America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (40 page)

Williams returned to the United States on July 9, 1953. He received a thunderous ovation when he threw out the first pitch at the All-Star Game on July 14. He had missed his favorite companion. As he told reporters, he had touched a bat just once during his entire time in Korea, when he and Lloyd Merriman—a pilot who, before he started shooting at Communists, patrolled center field for the Cincinnati Reds—gave their fellow Marines a brief demonstration of how the game was played.

On July 28, Williams was released from the military. That same day, he returned to Fenway Park, where he took batting practice several hours before a scheduled game. He wowed the couple of hundred onlookers by knocking nine straight balls out of the park. Afterward, when he ran into Sox GM Joe Cronin, he yelled, “What’d you do to the fucking plate while I was gone?” Something was wrong, Williams insisted. A few days later, the surveyor who checked out the batter’s box determined that the dish was off by an inch.

Williams got into his first game at the end of August. “He don’t look like he used to,” Yogi Berra said after Williams feasted on Yankee pitching in a Labor Day doubleheader. “He looks better.” In his 91 at bats, the revered elder statesman—Achilles had morphed into Nestor—would hit .407 with an astonishing 13 long balls. (Except for Barry Bonds in 2001, no player has ever hit that many homers per at bat over the course of a full season.) Despite his abbreviated season, Williams came in a close second in the voting for Comeback Player of the Year.

While Williams and lumber reconnected quickly—once again, he was always toting a bat around, swinging it and measuring it—he and Doris were done. In January 1954, she petitioned for a separation. According to a widely circulated UPI story, Doris charged him with beating her, making her life “an impossible burden,” and using “language that was profane, abusive and obscene.” Another stress on the marriage, which ended in divorce the following year, as biographer Leigh Montville has reported, was that the sexually hyperactive Williams had come down with “a social disease” while in Korea. The shame associated with this secret may well account for why the foul-mouthed Williams later turned to
syphilitic
as his epithet of choice.

For the man who had grown up without any intimate attachments, nothing was more horrifying than monogamy. As Doris told the press at the time of her divorce, “I don’t think he ever wanted to be married.” Even when living with Doris in Boston during the season, Williams would arrange for some getaway time in local hotels. After they split up, he became the incarnation of the “swinging bachelor” made popular by the recently launched
Playboy
magazine. He was infinitely more discriminating about the pitches he swung at than about the women he slept with. Just about anyone would do—at least for the very short term. At autograph shows, he wouldn’t hesitate to print his Boston address—“Room 231, Hotel Somerset”—next to his signature before passing back the baseball to any woman he found appealing.

For companionship, as opposed to sex, he turned elsewhere. One might be tempted to argue that just as the adolescent Kinsey bonded with bugs, the adult Williams took to fish; but ever since his days in North Park, he much preferred the inanimate over the animate. By the late 1950s, he was a devoted and talented fisherman; yet catching (and releasing), as opposed to collecting, was what he was after. His goal was a thousand each of “the Big Three”—tarpon, bonefish, and salmon—and he dutifully recorded his progress in his log books. His closest bonds were with his flies—Mr. Meticulous was constantly inventing and tying his own, an activity that he dubbed “the pièce de résistance”—and with his fishing rods. Like bats, these tools, which he kept in neatly organized collections, could also provide comfort. Late in his career, after taking a called third strike, a disgusted Williams flung his bat into the stands in Fenway Park, accidentally hitting his manager’s housekeeper in the head. Before going out to dinner that night, he calmed down by sequestering himself in his room at the Somerset Hotel for an hour, tying flies. Yet even with his fishing paraphernalia, sudden breakups were not rare. If a big fish managed to swim away with his lure, Williams might smash his rod in two, yelling, “Here, you lousy son of a bitch,” before tossing the alleged offender into the water, adding, “Take that, too.”

The Red Sox teams during his last years were terrible, but Williams continued to excel at the plate. In his first full season after Korea, Williams won the batting title with a .345 average. In 1957, the ageless wonder not only hit .388; he also banged out 38 homers. The hittingologist attributed his surprising .388, which, as the years went on, he was even more proud of than the .406, to a series of experiments. After the previous season, he had Hillerich’s send him a couple of extra-heavy bats weighing about 60 ounces, which he kept swinging all winter. And that spring, he officially switched to a 34½-ounce bat, two ounces heavier than the one he had been using. As the weather got warm, he went back to hitting with a slightly lighter bat. “I never hit the ball harder,” he later recalled, “than that year.”

Everything clicked in 1957. On two occasions, he hit three homers in the same game, the first American League player ever to do so. In mid-September, after missing a couple of weeks with pneumonia, the perfectionist hit four homers in his first four official times at bat, en route to a remarkable streak in which he reached base safely (on a walk or hit) in sixteen consecutive plate appearances. Later that month, Red Sox clubhouse attendant Johnny Orlando told the
Globe
that “practice is everything to Williams.… When Ted was sick
recentl
y…he takes it [an extra-heavy bat] back into his room and he’s practicing swinging it while he’s sick.”

The following year, Williams again won the batting title; he got five hits on the last weekend of the season to pass teammate Pete Runnels and finish at .328. In 1959, bothered by a pinched nerve in his neck, Williams hit a fully mortal .254 (the only time he fell below .300). In 1960, the forty-two-year-old rebounded by hitting .316 with 29 homers and 72 RBIs as a part-time player; that final year, his home-run percentage was 9.4, the highest of his career.

In February of 1969, baseball, as the
New York Times
sports columnist Arthur Daley observed, got “a shot of Adrenalin.” The Kid—with Williams incapable of growing up, the old moniker still applied—was back in the game.

To keep pace with the Washington Redskins, who had excited the capital’s sports fans by hiring the legendary Vince Lombardi as their head coach, Bob Short, the new owner of the Washington Senators, snagged the retired Sox star, the biggest name he could get, as his manager. The price was steep; the Hall of Famer landed the biggest contract ever given to a field general, a five-year deal, which, with stock options, was worth more than $1 million.

Since his final at bat, the monomaniacal loner had not done much but fish. Back in 1960, he had signed a contract with Sears Roebuck to test and market hunting and fishing gear; as a sales rep, he no longer needed to put in too many hours to pick up his one hundred grand (roughly the same salary as he earned from the Sox in his final years). Also appointed a Red Sox VP after his retirement, he did little for the team but tutor hitters at spring training, an assignment that he gave up in 1967 when he abruptly left its spring-training camp in Winter Haven after just a couple of days. “Ted was a helluva hitter, but a pain in the ass. He disrupted my camp,” recalled the late Dick Williams, the Sox manager that year, in a phone interview in early 2011. A disciplinarian who ran a tight ship, the skipper of the pennant-winning “Impossible Dream” Team complained that the retired star “kept corralling my pitchers to pick their brains about hitting.”

While Ted Williams had nothing but contempt for the other segment of the baseball fraternity—“The only thing dumber than a fucking pitcher,” he would bark out, “is two fucking pitchers”—he rarely could resist the temptation to discuss his favorite subject. The new Sox manager may have actually felt less annoyed by his jabbering than threatened by his very presence. Ted Williams had twice turned down the Sox job, and when Dick Williams was signed, several Boston scribes protested, “It’s the wrong Williams.”

As Ted Williams headed to the Senators’ spring-training facility in Pompano Beach, the
Boston Globe
described his hiring as the “most exciting off-field event” since the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Dodgers in 1946. His charisma generated buzz, but so, too, did his unpredictability. “Manage twenty-five men,” mused the paper, “heck, he can’t even manage himself.”

Facing a barrage of reporters for the first time in nearly a decade, Williams declared that he was up for the challenge. “I still love fishing,” insisted the fifty-year-old, who no longer qualified as a Splinter, as his weight was up to 230 pounds. “But I found that I had fished most places already. Peru, Alaska, Costa Rica, Nova Scotia. It was time for something new.”

He also had a new family to support. About a year earlier, the still handsome and imposing Williams had married Dolores Wettach, a former Miss Vermont, nearly two decades his junior. In March 1964, just as he was divorcing wife number two, Lee Howard, after only two and a half years of marriage, he and the
Vogue
model both happened to be flying back to America from Down Under in the same first-class cabin. He began the conversation by popping spitballs that folded out into notes in her direction—a first move that reflected both his crudeness and his charm—and several hours later, after a dinner in San Francisco, they were in the sack.

In the aspiring actress, who had just missed landing the part of Bond girl Pussy Galore in
Goldfinger
, Williams was looking for an occasional squeeze; only after she accidentally became pregnant did he start thinking about tying the knot. His first son, John Henry, was born in August 1968; a daughter, Claudia, would follow in 1971. “Dolores was a beauty,” said Senators slugger Mike Epstein, who recalled a lunch when Williams hurled Dolores’s plate against the wall. “He had picked at her salad, and she had told him, ‘Just take it.’ You never knew what was going to set him off.” As Dolores once put it, “Ted can be a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde.” The inevitable divorce came in 1973.

The Washington Senators team inherited by Williams was pathetic. The players, with a few notable exceptions, such as All-Star outfielder Frank Howard, were a bunch of rejects. In its previous eight seasons, the expansion club had never won more than 76 games. In 1968, the Senators had finished in tenth place, 37½ games out of first, and had drawn just 547,000 fans, less than half the league average. With expectations low, Williams would feel free to manage the team exactly as he saw fit. What did he have to lose?

“I may turn out to be a horseshit manager,” he told the press, “but I’m going to try.” To fix all that ailed the Senators, Williams devised a simple cure: he would steep his players in his own obsessions.

On day one in Florida, the man who had practiced his swing more than just about anyone else who had ever lived (with the possible exception of Hall of Famer Ty Cobb) set up extralong batting practice sessions. Hitting was first and foremost on the agenda. “Early in camp, the infielders were practicing a pickle play [a drill in which infielders throw to each other to catch a would-be runner trapped between the bases],” Mike Epstein told me. “The coaches were arguing about how to conduct it properly. Williams comes out of the dugout and says, ‘What’s this all about? Fuck it, let’s hit.’” The paragon of patience at the plate also emphasized concentration in the chess game between batter and pitcher. “What the hell are you thinking about up there, bush?” he would ask his players.

Williams identified as candidates for special tutelage the power hitters Frank “Hondo” Howard and Mike Epstein. The six-foot-seven, 290-pound Howard, then thirty-two, had been a solid hitter for nearly a decade, but Williams sensed that he was capable of being great. Cutting to the chase, the new manager asked the All-Star outfielder about his previous year’s stats: “How can a guy hit 44 home runs but get only 48 bases on balls?” He accused Howard of going after “that first little swifty,” the first fastball that he saw. Eagerly taking the medicine, “Hondo” told reporters that spring, “Repetition is the most important part of learning to hit.” The effects would be dramatic. That season, Howard’s average jumped from .274 to .296, his walk total nearly doubled, and his on-base percentage jumped from .340 to .402. Howard also had career highs in both homers, 48, and slugging percentage, .574. Epstein, who turned twenty-six that April, had been a minor-league MVP but had yet to do anything in the majors. In 1969, the six-foot-three, 230-pound, left-handed hitter, who reminded Williams of himself, would have his best year, hitting .278 with 30 homers. His on-base percentage was .416, up nearly 100 points from 1968. “Learning the mental side of the game from Williams,” stated Epstein, who today passes down his former manager’s lessons at his hitting school in Colorado, “was a phenomenal experience.”

Williams also worked wonders for several other Senator hitters, even Eddie “Wimpy” Brinkman, his six-foot, 170-pound, great-field, no-hit shortstop. In his previous eight seasons, all with the Senators, the once promising twenty-eight-year-old, who had hit .460 while playing high school ball with Pete Rose in Cincinnati—most scouts considered him the better prospect—had been a nonentity at the plate. In 1968, Brinkman, whose career high was stuck at .229, hit an embarrassing .187. In camp, the manager who carried a bat on the bench at all times (“something to hold on to”) insisted that Brinkman also take his bat with him wherever he went. And that spring, Williams taught his shortstop to choke up and slap the ball to all parts of the field. “Williams,” Brinkman later recalled, “beat it into my head what I had to do.” By the All-Star game, Brinkman was batting .287 with a team-leading 102 hits; he would finish at a respectable .266, his career high.

As a rule, Williams encouraged his players by telling them that with hard work and concentration, anyone could be successful; however, he could also be brutally honest. When the light-hitting second-baseman Tim Cullen once asked for reassurance, Williams fired back, “Timmy, you’re one of the dumbest fucking hitters I’ve ever seen in my life.” With the exception of Cullen, who hit .209 in 1969 and was soon out of baseball, Williams’s batters thrived. In 1969, the team hit .251, up from .224 in 1968; while the Senators’ walks went up from 9 to 11 per 100 at bats, their strikeouts dipped down from 18 to just 6 per 100 at bats.