Sunday, July 07, 2002
Memories of an American original
He left game in his own style
Enquirer staff and news services
His farewell might be epic. But it absolutely wouldn't be emotional; Ted Williams was making sure of that.
The year had been a campaign of atonement, Williams wanting to prove that his dismal .254 average in 1959, after which he demanded that the Red Sox cut his salary an unprecedented 28 percent, from $125,000 to $90,000, had been an aberration.
He would end with an .316 average and 29 home runs that defied his age, 42.
He had focused on his hard-edged quest, and he didn't have time for such nonsense as sunset tours. Thus, it hadn't been announced until three days before the game that Williams would not return for another season.
Wanting to do something, the team had slapped together a patchwork ceremony that in truth was almost an afterthought.
Williams spoke for all of three sentences, the third being “Thank you,” a model of brevity in which he managed to express his affection for Tom Yawkey as the best owner in baseball, his appreciation of the Boston fans as America's finest, and his contempt for the media, whom he had scornfully dubbed the Knights of the Keyboard.
That was the extent of the goodbye, as witnessed by a dreary crowd of 10,454 on a Wednesday afternoon. But, as always, Williams saved his real passion and elan for what transpired on the diamond.
Though it was unknown at the time, he had a special reason for wanting to hit career home run No. 521 (third at the time on the career list behind Red Sox forebears Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx) on this day. There were no flourishes in the first inning as Orioles lefthander Steve Barber — born in 1939, Williams's rookie season in the majors — issued him a four-pitch walk, and the old man eventually slid home on a sacrifice fly, the last time he would hit the dirt at Fenway.
In short order, Barber gave way to another 21-year-old, Jack Fisher. In the third inning, Williams got a little too much under a pitch and lofted a fly to center.
Moments later, there was an announcement in the press box: After the game, Williams's No. 9 would be retired. That meant Williams would retire along with it; that he wouldn't accompany the team to Yankee Stadium; that this wasn't merely his last Fenway game, it was his last game, period. The belated, understated notification was Williams's final attempt to sabotage the schmaltz.
His remaining at-bats took on greater historical importance. In the fifth, Williams just missed supplying the crowning touch, driving right fielder Al Pilarcik to the bullpen wall, where he stabbed the line shot. That left one more try. It came in the eighth, just after Willie Tasby had led off with a grounder to shortstop. Acknowledging that this was it, the crowd gave Williams a two-minute ovation as he stepped into the lefthanded batter's box.
On the 1-and-1 pitch, Williams produced. He launched a 440-foot bomb that caromed off the canopy atop the bench in the Red Sox bullpen. Home run No. 521.
Williams supported AL's 1st black player
Ballplayers would leave their gloves in the field back then and so it was that Larry Doby found himself jogging across the Fenway green with his chin tucked tight and his eyes locked on the tool of his trade, converting from offense to defense while one Red Sox star was converting from foe to friend.
“Congratulations,” Ted Williams said as he passed by. “Good luck.”
As the first black man allowed to compete in the American League, Doby would be scorned by players with half of Williams' skill, and by players every bit as grand. Joe DiMaggio wouldn't so much as say hello. He wouldn't ever acknowledge Doby's presence, even when the two were old and gray and crossing paths in the offices of major-league baseball in the years before DiMaggio's death.
“He completely ignored me,” Doby said. “Joe DiMaggio never talked to me, and I don't have time for people like that.
“Ted Williams? To me he represented everything baseball should be about. He showed that baseball is the all-American game.”
The obituaries are calling Williams The Kid, Terrible Ted, Teddy Ballgame, The Splendid Splinter, The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. From his New Jersey home yesterday, Larry Doby called him a friend and adviser at a time when White America had them in short supply.
“With everything I had to go through, Ted made things much easier for me,” Doby said. “We used to talk about hitting; Ted loved to talk about hitting. We'd get into Boston and I wouldn't be swinging the bat too well and I'd say, "Ted, I'm having a few problems. Can you help?'
“He'd watch me in batting practice or right in the middle of the game, and tell me things I was doing wrong even though he was on the other team. I mean, I'd come out of the Negro Leagues and Ted Williams and Josh Gibson were the greatest hitters I ever saw. And Ted wasn't just nice to me to get publicity or anything. He was nice to me because that's the way he was.”
Hometown San Diego shaped a slugger
He used to be embarrassed to be seen on its streets, hiding behind the bass drum while his mother, May, footsoldier in the Salvation Army, shook her tambourine and asked passersby for nickels.
But when he came back, decades later, to see one of those streets renamed Ted Williams Parkway, Ted Williams expressed the wish that he had come back long ago to reclaim his home, where he is regarded with some of the same fondness he has known in Boston.
San Diego remembered Williams, erecting a statue of him swinging a bat in the city's Hall of Champions, inviting him to throw out the first pitch at the 1992 All-Star Game, and proclaiming Ted Williams Day.
On that day, city officials renamed after him the playground and high school fields on which he played, as well as state highway 56, near a spot where the famous native son once hunted jackrabbits and quail.
And Williams remembered San Diego. On loan at the Hall of Champions are his MVP plaques from 1946 and '49, one of his triple crown trophies, and the Medal of Freedom he was given by President Bush in 1991. He returned for his 50th reunion at Hoover High School in 1987, for the dedication of the playground field at North Park Recreation Center in 91, and for the All-Star Game in 1992.
And in 1966, in the speech he gave at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., upon his induction, Williams singled out two San Diegans for their impact on his life: Rod Luscomb, the playground director whom Williams used to follow around for hours at a time; and Wofford “Wos” Caldwell, his high school coach.
Caldwell also was present when Williams opened his Hitters Hall of Fame in Hernando, Fla.
“My high school coach used to get me between first and second, you know,” Williams said. “I couldn't run good, because I was all arms and legs and tried to get going.
“And by the time I got between third and home, he was hitting me in the butt with a stick. That was the kind of coach he was.”
Squabbles with scribes
The conflict between Ted Williams and the reporters who wrote about him for Boston's newspapers began almost from the time he arrived as a teenage rookie and continued for more than two decades, to his last game and beyond.
And when Williams's anger spilled over onto the fans, on those occasions when he spit toward the stands and made obscene gestures, he often blamed the media afterward for poisoning the atmosphere. “Despite the many disagreeable things said about me by the "knights of the keyboard' — and I can't help thinking about them,” the Boston Globe quoted Williams as saying in a pregame ceremony at Fenway Park on Sept. 28, 1960, the day he ended his career with a home run in his last at bat.
“Despite these things, my stay in Boston has been the most wonderful thing in my life. If I were asked where I would like to have played, I would have had to say Boston with the greatest owner in baseball and greatest fans in America.”
Globe reporter Harold Kaese wrote in a Sport Magazine piece titled “Why We Pick on Ted Williams,” “In Boston, a man does not qualify as a baseball writer until he has psychoanalyzed Ted Williams.”
Michael Seidel, the Columbia University professor and author of Ted Williams: A Baseball Life, wrote that Williams was “rarely careful of tongue or gesture; he was by turns motormouthed and abrupt. His exuberance was one symptom of a mercurial attention span. If he was too good a hitter for the Red Sox to ignore, he was too good a subject for the press to coddle.”
And Williams found it impossible to ignore or forget what was written about him.
“I was never able to be dispassionate, to ignore the things people said or wrote or implied,” Williams wrote in his autobiography, “My Turn At Bat,” coauthored by John Underwood. “It just wasnt in me.”
Went to bat for Shoeless Joe
One of Ted Williams' final ambitions in life was getting Shoeless Joe Jackson eligible for the Hall of Fame. Jackson had a .356 batting average and was considered one of the greatest players of his time, but was banned for life from baseball - and the Hall — after being involved in the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
Even in his final days, Jackson, who never made an error and had a record 12 hits along with a .375 average in the 1919 World Series, vowed he had never done anything to change the outcome of those games. Williams took up the cause in the late '90s after researching the former hitting star - who many had compared him to during his playing days - for several decades.
“Ever since he died (in 1951) I started reading about him,” Williams told Florida Today in one of his final, rare in-depth interviews in July, 1998.
“Then they started making documentaries and movies about him and the first thing I knew ...”
Williams returned to the national limelight late in life, for a brief period, to try to get Jackson eligible for the Hall. He pointed out Pete Rose was convicted of a crime, while Jackson never was.
“Pete Rose went through the due process. He was found guilty,” Williams said. “(Jackson) wasn't even guilty in the court of law and he spent the rest of his life outside of baseball.”
Williams appeared in an HBO special. He called senators, baseball executives, even presidents on Jackson's behalf. He pushed baseball's Veteran Committee hard to consider Jackson. He even traveled coast-to-coast, despite failing health even then, to make special appearances to state Shoeless Joe's case.
Jackson was one of seven players to hit .400 (.408 in 1911) while Williams was the last (.406 in 1941). Williams even included Jackson in his own Hitters Hall of Fame in Hernando, with a complete display of his uniform.
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Memories of an American original