The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (16 page)

If he failed to hit, he’d make a flippant, nonsensical remark; he’d question why he was fooling around playing baseball in the first place or say he probably should quit and get a real job.

Not all Ted’s outrageous remarks were reported at the time. In a 1959 article reflecting on Williams’s career, Bill Cunningham, who in 1938 wrote for the
Boston Post
and was considered the city’s leading sports columnist, said he witnessed an early Ted rant during that brief spring training stint in Sarasota. Spotting a gaggle of writers and photographers on one side of the clubhouse interviewing some of the veteran players, Ted said, to no one in particular, and in a loud voice: “What are all the writers and photographers doing down there around those old men?” Cunningham wrote. “Why aren’t some of ’em up here looking at some real ball players?” Earlier, when Ted had tried to approach the irascible Lefty Grove as if he were a long-lost friend—“How are ya, Lefty, old kid?”—Grove brushed the upstart back: “Better not fool with me or you’ll get hurt.”
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Now Williams unloaded. “From what that old Lefty Grove showed me out there today he couldn’t pitch third string in the Coast League.”

Bobby Doerr had tried to tell Ted on the trip across country how great Jimmie Foxx was. “I said to Ted, ‘Wait til you see Foxx hit these shots.’ Ted said, ‘Yeah, wait til he sees
me
hit.’ Ted was impressive, but he was an excitable kid.”
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Now Williams let loose on the man who would become the second player in Major League Baseball history to hit five
hundred home runs, beaten only by Babe Ruth. “And what’s so hot about this Foxx? I’ve been reading about him, and expected to see something, but I hit three balls out there today farther than anything he got hold of. But you can’t expect any sense from writers. They’re all alike. They don’t know anything. They try to tell you how to play, when they never played themselves. It’s the same on the Coast. I thought it might be different over here.”
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Furthermore, Williams continued to radiate his indifference to fielding. He did his “Hi-yo, Silver, away!” routine while chasing balls in the outfield. Cronin once caught him swinging his imaginary bat in the outfield and shouted to him, “Hey, Bush, never mind practicing this [mimicking a swing]; practice this [bending to scoop up a ground ball].” And Doc Cramer gave up trying to teach Ted how to play the outfield after a few days. “They wanted me to teach Williams how to field up there,” Cramer told writer Peter Golenbock. “Ted said, ‘They ain’t paying me to field. I’m going to get paid for hitting. The hell with this.’ You couldn’t do much with him. I did help him a little bit. He couldn’t catch a ground ball. Used to go right between his legs.”
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In one brief introspective passage in his book, Ted chalked up some of his bizarre behavior in Sarasota to the fact that he was “a kid away from home, really for the first time in his life, feeling alone, a little scared and seeking attention.”
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On March 21, the Red Sox made it official and announced that Ted was being optioned out to Minneapolis. Though his departure was inevitable, Ted had perhaps hastened it by again calling an unamused Cronin “Sport” the day before.
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Ted was given a bus ticket and told to join the Millers at their training camp across the state, in Daytona Beach. Johnny Orlando remembered escorting the Kid to the bus stop. Orlando, ever the Williams apologist, thought the older players had been overly harsh on the rookie from the outset, riding him almost immediately with barbs like “Hey, Kid, how you gonna like it back in the minors?”

“It wasn’t like it is today,” Orlando said. “A veteran will help a rookie now. Those days, they gave him the short end of the stick. They really got under his skin. They irritated him until he finally blew his stack. He really let loose the day he got his walking papers back to the minors. ‘I’ll be back and I’ll make more money in one year than the three of you combined!’ ” Ted shouted at Chapman, Vosmik, and Cramer. Then Williams asked Orlando how much he thought each of the veterans made. Orlando guessed $12,000, maybe $15,000.

Then Orlando asked him how much money he had. Ted didn’t answer directly, but said he had enough. “So I told him, ‘Kid, I got a finif [$5]. I’ll split it with you. That’ll buy you a good steak. Just go out and have a good year. You’ve got a lot of time coming up for you in the big leagues.’ ”
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Chapman later laughed off Ted’s parting shot at Vosmik, Cramer, and himself: “It didn’t bother me. I took it with a grain of salt. He was a young kid. Let him have his fun.” But what had seemed like a spiteful outburst would turn out to be not just petulance but prophecy: “What he said came true. You can’t condemn him. That guy was one of the greatest hitters you ever looked at. Oh boy, could he swing a bat. When he said what he did about the three of us, I thought, ‘He might be right.’ ”
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If Ted was disappointed at his demotion, his mood seemed to have brightened by the time his bus pulled into Daytona Beach.

On a lark, he borrowed a bicycle from a Western Union messenger and rode it all around the station, hooting and hollering “and frightening women and little children,” it was reported.
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For a Minnesota press corps already overheated by the Millers’ acquisition of Williams—“one of the greatest hitting prospects ever to come along,” wrote Halsey Hall of the
Minneapolis Journal
—this arrival scene set the tone for the portrayal of Ted as an ebullient, puckish, Peter Pan–type character who, in the sporting-press vernacular of the day, was quickly labeled a “screwball.”
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But a screwball with talent, clearly. Reporters began gravitating to him as a hitting prodigy with color, whose exploits and persona made him an endless font of good copy.
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After Ted’s first day in camp, Dick Hackenberg of the
Minneapolis Star
pronounced the young slugger “tickled to death to be with the Millers” and said he “talks a blue streak, wants to know all about Minneapolis and Minnesota, when the duck hunting season opens, the fishing [and] would like to get his hands on the guy who started ‘this second DiMaggio business.’ ”
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The next day, the
Minneapolis Journal
reported that Ted was “rattling the fences” and “would not pose for a picture doing anything but swinging a bat. He likes to use a 44 ounce bat in practice and then switches to his own 34-ouncer for the game. He doesn’t care for any other sports but baseball. He’s the happiest, pokingest lad in camp. Although he has been
here less than a week, he is everybody’s friend.” The only downer in this upbeat report with no byline came at the end, when it was noted that Ted “is no ball of fire in the outfield.”
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The Kid still had difficulty channeling his exuberance. Early one morning he walked down the hall of the Millers’ spring training hotel to rouse a teammate by jumping on him—only it turned out to be not a teammate at all but future Hall of Fame umpire Jocko Conlan, then apprenticing in the American Association.

“Get up, Bush, let’s go!” Ted screamed, pouncing on the umpire.

“Get out of here, you big skinny punk!” Conlan yelled, as he recounted the story in his memoir,
Jocko.
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“You’re not Bush,” said Ted. “You’re not even a ballplayer. You’re too old to be a ballplayer.”

“Who are you?” Conlan demanded.

“I’m Ted Williams. I hit twenty-three home runs in San Diego and I’ll hit forty in this league.”

“You better wait till this league gets started. Maybe you won’t even be here.”

“Is that so? You watch me. I’m a great hitter.”

Later that summer, Conlan would be umpiring a game behind the plate in Minneapolis. There was a big crowd, and Ted had already hit two long home runs. Then he came to bat in the ninth with the bases loaded, two outs, the Millers down by a run, and the count at three and two. Conlan ended the game by calling Williams out on a pitch at the knees.

The crowd screamed for the ump’s head, and Millers manager Donie Bush, who’d been coaching third base, came running in to argue, shouting at Conlan that the pitch had been down around Ted’s ankles.

“And then Williams did something I’ll never forget, and it is one of the reasons I consider him a great friend of mine in baseball,” Conlan wrote. “He looked at Donie Bush and he shook his head. ‘No Donie,’ he said. ‘It was a good pitch. It was a perfect strike right at the knees. I should have hit it.’ I could have thrown my arms around him. I walked off the field and I thought, ‘What a man.’ I never had anyone else in my career do anything like that.”

Ted hit it off well with Bush, a five-foot-six, 140-pound firebrand who’d had a sixteen-year big-league career as a slick-fielding, light-hitting shortstop, mainly for the Detroit Tigers. He’d also managed in the majors for seven years, taking the 1927 Pirates to the World Series, where they were swept by the magnificent Yankees. “I knew the
minute I saw him that he was the greatest hitter I’d seen in 20 years,” Bush would say of Ted years later.
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Having had his ears pinned back at Sarasota, Ted tried a more self-effacing tack with the press in Minneapolis, admitting to one reporter that he hadn’t been ready for the big leagues and that he still had much to learn as a hitter: “I am glad I am going to spend a year under Donie Bush because I think he can make me a good hitter.… It would have been nice to have crashed the major leagues at 19. But I’m not ready.”
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Ted had been in the Millers camp for five days when suddenly Rogers Hornsby, generally considered to have been baseball’s greatest right-handed hitter, appeared. Hornsby was putting on a clinic for the Millers and another minor-league club, the Chattanooga Lookouts of the Southern Association, but then decided to stay on for a while, entering into talks with Millers owner Mike Kelley about a possible role as a utility player for Minneapolis.

The Rajah, as Hornsby was known, was then forty-one and had just finished twenty-three seasons in the big leagues, most recently as the pinch-hitting manager of the St. Louis Browns. During his career, he had hit over .400 three times, including .424 in 1924, the highest average of the modern era. He’d won six straight batting titles from 1920 to 1925, and from 1921 to 1925 he had averaged an astonishing .402. A second baseman with speed, Hornsby had a lifetime average of .358, second only to Ty Cobb’s, with 301 career home runs. No banjo hitter, he.

Hornsby never smoked or drank, and he wouldn’t read or go to the movies for fear of hurting his eyes. He had a cold, contentious personality and wouldn’t respect authority figures. He was also a compulsive gambler at the racetrack and had clashed on this issue with Commissioner Landis, who was unsympathetic to any players gambling after dealing with the Black Sox scandal of 1919. Hornsby told Landis it was nobody’s business what he did off the field.

The mere fact that Hornsby was at a minor-league camp and willing to consider a utility role for the Millers was testament to his continuing love for the game as well as to the fact that his barbed persona was wearing out its welcome in the majors. But he was a good teacher, and he loved to talk about hitting for hours with anyone willing to listen and work hard.

And that was Ted, of course, the ultimate hitting inquisitor, whose curiosity and thirst for batting wisdom had not been—and never would be—sated. He had questions, and the Rajah had answers.

Ted was respectful of Hornsby, who was twenty-two years his elder and soon to be a Hall of Famer, but he called him Raj, not Mr. Hornsby. (“Hi, Raj!” he shouted one day, hoping to engage Hornsby in a game of pepper. “Want to stop a few?” Hornsby didn’t.
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) Williams fell in quickly as a Hornsby acolyte. He would stay after practice and take extra hitting with the Rajah, and they’d have contests to see who could hit harder and with greater accuracy. Ted had more power, but Hornsby could still hit one line drive after another. It was quite a scene: two once and future hitting masters dissecting and perfecting their craft.

“I liked Hornsby because he talked to me, a kid of 19, and boy I picked his brains for everything I could,” Ted remembered. “We’d talk hitting and I’d ask personal questions I had no business asking.” Like how much money he’d lost at the track. (Hornsby apparently didn’t answer that question, but he told Ted he’d won $78,000 one day.)

“Get a good ball to hit” was what Hornsby preached to Ted, and that became the Williams mantra, his main rule to live by in hitting. If he had known this in theory before, he hadn’t fully digested it until now. Earlier in his career, getting walked would send him into a deep funk and was something to be avoided at all costs, even if he had to hit a ball out of the strike zone. Now, ahead of his time, Williams began to view a base on balls in a different light: a walk
was
as good as a hit, as the cliché said; getting on base helped your team and ultimately made you a better hitter by letting pitchers know you would insist on not chasing balls that weren’t strikes.

After two weeks, Hornsby left the Millers to take a job with the Baltimore Orioles as a coach and pinch hitter.
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Staying with a minor-league team as a utility player made no sense, and Donie Bush had no desire to be overshadowed by an irascible legend known for getting prickly whenever his advice wasn’t accepted. But for Ted, the time and tutorials with Hornsby had been serendipitous and invaluable.

“I thought Hornsby was great,” Ted wrote in his book.
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“He wasn’t a very diplomatic guy. If he had a dislike about anything, he came out with it.… I mean, even if the owner of the club said something he disagreed with, Hornsby would say, ‘What the hell do you know about it?’ He was all the time getting into wringers for what he said.”

The Rajah had an opinion about young Williams, too. “He’ll be the sensation of the major leagues in three years,” Hornsby told reporters as he left Daytona Beach.
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