The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (17 page)

After about ten days with the Millers, Williams had performed respectably but hadn’t quite lived up to the hype generated by the Minneapolis press corps, either. And he was the goat of the final exhibition
game, a 4–3 loss to Chattanooga. Batting in the seventh inning with the bases loaded, he failed to run out a ground ball he thought would go foul but stayed fair, and then dropped a fly ball with two outs, allowing the Lookouts to continue the inning and score two decisive runs.

When the regular season began, the Millers had to play their initial twelve games on the road, first against Indianapolis, then against Louisville, Columbus, and Toledo. In his first game, Ted, wearing the number 19 again and batting cleanup, went 0–5, though he ripped one ball on a line that the right fielder made a good catch on. He went hitless in the next two games, and during the third game, when a passing train sounded its whistle, a frustrated Williams said wistfully, “That’s what I want to be, an engineer. I’m no good for baseball.”
³¹

But things started looking up in Louisville, the next stop. Showing patience, Ted walked five times in the first game, went 2–5 with a double in the second, then broke out in the third game by hitting two massive home runs that were said to be perhaps the longest in American Association history.
³²
Ironically, both stayed inside massive Parkway Field. The first ball soared about 470 feet to right-center, and the second rose 450 feet in the air, slightly left of dead center, before it rolled up against the wall 512 feet away. Both balls were hit so far that Ted could jog home without a play at the plate. On his next time up, with center fielder Nick Tremark playing so deep as to be barely discernible from the press box, Ted lined a single to right. His homers accounted for the only Millers runs in a 6–2 loss.

Williams was hitting his stride. Over the next six games on the rest of the road trip, he collected eight hits, including another home run and three doubles, and had his average up to .270 by the time the club arrived in Minneapolis for its home opener. The Millers—or the Kels, as they were also called in the local press, after team owner Mike Kelley—were 6–6.

The Millers played their home games at Nicollet Park, a quaint ball field built in 1896 at the corner of 31st Street and Nicollet Avenue, across from the city’s streetcar barns. The park was made to order for left-handed power hitters like Ted: only 279 feet and ten inches down the right-field line, 330 to the power alley in right-center, 432 to dead center, and 334 down the left-field line. The right-field fence was thirty feet high, and it had netting on top as a further constraint against balls flying onto Nicollet Avenue and shattering the plate-glass windows of Minken’s department store and the President’s Café. But the windows at those establishments would still prove especially vulnerable during Ted’s time in town.

The Millers and their crosstown American Association rivals, the St.
Paul Saints, provided the only source of serious baseball for much of the upper Midwest in those years.
³³
Local idiosyncrasies included the requirement that Sunday doubleheaders be stopped promptly by 6:00 p.m. and the fact that Mike Kelley was inexplicably allowed to keep his menacing dog, a Dalmatian, in right field, in fair territory. Kelley had trained the dog to growl threateningly if any player wearing a visitor’s uniform chased a ball into the area. Highlights of the summer for fans were the holiday doubleheaders between the Millers and Saints, with perhaps a morning game at Nicollet and an afternoon game across the river in Saint Paul.

Ted gave the crowd something to remember at the home opener. He went 3–5 with a gigantic home run that soared over the fence and onto the roof of a building on the far side of Nicollet Avenue. He drove in four runs, scored three, and led the Millers to a 14–4 win over the Louisville Colonels.

The Kid owned the town from that day on.

“Ted Williams hit one so high and fast yesterday that he rode over the city on it,” wrote Halsey Hall in his account of the game for the
Journal.
“He rode right into his new baseball home, into the hearts of opening day fans.”
³⁴

Journal
sports columnist Dick Cullum went further, saying, “There was not a fan in the park who did not form an immediate attachment to gangling Ted. He is as loose as red flannels on a clothes line, but as beautifully coordinated as a fine watch when he tenses for action. He is six feet and several inches of athlete and the same number of feet and inches in likeable boyishness. He is positively splashed with class, up to that rare point where he looks good making mistakes. You see a lot of players you THINK will make the big league grade… but once in a while you have one quick glance of a natural and you KNOW he will make it, and not as just an average big leaguer, but as a star. That would be Ted Williams. He’s a dead mortal cinch.”
³⁵

Ted kept hitting, and he embraced his new status as star and toast of the town with relish. He began to assert his new freedom from home, his independence, and his financial wherewithal.

He bought his first car—a red Buick convertible—washed it almost every day, and, behind the wheel, raced around the city. “I thought I was gonna get killed,” remembered Sid Hartman, longtime sports columnist for the
Minneapolis Star Tribune,
who met Ted that summer of ’38 while working at the ballpark selling peanuts and popcorn. “He just
said, ‘C’mon, let’s take a ride, I got a new car.…’ He took the town over. He was a good-looking young kid, a lot of women chasing him.”
³⁶

Women were a new phenomenon. Ted had been all left feet in that department and still was. At first he had his roommate at Minneapolis’s Sheridan Hotel—Millers catcher Jimmy Galvin—field calls from groupies and decline any overtures. “No, Ted ain’t in, and he don’t want no dates!” Galvin would say as Ted sat nearby, listening to the radio full blast.
³⁷

But as the summer wore on and his celebrity blossomed, Ted, who had volunteered to Boston reporters in Sarasota that he was “still a virgin,” decided to dip a toe into the dating waters. It was still awkward, but at least his sense of cluelessness about girls began to dissipate.

“I met what amounted to the first girl I ever got interested in, and dated her that summer, and was so self conscious I never even put my arm around her, never kissed her,” Ted wrote in his book.
³⁸
“I don’t remember how I met her now, probably the ballpark. For a young ballplayer there’s never any shortage of available girls around a ballpark. A lot of them move pretty hard, and after a while a ballplayer learns to move pretty good himself.”

Williams was discreet about the identity of his first crush, and though it’s been widely reported to have been Doris Soule, the Minnesota woman who would become his first wife, it was not. They wouldn’t meet until the end of 1940.

The Millers didn’t want him hanging out with hell-raisers like Jim Tabor, the Alabama third baseman who had been with Williams at Sarasota and was now in Minneapolis as well. They thought they might be able to tamp down some of Ted’s rough edges if they had him rent a room from Wally Tauscher, an older pitcher who was married and had a family. Living next door to the Tauschers was Jack Bean, who was four years younger than Ted. His father, John, was a gregarious salesman for an ice cream company and an avid hunter. Williams prevailed on the elder Bean to take him hunting, and they got friendly.
^*

“My father was an Irishman, a first-class bullshitter, so they became close friends,” remembered Jack, who married Mitzi Gaynor, the singer, dancer, and actress. “Ted got to know him and liked him. Ted had that
need, because he had no male influences except baseball people.… He had dinner or lunch at our house whenever he wanted.”

Jack found Ted entertaining but untamed and crude. “He was a wild kid. He just wouldn’t listen to anybody. He wasn’t interested in acting like a man; he just wanted to hit home runs. He didn’t drink or smoke, and girls were a great delicacy, but he didn’t know very much about them. Ted was such an oddball; he’d say anything.”
³⁹

That was in evidence one night when John Bean took Ted to dinner at the home of a friend of his, Marty Hoffman, a Woolworth’s executive who was dying to meet the young ballplayer. Hoffman’s son Tom recalled the scene at the dinner table:

“According to our family custom, the food would go counterclockwise. You’d pass the dishes. Now keep in mind, Ted did not speak in a talking voice. It was practically a yell when he opened his mouth. The food would come, and if it was mashed potatoes, he’d say, ‘No, thanks!’ And then he’d take two big helpings and smack them on his plate. Then the roast beef would come around. ‘No, thanks!’ And he’d fill his plate with the roast beef. Then the mixed nuts, and he’d take about two or three spoonfuls after saying, ‘No, thanks.’ Of course we got a big kick out of that.”

At the end of the evening, as the elder Hoffman, who was rotund, said good-bye to his guest, Ted smacked him in the stomach hard and said, “Thanks for the dinner, Whale Belly!” Tom said his father laughed uproariously.

Ted stayed in touch with the Hoffmans and would come back to listen to the swing music Tom collected. “We had Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, all this kind of stuff,” Tom said. “We’re out there playing the record, and Ted’s beating on a pillow… like he’s playing the drums. Just listening to the music.”
⁴⁰

Ted made more friends in the small town of Princeton, some fifty miles north of Minneapolis, near prime hunting and fishing country. One off day, Ed Shave, a local outdoor writer, took Williams to Princeton and introduced him to John Kallas, proprietor of the Kallas Café. Kallas was a Greek immigrant who ran a mom-and-pop establishment that served good food and was a social center for the community. His teenage sons, Jim and Tony, ran the soda fountain. Jim followed baseball, but he did a double take when he saw Ted walk through the door of the restaurant. “I told my brother, ‘Do you know who that is coming through the door? That’s Ted Williams!’ ” Jim remembered. “My brother said, ‘You’re crazy.’ Dad took him hunting and fishing. Ted took
to him like a dog took to water.”
⁴¹
Before long, Ted would come up and stay at the Kallas home or at their cabin at nearby Green Lake. At the café, Mrs. Kallas would feed him her trademark pheasant with thick gravy, and he’d eat undisturbed in the kitchen.

The first time they went fishing, John got four or five northern pikes and Ted couldn’t get a bite.
⁴²
He was competitive, and he asked John for tips. Later Ted came back to go duck hunting. “Ted was from California and had never gone duck hunting,” recalled Frank Weisbrod, who was part of those early forays. Weisbrod worked nights as a baker and would go hunting during the day. “He made some mistakes at first. He didn’t know the distance the shells would travel. He was shooting from too far away. So we’d tell him whatever we knew. Give him some tips. Eventually he became an excellent shot.”
⁴³

By mid-July, Ted was hitting .310 with 24 home runs and 78 runs batted in, and he was a unanimous selection for the American Association All-Star team. His hitting ability had been on display for all to see, along with refreshing and endearing displays of exuberance, as when he would gallop from the dugout to his position in right field screaming “Yahoo!” like a man-child playing cowboys and Indians, or when he would take out the red handkerchief he carried in his hip pocket and wave it to the fans to acknowledge applause.

Yet there also had been startling displays of immaturity, self-absorption, and lack of concentration. He continued his pattern of shadow hitting—swinging an imaginary bat out in right field in between pitches—jawing with fans, doing jumping jacks, even turning his back on the infield.

Rival players were appalled by all this and jeered the rookie mercilessly. One opponent was Sammy Baugh, the football Hall of Famer, who had completed his first season with the Washington Redskins in 1937. Slingin’ Sammy had signed a baseball contract with the St. Louis Cardinals before starting with the Redskins, and in the summer of 1938 was playing minor-league ball with the Columbus Red Birds. “My best memory of being in Columbus was seeing this 19-year-old phenom for Minneapolis named Ted Williams,” Baugh told writer Dennis Tuttle. “He’d go out to right field, stick his glove in his back pocket and turn his back on the pitcher and start doing jumping jacks.… These old-school guys, many of them on their way back down from the majors… they were raising hell, saying ‘get him out of here!’ They hated Williams. Here was a young kid who didn’t give a fuck about anything. Nothing
bothered that cocky bastard.… But you know, that crazy sonofabitch would get up there and knock a goddamn board off the fence in the outfield. Everybody knew he was crazy. Everybody also knew he was going to be great.”
⁴⁴

In one game against Milwaukee, the Brewers had the tying run at second base when Donie Bush happened to look out to right field and see Williams swinging his imaginary bat. But this time, his glove wasn’t even on. It was lying on the grass next to him, a useless appendage. Bush stopped the game, sprinted out to Ted, and yelled, “What’s the idea! This run means the ball game!” Not to worry, the Kid replied. “That guy never hits to right field.”
⁴⁵

His teammates weren’t thrilled by Ted’s antics, either, according to Wilfred “Lefty” LeFebvre, a pitcher from Rhode Island who had just graduated from the College of the Holy Cross and who eventually became a pal of Ted’s. The day after graduating, LeFebvre signed a contract with the Red Sox for $600 a month and was soon pitching at Fenway Park. But by June he found himself in Minneapolis for further seasoning.

“Ted was a young guy, big and cocky as a son of a gun,” LeFebvre remembered. “The old-timers didn’t like him. You know, he would talk an awful lot, but he could back it up at the plate. I think that was what really got to some of the guys. He was a peculiar guy, always yelling, ‘Yahoo! Yahoo!’ He was just having fun playing baseball.” And LeFebvre knew Williams did some good deeds for impaired children in Minneapolis. There was more to the loud and garrulous Californian than many knew.
^*