Williams’s own Mexican roots, and his witnessing firsthand the discrimination that some of his family members were subjected to, likely shaped his views on race and the egalitarian ideal. “Ted was the most unbiased man I ever met,” said Curt Gowdy, the longtime Red Sox broadcaster. “He didn’t have a biased bone in his body.”17 Added Larry Taylor, a retired Marine Corps major general who became friendly with Williams late in life: “He was a guy that believed baseball was the ultimate meritocracy. It didn’t matter where you came from or your background. He liked the Marine Corps for the same reason: they didn’t care who you were—just what you did.”18
Beyond race and the arrival of Jackie Robinson, there was another intriguing development that April of 1947—this one taking place behind closed doors—that could have drastically altered the arc of Williams’s career.
One night, apparently during the Red Sox’s first trip to New York, from April 22 through April 24, Tom Yawkey and Yankees co-owner Dan Topping were biding their time at Toots Shor’s saloon when the conversation turned to the baseball icons of the day, Williams and Joe DiMaggio. As fans often did, they talked of how frequently DiMaggio’s long outs in Yankee Stadium’s vast left field would be home runs over the short wall at Fenway Park, and how easily Ted’s deep flies in Fenway’s cavernous right field would find their way into New York’s short upper deck in right. The two stars were playing in the wrong home parks. The conversation grew more and more serious. Finally, after both Yawkey and Topping were well lubricated, they agreed to make the trade. They would sleep on it and confer again the next day.
But when Topping called Yawkey in the morning, the Red Sox owner was having second thoughts; his people back at Fenway didn’t like the deal. DiMaggio had slumped the previous year, with numbers that paled next to Ted’s .342 average with 38 homers and 123 RBIs. Plus the Clipper had had surgery in the off-season to remove a bone spur from his left heel and had yet to return to the lineup. Ted, who was making twice as much money as Joe, was twenty-eight and still in his prime, while DiMaggio was thirty-two and likely in decline.
“If you want to make the deal,” Yawkey told Topping, “you’ve got to throw in your little left fielder,” a reference to the rookie Yogi Berra, who was also a catcher. Yawkey, whose Red Sox were still trying to live down the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, was probably looking for a graceful exit, knowing his demand for Berra would be a deal breaker, and it was. Topping refused.19
The Sox erected lights, and night baseball came to Fenway in 1947. Williams displayed increasing skill hitting to left field, doubling off the wall regularly, and on May 13, he hit his first two home runs into the screen in left. After Ted complained that the huge advertisements on the wall for Calvert liquor, GEM razor blades, and Liberty soap distracted him at the plate, the Sox took the ads down, so the wall was now an even more hitter-friendly clean green.
Yet both Williams and DiMaggio complained that balls weren’t carrying as well as they used to. “The ball was deadened near the close of the ’42 season and hasn’t been hopped up since,” Ted said in May. “What’s the percentage going for the home run? Why, I can’t even hit one into the bleachers in batting practice. I’ll tell you this, and I mean it: I’m going to stop going for home runs and hit for average.”
Another reason it was becoming more difficult to hit homers: opposing pitchers gave him little to hit, especially with men on base. Williams had been walked 156 times the previous year and was on pace to increase that total in 1947. And not only was it getting boring for fans at Fenway and around the league who came to see the Kid hit, but American League owners felt the walks to Williams were starting to hurt them at the gate. In a highly unusual move, they met around the All-Star break and agreed to order their pitchers to let Ted swing more often when the season resumed.20
In the All-Star Game itself, Ted singled and doubled off the Cardinals’ Harry Brecheen to exact a small measure of revenge from the man who’d humbled him in the World Series, as the American League edged the Nationals, 2–1.
The Sox then kept it close for a while, but Boo Ferriss, Mickey Harris, and Tex Hughson, the mainstays of the pitching staff who in 1946 had combined for sixty-two wins, all went down with arm problems, and the team went on to finish in third place, fourteen games behind the Yankees. And while Ted hit .343 with 32 homers and 114 RBIs to win the Triple Crown, he was robbed of the MVP when the writers narrowly gave the award to DiMaggio. The Yankees had won the pennant, but Joe’s statistics were again clearly inferior to Williams’s: DiMaggio finished with a .315 average, 20 home runs, and 97 runs batted in, but compiled 202 votes to Ted’s 201.*
Ted tried to find solace in some pleasant family news: Doris was expecting, he announced. The Traveler, in a breathless story headlined MRS. TED WILLIAMS TRAINS FOR STORK LEAGUE DEBUT, revealed that Doris had made arrangements for her “confinement” in Boston in January.21
Since Ted’s return from the war, he and Doris had lived quietly and modestly in a five-room apartment, the middle unit of a brown-shingled three-decker in Brighton, a blue-collar section of Boston. Tex Hughson, the pitcher, and his wife lived in another apartment in the same building. Word had quickly spread that Ted had moved into the neighborhood, and kids would always hang around outside the residence hoping to get an autograph.
Doris had indulged the insatiable Boston press and consented to several at-home-with-Ted features in the previous few years. The papers all agreed she was pretty, usually noting her icy blue eyes, husky voice, and petite stature: even in heels she stood an inch or two below Ted’s shoulders. She liked to cook and bake, but said she had to prepare meals for six because Ted ate like a horse. She still rarely went to Fenway Park, but would listen to the games on the radio, both to gauge what kind of mood her husband might be in when he returned and to know when to start dinner, since Ted insisted on eating as soon as he walked in the door. They avoided talk about baseball—Ted didn’t want to bring any of his problems home, and Doris didn’t care for the game anyway. They both liked the movies, and they had the radio or record player on all the time, playing swing, jazz, or anything upbeat.
Doris seemed able to keep Ted’s temper in check. She wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, and might handle a tantrum with a droll put-down or by just keeping quiet and waiting for the storm to pass. But they both seemed to enjoy mixing it up, usually when fishing.
“He’s always making me cast over again,” Doris complained to a reporter. “He taught me, but he has no patience with me. And I have none with him.… We have some rows that literally rock the boat. Sometimes we fight because he won’t go home and it gets so dark I have to light matches so he can see to bait the hook. Then he’s always butting in when I have a bite, telling me how to haul the fish in. Usually I tell him to shut up.”22
The Williamses wintered back in Doris’s hometown of Princeton, Minnesota. On January 6, the Kid, dispensing with the annual contract-signing press extravaganza in Boston, sent the Red Sox a telegram from Princeton agreeing to the same exact terms for 1948 as he had in ’47: a base salary of $65,000 with easily achievable attendance escalators topping out at $75,000.
Williams sent Doris on to Boston to prepare for the delivery of their baby, which was due on February 15. Doris would be staying with friends in Brighton while Ted would go down to Florida to resume fishing in warmer climes.
“I hope it’s a boy,” Ted told the Globe by phone.23 “And I hope he breaks every record in baseball, as I’ve been trying to do since I first joined the Red Sox.” Doris, for her part, said she wanted a girl.
The birth came suddenly, nearly three weeks ahead of schedule, on January 28. It was a girl, weighing five pounds and six ounces. The child was formally named Barbara Joyce, but they would call her Bobby-Jo. Williams’s daughter would later say that her father called her Bobby-Jo because it reminded him of a boy’s name, and he always wanted a son.
Ted, who had been planning to arrive in Boston to be with Doris the first week in F
ebruary, was off fishing in the Everglades when the baby was born. Doris, her family, and their friends all tried to locate him—telegrams were sent, calls made. Finally a reporter in Miami tracked him down at a house in Everglades City and gave him the news.
That night, someone on the Globe sports desk called him. The reporter asked when Williams was going to come to Boston to be with Doris and his new baby. Ted, who considered virtually any call from a reporter an invasion of his privacy, was cranky and defensive. The conversation, which the paper recorded, wasn’t pretty:
REPORTER: Hello, Ted. This is the Globe.
WILLIAMS: Yeah.
REPORTER: Have you been able to get a reservation to Boston?
WILLIAMS: Haven’t tried.
REPORTER: Aren’t you coming up to see the baby?
WILLIAMS: For Chrissake! What could I do up there?
REPORTER: Were you disappointed that it was a girl?
WILLIAMS: Nope.
REPORTER: Then you didn’t care?
WILLIAMS: I didn’t give a shit.
REPORTER: How’s the fishing?
WILLIAMS: Pretty good.
REPORTER: I didn’t get you up, did I?
WILLIAMS: Hell, no.
REPORTER: Where are you fishing, the creeks?
WILLIAMS: Yup.
REPORTER: What do you get?
WILLIAMS: Goddamn it! I’ve been down here three years and I’ve been telling you for three years what I get.
REPORTER: You never spoke to me before in your life.
WILLIAMS: Well, I told the goddamn sportswriters.
REPORTER: What do you get?
WILLIAMS: Fish.
REPORTER: Okay. Good luck.
WILLIAMS: Thanks.
REPORTER: Are you going out today?
WILLIAMS: Sure.
REPORTER: Okay. So long.
WILLIAMS: [Slams phone down]
A softer, sanitized version of this conversation was published in the Globe of January 29 in an article that carried no byline. The original transcript—which would make the rounds of the paper for years to come, always eliciting amusement—is contained in Harold Kaese’s archives, under the cheeky headline BLESSED EVENT. In a column the same day, Kaese dug at Williams for not being at his wife’s side when their daughter was born, claiming that “almost everybody in Boston seems to be mad about it.” The support for that assertion was interviews with ten unnamed people, five of whom spoke in favor of Ted, five against. Still, Kaese concluded: “Everybody knows where Ted Williams was when his baby was born here yesterday. He was fishing.… Once again, Williams finds himself standing in a corner wearing a dunce cap.”24
But Doris, talking to writers by phone from her hospital bed the following day, didn’t seem upset with her husband and stated the obvious: the baby had been born prematurely, far sooner than expected. Ted had been planning to be there for the birth. She explained that he had indeed tried to call the previous night, but she’d been asleep and he hadn’t wanted to disturb her, adding that she hoped to hear from him today. She said their daughter had Ted’s eyes and her mouth. Meanwhile, Doris was enjoying herself watching television, the first patient in Boston’s Lying-in Hospital to be accorded this new perk.25
Furious with the Kaese column, Williams flew up to Boston three days later, on the night of February 1. The flight was delayed, and by the time it arrived it was 1:45 a.m. Ted told the mob of reporters and photographers awaiting him that he’d learned of the birth about ten hours after the fact and claimed he’d tried to make a plane reservation to get to Boston but had not been able to get a flight until now. Asked if he’d pose for pictures with the baby, Ted replied, “Nothing doing. I don’t care what people say about this, but there’ll be no pictures taken in the hospital.”26 He said Doris and Bobby-Jo would soon move in with friends in the area and he would return to Florida. As for those who thought he’d behaved poorly, he was blunt: “To heck with public opinion,” he said. “It’s my baby, and it’s my life.”
The crowd of reporters followed him over to the hospital, where the Kid did allow himself to be photographed peering in through the glass wistfully at little Bobby-Jo. “What a sweetheart,” he murmured. “A little on the light side, but so was I.… They tell me she has a temper, too.… I wonder where she got that?” Ted added, smiling. Now that his family was growing, he would move out of his apartment and rent a big house in upscale Newton, just west of Boston, so Doris and the baby would have plenty of room. He’d hire a nurse, too. “That gal is going to have everything she wants.”27
Before long, the writers were ready to change the subject. They wanted the Kid’s reaction to two big off-season moves the Red Sox had made.
First was the hiring of Joe McCarthy, the fabled former Yankees manager, to take over the dugout in Boston, replacing Joe Cronin, who’d moved on to the front office as general manager. McCarthy had been forced out of New York in May of 1946 because of complications arising from his well-known battle with the bottle. Still, he had the highest winning percentage of any major-league manager ever, and he’d won nine pennants—one with the Cubs in 1929 and eight with the Yankees—as well as seven World Series titles in New York, so it was considered a coup for the Red Sox to have lured him out of retirement. McCarthy was known for his insistence on discipline and professionalism, and the press was already speculating about whether he and Williams would clash and about whether, or how, McCarthy might try to bring Ted to heel.
The second move was a blockbuster trade with the St. Louis Browns in which Boston gave the Browns $375,000 and nine marginal players in return for All-Star shortstop and slugger Junior Stephens and two frontline starting pitchers, Ellis Kinder and Jack Kramer. Stephens was considered the most important part of the deal, since he provided a potent bat to hit behind Williams and keep pitchers honest.28
“I’m hoping, of course, that Junior Stephens can pile up some 25 homers this year,” Ted said.29 “That certainly would help the team, wouldn’t it?” As for McCarthy, the Kid didn’t foresee any problems. “It’s kind of queer for me to hear people asking me how I’ll like McCarthy. That doesn’t worry me a bit. I hope I play and conduct myself so that McCarthy will like me.” McCarthy himself was also ready with a conciliatory off-season quote: “A manager who can’t get along with a .400 hitter ought to have his head examined,” he proclaimed.
But it was the baby story—Ted’s perceived callousness toward his wife and his scorn for public opinion—that lingered in the news for weeks and became one of the defining episodes of his career.
The syndicated columnist Paul Gallico wrote an open letter to Ted, fanning the flames of the anti-Williams narrative: “You… were quoted out of Boston as saying to newsmen who interviewed you at Logan Airport upon your belated return from fishing in Florida to visit your wife and newborn daughter: ‘To hell with the public—they can’t run my life.’ These, you must surely know, are the most famous of famous last words.… With them, you brand yourself as not only an ingrate, but a first class dolt. You are not a nice fellow, Brother Williams. I do believe that baseball and the sports pages would be better off without you.”30
Ted did have his defenders, who argued that the press had no business butting in on his private life, including, surprisingly, Dave Egan as well as the Globe’s Jerry Nason. Yet the birth of his daughter was a public relations debacle that could easily have been avoided had Ted simply said how delighted he was to be a father and that he would certainly have been with his wife had he only known that the baby was going to arrive early. Once again, Williams wasn’t wired to comply with PR norms. He’d felt cornered by a press he deemed out-of-bounds, and he wasn’t about to pivot and curry favor with the sort he despised.
Ted also thought this episode illustrated the differences between playing in Boston and New York, arguing that DiMaggio and other Yankees stars got a pass and he didn’t. “You can make a case out of anything if you want to, or you can be fair to a guy and not make a big how-do-you-do out of a litt
le thing,” he wrote in his book.31 “I always thought the Yankee players were protected from this sort of thing, that even their real bad actors were written up in angelic terms by the New York press. You can protect a guy and everybody will love him, or you can dig at him and everybody will think he’s an S.O.B. Of course, the Yankees were winning—you get a good press when you’re winning, and we were losing.”
Joe McCarthy had always insisted that he and his Yankees wear jackets and ties off the field—another point of interest as spring training approached. How, people wondered, would he enforce his dress code on Ted, who of course was famous for disdaining ties? The manager surprised everyone in Sarasota with a disarming gesture: he greeted his star while wearing a shirt with an open collar.
Spring training was thus quickly defused of any tension and unfolded quite boringly, save for an entertaining diversion on March 9, when Ted accepted a challenge from Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the former Olympic track star turned golf champion, to compete with her in a driving contest at a local range. This publicity stunt, lapped up by writers and photographers alike, was engineered by Fred Corcoran, the agent for both Ted and Babe. Ted, who towered over and substantially outweighed Zaharias, sliced most of his drives out to the left, while Babe’s were always down the middle and mostly longer. Soon she was coaching Williams on his swing—and needling him, too. “Let’s see you chase this one,” she’d say. Or: “Here’s one for you to shoot at, Ted.” After finishing his bucket of balls, the Kid cheerfully conceded. “You’ve got me beat,” he said.32
Despite the big-name manager and the new reinforcements from Saint Louis, the Red Sox got off to a miserable start and were 14–23 at the end of May, in seventh place. Ted was hitting, at .374 with 11 home runs and 42 RBIs, but nobody else was. Responding, McCarthy dropped Mickey Harris and Boo Ferriss from the pitching rotation and installed rookie Billy Goodman at first base. The team took off, going 18–6 in June, as Ted hit .460 for the month. By late July, the Sox were in first place, and through August, the month Babe Ruth died, they fought for the top spot with the Yankees and the Indians. In September, with seven games left, the three teams were tied, with records of 91–56.33
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 38