Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (23 page)

When he finally came up to his first major-league camp, Doerr traveled east with him. On the train, Williams practiced his swing in the aisles, not with bats but with the only thing available—pillows from the sleeping car. He was a boy living his dreams: All he could talk about on that trip was how exciting this was, arriving at the very precipice of the major leagues, and how he hoped to be not just a major-leaguer but a great hitter. “Bobby,” he kept telling Doerr, “I’m going to be the greatest hitter that ever lived.” To Doerr, there was something touching about his eagerness and his innocence. But to the veterans that spring, he seemed unbearably brash. He did not understand his own lowly position in the pecking order of a major-league team. As a result, veteran outfielders Doc Cramer, Joe Vosmik, and Ben Chapman ragged him hard. A story that made the rounds of the Red Sox camp that spring was that Doerr had told him, “Wait until you see Jimmie Foxx hit,” and Williams
had answered, “Wait until Foxx sees me hit.” Williams said later that the story was not true, but given his attitude at the time, it might as well have been. The first thing he said to Joe Cronin, the manager, was, “Hi, sport.” That, thought Doerr, guarantees him a ticket to the farm team in Minneapolis.

In his letters home that spring there was no brashness, only childlike wonder—he described the beauty of watching Grove pitch, the purity of his motion, and the explosive crack of the bat when Jimmie Foxx hit a ball, a sharper sound than he had ever before heard. He heard something similar later in his career when Mickey Mantle came along, Mantle being built along the same lines as Foxx. But he was not, somewhat to his surprise, destined to stay with the Boston club that season. Williams liked to tell of how he was at last sent back to the minors. Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse boy, escorted him to the bus station. As he prepared to board the bus, Williams turned to Orlando and told him to tell Cramer, Vosmik, and Chapman that he’d be back, and that he’d make more money playing baseball than all three of them put together. Then Orlando lent him five dollars to get to Daytona.

When he finally arrived in the major leagues a year later, Williams was only twenty years old. He became the first rookie ever to lead the league in runs batted in, with 145; and he hit .327, with 31 home runs. It was a breathtaking debut, and it was overshadowed only by DiMaggio, who, in his fourth year, hit .381. Williams was absolutely fearless. On one of his first trips to St. Louis with the Red Sox, he and Doerr ran into Fred Haney, the new Browns manager, whom they both knew from the Pacific League. Haney said to Williams, “Hey kid, we’ll see how you hit today sitting on your ass.” Williams and Doerr both laughed because they thought of Haney as a friend. But the first time Williams came up, the ball whizzed in right at his head. Williams dropped to the ground. His very career, he knew, was
at stake. He picked himself up and very deliberately dug his left foot even deeper into the ground. Then he hit the next pitch against the right center-field fence for a double. The next time up, the pitcher knocked him down once more. Again, very slowly, he got up and planted his back foot deep into the dirt. Focusing fiercely on the pitcher, he hit the next pitch into the right-field seats. With that the knockdowns stopped. It was, thought Doerr, as if some tribal drumbeat went through the entire league: Whatever you do, don’t throw at this kid; if you do, he’ll kill you.

The first time Lefty Gomez pitched against him in Yankee Stadium, it was said that Williams hit a tremendous home run that landed about a third of the way into the deep right center-field seats. Gomez went back to the dugout, where Red Ruffing accosted him. “What’d you throw him?” he asked. “My fastball,” said the deflated Gomez. “I’ll be damned if he’ll hit my fastball that hard,” Ruffing said.

The next day Ruffing pitched Williams a fastball, and it landed
two
thirds of the way up into the right center-field seats. “Just as long as it wasn’t a fastball,” Gomez needled him when they got back to the dugout.

Williams was emotional, and his mood on any given day was directly keyed to how well he has hitting. Lou Stringer, the backup second baseman in 1949, felt he could gauge Williams’s attitude during batting practice. If he was hitting poorly, he would be down, and he would take extra batting practice. Pitch by pitch, as he found his groove, his body and his spirits would lift, like a man climbing stairs, Stringer thought. Once when he had finished hitting, Stringer turned to him and said, “Ted, you look great.” Williams replied, “You’re goddamned right! Did you see that wrist action? Did you see that swing? You see that power? I’m the best goddamn hitter in the world, kid, and you better believe it, the best goddamn hitter who ever lived!”

In 1941, the year he hit .406, he constantly took batting
practice with Joe Dobson. Williams wanted not just to hit every pitch but to call it as well. Often they would argue over whether a pitch was in the strike zone, and if Williams hit one to right field, they would argue whether it was an out, a single, or a double. Williams would never give an inch. He wanted nothing less than the best batting-practice average in the history of the game. Even in the locker room he competed. There was a small spittoon filled with sand there, and he liked to bet that he could cast a fly into it eight times out of ten. “Just eight out of ten,” he would say, “any bets?”

Richard Ben Cramer noted with great shrewdness in
Esquire
that Williams sought fame but could not deal with its fellow traveler, celebrity. Even worse, he had unfortunately picked the most difficult city in America in which to grow up in public. Boston’s newspapering in the late forties and into the late fifties was probably the worst of any major city in America. It specialized in sensationalism, parochialism, prejudice, and ignorance. The Boston tabloid headline in the event of World War III, the standard joke went, would be
HUB MAN WITNESSES/ ATOMIC BLAST/ IS LIGHTLY BURNED/ 20 MILLION DEAD.
The competition was venomous, and to visiting players, there seemed to be twice as many writers in Boston as anywhere else. “They ought to put numbers on their backs,” Williams once said. “There’s so many of them it’s the only way you could figure out who they were.”

Williams, a young brash kid with rabbit ears, was raw meat to the Boston writers, and in terms of press relations his behavior was often wildly self-destructive. The makings of a war were there. Soon the papers divided between the reporters who liked Williams and those who pursued him relentlessly. The latter might not have practiced good journalism, but it was a living.

In a culture of journalistic scoundrels, the greatest scoundrel of them all was Dave Egan, a columnist for the Hearst tabloid the
Record.
Egan was known as the Colonel, though
it was not known whether he had ever actually been a colonel in anything, least of all the United States armed forces. He was a man of immense talents, considered by many to be the most gifted sports columnist in Boston, but he was also locked in a terrible battle with alcohol, a battle he never won. Gentle and kind when sober, he became, when drinking, a monster, a man with the foulest tongue imaginable. He was nothing if not shrewd, and he soon hit upon the perfect formula, which enabled him to be. distinctive: He became, in an age when most sportswriters were fans, the provocateur. What everyone else was for, he was against. Did Boston celebrate the triumphs of its young undefeated heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano? Well, then Egan ripped him.

What he did, especially to Williams, was not pleasant for anyone who cares about the American press. His coverage amounted to a vendetta. He knew exactly which buttons to push with this sensitive young man. He loved to claim that Williams was not a clutch hitter, and was, in Egan’s cruel phrase, “the inventor of the automatic choke.” There was little real evidence of this, but Egan cleverly picked what
he
considered the ten most important games of Williams’s life (playoff games, World Series games, etc.) to show that Williams hit only .232 at such critical moments. Though no two games had been more important than the two final regular-season games against the Yankees in 1948, in which Williams had been on base eight of ten times, Egan declined to include them in his stress test. That Williams carried his team for weeks against pitchers who never gave him a decent pitch, that pitchers vastly preferred to walk Williams and pitch to Junior Stephens, did not matter.

What Dave Egan did was brutal and relentless. But it worked. Each day New Englanders
had
to read what the Colonel had written about Williams. “I knew New England well,” Birdie Tebbetts once reminisced. “I didn’t just grow up there, but I lived there off-season and I knew what happened
in New England—I knew that in every small town throughout the region there would be people waiting in the early morning for the delivery of the
Record
so they could read the Colonel.”

Part of it was sheer talent: At his best he was the most outrageous and talented writer in Boston. He had a nickname for everyone. Fiorello La Guardia was “The Little Flower with the Big Pot”; a local fight promoter named Sam Silverman, who used a variety of small local arenas, was “Subway Sam.” He kept up a running feud with Jim Britt, who for a long time broadcast the Red Sox games. “Meathead Britt,” he called him on occasion. In honor of Britt’s valiant but doomed efforts to maximize the thinning hair at the front of his head, Egan also called him “The Tuft.” On one occasion he wrote of Britt, “He’s putting in his car what he should be drinking, and he’s drinking what he should be putting in his car.”

As Egan and a few other writers provoked, so Williams responded. Soon the fans understood, at least subconsciously, that it was fun to ride Williams because he would react to their taunts. If they went to Fenway, sat in the left-field stands, and diligently baited him, they became momentarily his equals. This was a forerunner to the more complicated relationships of the seventies and eighties among young, talented, and highly paid superstars, the press, and their fans.

The senior executives at the
Record
were warned by their lawyers that Egan’s writings were so vitriolic and personal that Williams had, with the tighter libel laws of those days, cause for a libel action. “I wouldn’t give those bastards the satisfaction of a lawsuit,” Williams told friends.

Egan was often too drunk to write his column, and had to be taken to his favorite drying-out home, Dropkick Murphy’s (where he was known to smuggle in his own bottles). A group of younger men at the
Record
would cover for him. Egan would call one of them and begin, “Ted Williams
today outdid himself ...” Then there would be a pause, and Egan would say, “Ah, the hell with it, Bill, you fill in the rest.” Soon management became suspicious, and the job of faking it became more complicated. Sammy Cohen, the sports editor, would order the others to make it seem like they were taking dictation from Egan over the telephone while an executive of the paper stood nearby. This called for high theatrics. The writer actually had to write the column while faking a conversation with Egan: “Yes, Dave ... Wait a second, Dave, you’re ahead of me. ... Oh, great, Dave, that’s great stuff. ... Wait ’til Ted reads this one. ...”

Egan had graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He first took a job as a lawyer in one of Boston’s grand firms for ten dollars a week. When he was told that he was not entitled to a paid vacation, he walked out of the world of law and into the world of sportswriting. Egan worked at several Boston papers, and his reputation always preceded him. Editors hired him hoping that they could somehow live with his darker side—the whiskey-fed rages, the disappearances, the hiding of forbidden whiskey bottles in the men’s room—because of his talent. But eventually they would decide reluctantly that they could not.

The
Record
was Egan’s last stop. Hardly Boston’s most prestigious paper, its formula was simple: sex scandals, racing results, and baseball. Its extraordinary efforts, channeled almost exclusively into these areas, brought the paper a circulation of around 500,000, but it did not bring it peer respect. George Frazier, a Boston writer who worked for the
Globe
for much of his career, once noted of the
Record
and its successor, the
Record American,
“When I went to the
Record-American
as a columnist I was aware that its devotees moved their lips while they read. What I did not realize was that its editors did too.” It was engaged in a never-ending circulation war with other, richer papers. Once Mel Parnell, the Boston pitcher, cornered Egan after a game and asked why he had to be so
personal
in his criticism. Egan
replied, “Kid, it isn’t personal—I’m just selling newspapers.” When another Boston writer criticized Egan, the Colonel asked, “How much mail do you get?” A few letters a week, the writer answered. “I get a barrelful every week,” Egan said, “most of them telling me what a bastard I am. But they write. Maybe they’re right—but I’m the bastard they write to.”

There were those who thought things easily might have gone the other way: that had Williams taken Egan in, made him his insider, then Egan would have celebrated Williams. Williams’s failure to play that game cost him dearly.

That spring, with Boston losing but Williams hitting well, Egan came down on him regularly. He was, Egan wrote in a late-April column, hitting but not the way he used to—his power had disappeared. Soon that was followed by a column attacking Williams for his alleged jealousy toward Junior Stephens. Williams, it appeared to Egan, did not congratulate Stephens enthusiastically enough upon the occasion of Junior’s home runs. Williams would walk, Egan wrote, “stonily” to the bench, “looking more displeased than otherwise, and it must be obvious that victory in itself, however melodramatically won by others, is not important; that his personal role in the victory is the all-important consideration, and that defeat with him starring is preferable to victory when he must stand in the shadow of another.” (If anything, Stephens was somewhat envious of Williams, or more particularly of his salary, which was double his own. From time to time he would complain to teammates. “Junior,” Joe Dobson once asked him, “there are thirty-five thousand people out there today. How many are here only because Junior Stephens is playing?”)