The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Across town, meanwhile, the Boston Braves had clinched the National League pennant. The city was baseball-mad and preparing for a streetcar World Series. The rise of the Braves, who hadn’t won a pennant since 1914, was an intriguing story. While Boston had long been dominated by the Red Sox, the balance of power started to change during the war years, when the Braves were acquired by three wealthy local contractors—Lou Perini, Joe Maney, and Guido Rugo—whom the press quickly dubbed “the Three Little Steam Shovels.”

  The Steam Shovels had plenty of money and weren’t shy in spending it to build a respectable team and a loyal fan base. In 1946, they had hired away the successful Cardinals manager Billy Southworth, saw their attendance jump by nearly six hundred thousand to just under a million, and finished fourth. Though the Red Sox won the pennant that year, the Braves had been helped by their rival’s success, when fans, unable to get into sold-out Fenway Park, instead tried Braves Field, which was within walking distance along Commonwealth Avenue.

  The Braves had exciting new players, such as Bob Elliott, Warren Spahn, Earl Torgeson, Johnny Sain, and Tommy Holmes. They brought night baseball to Boston a year before the Red Sox did and aggressively marketed the team to the community with such initiatives as a new $50,000 scoreboard the size of a tennis court, a new press box, three troubadours who wandered the stands playing music, and fan appreciation days, when new cars were given away. Many of these ideas came from the Steam Shovels’ indefatigable publicity man, Billy Sullivan, the future founding owner of the Boston Patriots. By 1947, the Braves had finished third and broken the million mark, drawing 1,277,361 fans. In the pennant year of ’48, attendance went up to 1,455,439.

  Back in the American League, what many consider to be one of the greatest pennant races ever approached its finale. With three days left, the Indians had pulled ahead by two games over both the Red Sox and the Yankees. Cleveland had three games at home against Detroit. Boston and New York had an off day, then played each other on October 2 and October 3 at Fenway. When the Tigers won their first game, the Indians’ lead over the Yankees and Red Sox dropped to one.

  A capacity crowd of thirty-five thousand watched Jack Kramer defeat Tommy Byrne of the Yankees. Boston’s 5–1 victory was paced by Williams, who hit a homer and a double to drive in two runs. He also stole a base and was walked three times, twice intentionally.

  The home run off Byrne was especially satisfying for Williams, since the New York pitcher delighted in needling Ted almost every time he faced him, trying to break his concentration. “Hey, Ted,” Byrne would say. “How’s the Boston press these days? Still screwing you? That’s a shame. I think you deserve better.… By the way, what are you hitting? You don’t know? Goddamn, Ted, the last time I looked it up it was .360 or something.” Or later, when he knew Williams was having marital problems, Byrne would bellow, “Ted, how’s the family?” Finally, Ted would turn to the catcher, Yogi Berra, and say, “Yogi, tell that son of a bitch to throw the ball!”34

  Boston’s win eliminated the Yankees, while in Cleveland, the Indians beat Detroit to maintain a one-game lead going into the final day. That meant the Red Sox needed to beat the Yankees and have Cleveland lose in order to tie the Indians. In the event of a tie, there would be a one-game playoff for the pennant in Boston.

  After the game, Joe DiMaggio drove with his brother Dominic to spend the night at Dominic’s home, in suburban Wellesley. The Red Sox center fielder was getting married on October 7, and his parents had flown in from San Francisco for a family dinner that night. The two brothers drove in silence. Joe was down because the Yankees had lost, but he was quiet and reserved under normal circumstances. Finally he turned to Dominic and said: “You knocked us out today, but we’ll get back at you tomorrow. We’ll knock you out. I’ll take care of it personally.” Dominic, who always played in Joe’s shadow, pondered that for a moment, then replied: “You’re forgetting I may have something to do with that tomorrow. I’ll be there too.”35

  Since Joe had already had such great success, his parents were openly rooting for Dom. As it happened, both brothers delivered the next day. Joe doubled to drive in the Yankees’ first run as New York jumped out to a 2–0 lead after two innings. Fans were dividing their attention between the game and the scoreboard, awaiting news from Cleveland, and roared in the second when they learned that the Tigers had scored four runs off Bob Feller. The Red Sox responded with five runs of their own, triggered by a Williams double. But Joe DiMaggio, despite being hobbled by his bad heel and a variety of other ailments, hit a double in the fifth, driving in two runs to bring the Yankees within one. Then Dominic, leading off the sixth, stroked a home run over the wall in left, igniting a pivotal four-run rally that gave the Red Sox a 9–4 cushion. Nevertheless, his brother didn’t give up, singling in a run in the seventh and banging out another single in the ninth. But by then it was 10–5, and Yankees manager Bucky Harris raised the white flag by sending in a pinch runner for the Clipper. As Joe limped off the field, the sellout crowd gave him a long standing ovation—a generous, spontaneous gesture that DiMaggio would later call the greatest thrill of his career. Dominic joined in the tribute, doffing his cap from center field as Joe entered the dugout.

  It had been another big game for Williams: two doubles and a sacrifice fly for two runs batted in and a walk. In the two Yankees games, he had reached base eight out of ten times. And the news remained good from Cleveland: the Tigers, behind Hal Newhouser, beat the Indians and the redoubtable Feller, 8–1, to force the playoff showdown in Boston on October 4.

  When the Red Sox arrived at Fenway the next day, they were shocked to learn that Joe McCarthy had selected Denny Galehouse, a journeyman right-hander nearing the end of an ordinary career, to pitch the most important game of the season. Mel Parnell, the left-hander who last had pitched on September 30, had expected to get the start, and Ellis Kinder, more rested, was generally thought to be the second choice. But McCarthy—in what remains one of the most controversial decisions a Red Sox manager has ever made, a decision that is still debated among old-timers and baseball aficionados—eschewed Parnell, Kinder, and the rest of his starting rotation in favor of Galehouse, a reliever who had warmed up in the bull pen for six innings the day before in the 10–5 win over the Yankees.

  Parnell wasn’t the only one stunned. “McCarthy would always put the ball under your cap in your locker,” Parnell explained. “That’s how you knew you were pitching. We only had three days’ rest back then. Finally McCarthy comes up to me and says, ‘Kid, I’ve changed my mind. The elements are against a left-hander today. The wind’s blowing out.’ The wind was blowing out, but hell, I pitched a lot of games at Fenway Park with the wind blowing out. So he told the clubhouse boy to go out and get Galehouse. Galehouse was white as a ghost. He was shocked.”36

  In the first inning, Indians player-manager Lou Boudreau homered over the left-field wall to take Cleveland to a 1–0 lead. The Sox tied it in the first, but the roof fell in on Galehouse in the fourth, when he gave up four runs, three of them on a homer by Ken Keltner, after which the Indians cruised to an 8–3 win. Boudreau got four hits, including another homer. Gene Bearden, a left-handed rookie knuckleballer who’d gone 20–7 in 1948 before fading away to mediocrity, easily kept the Sox, and Ted, in check, giving up only five hits. Williams could manage only a single in four trips to the plate, and he dropped a fly ball in the eighth inning that led to the seventh Cleveland run.

  McCarthy’s decision to start Galehouse dominated the postgame commentary, deflecting attention from the failure of Williams and other Sox hitters to deliver in the pinch against Bearden’s junky soft-serves. Ted hung around the clubhouse moping, waiting for the writers and almost everyone else to leave.

  Finally, he showered and dressed and was walking through the training room when McCarthy approached him.

  “Well, we fooled ’em, didn’t we?” the manager said.37

  “What do you mean, Joe?”

  “Well, they said you and I cou
ldn’t get along, but we got along pretty good, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, we did, Joe,” Ted replied.

  Williams won the batting title with a .369 average, and he had 25 homers, with 127 RBIs. Though he led the league in doubles and slugging percentage, critics noted that his home-run production was off sharply from his previous four years. Statistics maven Harold Kaese concluded that Ted had changed his swing too radically in order to beat the shift: “The Cleveland Indians won the pennant on July 14, 1946,” the day Lou Boudreau installed the shift, he wrote.38

  Boudreau was victorious in another way, too: he was the runaway winner of the American League MVP award. Ted finished third.

  En route to his fourth batting championship in 1948, Ted made an intriguing change in his pregame preparation. Open to hitting-related ideas from all comers (except the media) as he turned thirty and looked to maintain his edge, Williams tinkered with the care and maintenance of his bats on the advice of quite an unlikely source: fourteen-year-old David Pressman from Chelsea, Massachusetts, a gritty immigrant city located just across the Mystic River from Boston.

  Pressman loved baseball, which he played on the Chelsea sandlots, and he also had a scientific bent. One morning, after leaving his bat outside overnight, he noticed that it felt heavier and had less pop. He wondered if it had absorbed too much moisture from the damp ground. He went to the Chelsea post office to use the scales there and determined that his bat was two ounces heavier than it was when he kept it off the ground or when the weather was dry.

  In the spring of 1948, Pressman decided to see if he could dry the bat out artificially by warming it. His house was heated by a coal stove. He went home, stoked up the furnace, and baked the bat over the embers of the coals for a while. When he went out to hit with the bat the next day, he found it was “perfect,” and he returned to the post office scales to confirm that it had lost the two ounces it had gained from the moisture.

  Pressman wondered if his favorite ballplayer, Ted Williams, might like to know about the experiment he had conducted, which suggested that heating a bat could extract moisture from it, restore its original weight, and perhaps enhance its performance. He read an article in one of the Boston papers about Frank “Tabby” Ryan of Hillerich & Bradsby, the Louisville company that manufactured the famed Louisville Slugger used by most major leaguers.

  Pressman sat down and wrote to Ryan, the company’s representative to the Red Sox and other teams, laying out his theory, and asked him to pass his letter on to Williams. The boy wanted the letter to look official, so he borrowed the official stationery used by his father, a lawyer.

  “Next thing I knew, my father got a call from Ted himself, thinking it was my father who had given him the tip,” Pressman recalled. “My dad said, ‘You must want my kid. He’s in school. He’ll be home at two o’clock.’ When I got home, I got a call from Ted. He said, ‘That’s really interesting. Can you come to Fenway? We’re playing a doubleheader with the Tigers, and Virgil Trucks is pitching.’ ”

  Pressman’s discovery confirmed Williams’s views on the virtues of a lighter bat. He’d had an epiphany on the subject when he was playing for the Minneapolis Millers back in 1938 and borrowed teammate Stan Spence’s much lighter bat on a hot, muggy night in Columbus. He was tired, and Spence’s bat felt like a feather, as if it were made of soft balsa wood. But Ted hit a 410-foot home run to center field with it.

  When Williams broke into the majors, the big sluggers were all using heavy bats—between thirty-six and forty ounces. When Ted ordered lighter bats, John Hillerich, then the head of Hillerich & Bradsby, tried to talk him out of it. Ted insisted, arguing that the speed of his swing, its torque and whip, would generate more power than Hillerich’s heavier bats alone.39 A lighter bat also gave him more control. It allowed him to wait a fraction of a second longer before he committed to swinging at a pitch: if he could wait longer, he would not be fooled as often.

  Williams had made his first visit to the factory in Louisville in the spring of 1941, with Bobby Doerr. They arrived half an hour before the plant gate opened, and Ted couldn’t wait to get inside, examine the wood, and quiz the lathe operators who actually fashioned the bats from billets. He met an old-timer on the factory line named Fritz Bickel, who presented him with a choice billet from which he promised to construct a nice bat. Bickel pointed out that the wood had two knots in it, which helped make it harder. Ted gave Bickel $25 and would send him other gratuities over the ensuing years. Bickel would reciprocate by prowling the factory line looking for only the best wood for the Kid.40

  The doubleheader Ted invited young David Pressman to attend took place on June 6. Pressman had never been to Fenway Park, and by the time he arrived, after being delayed by public transportation, the second game had already started. “Ted had made arrangements for me, but I had to sit in the clubhouse and wait a while,” he recalled. “There was some leftover food. They gave me a tuna sandwich and a Coke. Ted came down during the game, and that’s when I showed him my bat, which I’d brought along for him to see. He looked at it and said, ‘This is a piece of shit.’

  “He said he’d be hitting next inning and to come up to the dugout then. One of the batboys came down to get me.” Pressman arrived in the dugout just in time to see Williams blast a home run off Fred Hutchinson. Then the next two batters, Stan Spence and Junior Stephens, also homered. “There were three home runs back-to-back,” Pressman said. “I never saw such excitement.” He saw Williams go 4–5 with a double and three RBIs as the Red Sox crushed the Tigers, 12–4.

  In the clubhouse after the game, Ted and the teenager talked hitting. They discussed what generated power: the speed of the pitch and the speed of the swing. Pressman, who said he had consulted with older acquaintances at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the physics of hitting, told Williams about a third factor in generating power: the principle of restitution, in which both the bat and the ball compress and then expand at impact. They discussed the wisdom of using narrow-grain wood in a bat to promote flexibility: the more grain lines there are in the bat, the more it can compress and expand.

  On the matter of heating the bat, Ted asked Pressman how he could do it. He didn’t have access to a coal stove the way David did. Pressman suggested putting his bats in the clubhouse clothes dryer with some towels wrapped around them so they didn’t bang around and get nicked up. (He had thought of the dryer idea beforehand because his uncle was in the dry cleaning business and once had the contract to clean the Red Sox uniforms.) Pressman advised Ted to check the bats every fifteen minutes and weigh them. When they stopped losing the weight they had gained from moisture, he should take them out of the dryer. Pressman said the Chelsea post office provided two scales for Williams to use. “When I told them the scales were for Ted, they sent them to him, no problem,” Pressman said. “He then experimented with the dried bats and called me afterwards and said, ‘This is incredible. This really works.’ He said he was hitting the ball harder and farther. I was not surprised, because I’d already done it.”

  Since there were no rules against drying bats in Williams’s day—and none today, for that matter—the practice was not cheating. Rather, it seemed to be an extension of the diligent and rigorous care with which Williams treated the tools of his trade. “I always worked with my bats, boning them down, putting a shine on them, forcing the fibers together,” Ted wrote in his autobiography.41 “Not just the handle—the whole bat. I treated them like babies. Weight tolerance got to be a big thing with me. The weight can change. Early in the season it’s cold and damp and the bats lying around on the ground pick up moisture and get heavier. I used to take them down to the post office to have them weighed. Eventually, with the Red Sox, we got a little set of scales put in the locker room.”

  In 1949, the year after he started heating his bats, Williams told Pressman he wanted to try to scientifically measure how much harder he was hitting the ball with a dried bat compared to a nondried bat. Pressman’s acquaintance
s at MIT said they could help.

  On a day when the Red Sox were off, the MIT people showed up at Fenway Park around ten in the morning and set up three instruments, two on tripods and one on the ground, just to the left of the batting cage. MIT had been the center of American radar research during World War II, and the instruments were precursors of the radar gun, which would be widely used in baseball years later. Williams stepped into the box against Joe Dobson, a hard-throwing right-hander. Ted told him to bring it. Even though there was a batting cage, Birdie Tebbetts, the Red Sox starting catcher, was behind the plate, Pressman recalled, perhaps to increase the efficiency of the exercise and to more quickly return the balls Williams didn’t swing at to Dobson.

  “He had four bats, two of which were heated, two not, and he had numbers on the knobs marking which was which,” Pressman remembered. “If he hit a ball on the screws, Ted would call out, ‘Measure that one.’ They would get the velocity results right away. There were very consistent findings of one hundred fifteen miles per hour for the nonheated bats versus one hundred and forty-eight for the heated bats.”*

  Pressman entered Harvard while continuing his interest in baseball. He got a key to Harvard’s indoor batting cage, and on rainy days Ted would call him and ask him to open up the facility early in the morning so he could come over and take batting practice. Williams would swing by Pressman’s dorm at Lowell House in his Cadillac and pick him up, in full uniform.