Park against a handpicked group of leading American Leaguers that included Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg. It was a cold, raw day, and only 1,996 people turned out to watch the first game on October 1, when DiMaggio was forced to take the field in a Boston uniform after his Yankees flannels did not arrive on time. In his third at bat, Williams, facing five-foot-eight Washington Senators left-hander Mickey Haefner, was struck on the tip of his right elbow. The pitch wasn’t deliberate—it was simply a curve that didn’t curve. Ted had seen the ball spinning toward him and thought it would break in, but it never did, and he couldn’t get his elbow out of the way in time.
X-rays showed no break but revealed a bad bone bruise, which was painful and swelled quickly. “Shoosh,” Ted wrote in his book, “the elbow went up like a balloon. It turned blue. The World Series was to begin three days later, but I couldn’t take batting practice for two days.”
Les Cassie Sr.—Ted’s old San Diego neighbor who had driven him across the country to spring training in 1939 and was now in Boston, collecting on Williams’s promise to invite him to the first World Series he appeared in—was alarmed. He phoned Les junior and said: “His elbow is three times as big as it’s supposed to be. He’s all stuffed up with antibiotics. I don’t see how he can play.”37 The papers splashed news of Ted’s injury on the front page, next to dispatches from Germany and the Nuremberg trials, in which Nazi leaders had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.
By October 3, the Cardinals had dispatched the Dodgers in two straight, and the Red Sox knew they would be heading to Saint Louis. Dr. Ralph McCarthy, the team physician, announced that Williams would be in the lineup when the Series began on Sunday the sixth, but he would not have proper use of his elbow for at least a week. “It’s going to hurt him every time he swings,” McCarthy said.38 Williams spent the next three days in the trainer’s room getting whirlpool treatments.
Hundreds of fans turned out at Trinity Place station in the Back Bay section of Boston on the evening of the third to give their heroes a proper sendoff as Williams and his teammates boarded the eight-car “Red Sox Special” for the twenty-four-hour trip to Saint Louis.
Just before the train was scheduled to pull out, Dave Egan launched a maliciously timed bombshell designed to make maximum mischief on the eve of the Series: Ted, the Colonel claimed, was on the trading block. The Detroit Tigers had already offered to swap pitcher Hal Newhouser and outfielder Dick Wakefield for him, while the Yankees, not to be outdone, had offered Joe DiMaggio himself as well as third baseman Bill Johnson and catcher Aaron Robinson. Delighting in tweaking Ted, Egan played off Williams’s status as a Globe columnist. “I hate to scoop a brother journalist,” the Colonel began, “particularly one who is laboring bravely under the handicap of an injured writing arm, but this is to inform journalist Ted Williams that left-fielder Ted Williams is up for sale to the highest bidder.”39
Egan cited no basis for his story and did not otherwise explain how he knew it to be so. He merely asserted he “has the facts… and knows them to be the facts.” He said the Red Sox had been fed up with Ted’s behaving like a “spoiled brat” in August and September and interpreted his comportment to mean he wanted out. Moreover, since Williams had not yet officially ruled out jumping to the Mexican League at the end of the season, the team worried it could receive nothing of value for its star player if he took that option. The Colonel predicted it would be the Yankees who would land Williams and that DiMaggio had signaled as much when he put on a Boston uniform the other day at Fenway Park.
Egan’s column was the talk of the train ride to Saint Louis as the players and members of the front office passed copies of the Record around. Ted, of course, devoured every word and smiled broadly as his teammates ribbed him about it, but he declined comment to the writers. Sox general manager Eddie Collins said he knew nothing about any trade for Ted, then, oddly, added that he didn’t want to be quoted as saying so. Tigers manager Steve O’Neill, who was on board the train as a guest of the Red Sox, said he had not heard that his team had made any offer for Williams.40
When the Red Sox took the field at Sportsman’s Park to practice the day before the Series was to start, Williams made his first comment on Egan’s column, saying he’d quit or jump to Mexico before going to New York. “I’d hate to be traded to the Yankees,” he said. “I don’t like New York. I just don’t want to play there.” He said nothing about Detroit, perhaps feeling he didn’t have to, since it was well known that Williams considered Briggs Stadium one of his favorite parks to hit in.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Red Sox hierarchy—Joe Cronin and Tom Yawkey—were less equivocal than Collins had been in denying Egan’s column. Cronin said, “The idea of trading Williams is silly—ridiculous. We have never discussed such a thing.”41 Added Yawkey: “I wouldn’t trade him for Yankee Stadium or Briggs Stadium. If he ever is sold, however, the press won’t name the club nor will the press name the price. I’m still running the ball club.”42
Taking his first batting practice since being plunked on the elbow, Williams felt better than he thought he would, and he certainly put on a show. He hit three homers on top of the right-field roof and crashed two balls against the right-field screen. “When I give it that little extra—either throwing or hitting—it hurts,” Ted told the writers.43 But the pain did not prevent him from giving it that little extra, he added.
The Red Sox were heavy favorites to win the Series, but many of the Cardinals were cocky, and some openly talked trash. Stan Musial would make Ted “look sick” in the Series, predicted p
itcher Red Barrett.44 “Do we fear Williams? Of course we don’t,” added reliever Ted Wilks. “We pitched against him in the South this spring and got him out and we’ll stop him again.”
Not all the Cardinals were so impudent. Joe Garagiola, the rookie catcher and Saint Louis native, was a great admirer of Ted’s and remembered well listening to him abuse the Browns on the radio as he was growing up. Now Garagiola found himself behind the plate in game 1 of the World Series when the Great Man himself stepped into the box. “All of a sudden there he was right in front of me,” Garagiola recalled. “I didn’t know whether to throw the ball to the pitcher or ask for an autograph. The first pitch was an inside fastball, and he followed it all the way into my mitt. ‘That ball was inside,’ he said to me. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said to him, and that was all I could say.”45
The first time Williams came up, Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer ordered his team into a modified Boudreau shift, despite having said before the Series that he would play it straight against Ted. Shortstop Marty Marion remained at his position, while third baseman Whitey Kurowski ran across the diamond to play second, second baseman Red Schoendienst shifted to the hole in short right, and first baseman Stan Musial hugged the line. The left fielder played center while the center and right fielders divided right. If Dyer’s goal was to get into Ted’s head, he apparently succeeded. “I never expected it,” Williams wrote in his column the next day. “Brother, did they pull a fast one on me.”
Ted, facing left-hander Howie Pollet, then grounded out sharply to the newly aligned Schoendienst. He walked in the third, lashed a single over Kurowski’s head into right-center in the sixth, and walked in the eighth. The game was tied after nine innings, 2–2. In the tenth, Ted fouled out to Musial before Rudy York ripped a home run to the left-field bleachers to give the Red Sox a 3–2 win in the first game.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 35