The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (23 page)

One issue that vexed Williams and that he decided to speak out about was Fenway Park’s long right field, which he felt was unfairly cutting down on his home runs. He had a point, especially when comparing Fenway to his favorite American League destinations—Yankee Stadium, which was 314 feet down the line in right, and Briggs Stadium in Detroit, which was 325 feet. But the way he argued his case made it appear that he was more interested in his own well-being than the team’s.

“I should be doing a lot better and I know I would be if I played my home games in another park except Fenway,” Ted told Hy Hurwitz of
the
Globe.
“Why, I’m really delighted to leave Boston, even though the fans, the management, and everybody has just been wonderful to me. Because now that I’m going on the road, I’ll really start hitting that ball.

“I feel that I have a chance to be one of the greatest hitters in baseball, but I won’t unless they shorten right field at Fenway Park. Why, I wanted to be the greatest first year player in the game and I believe I’d have done it easily if I didn’t have to play 77 games in Boston.”
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Ted went on to name the great sluggers and said they were all helped by favorable home fences. He reiterated that he didn’t want to leave Boston, but “I’m the guy that counts most to myself. I’m in this game to make a lot of dough and I want to get it fast. The best way for me to get it is to hit more home runs and drive in more runs than anyone in the game. I won’t do it at Fenway Park if the fence stays out as far as it is now.”

Ted said a shorter fence would add twenty to twenty-five points to his average. He wanted to beat Joe DiMaggio’s rookie records, and said that Fenway was tougher for him than Yankee Stadium was for DiMaggio. If they moved the fence in twenty-five feet, Ted concluded, he’d be “crazy” to want to play for anyone else but Boston.

Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey loved Williams and delighted in needling him or otherwise horsing around with his young star. In a July game at Detroit, Yawkey had stationed himself in the right-field stands, and, masquerading as a Tigers fan, heckled Williams mercilessly. In the clubhouse after the game, Yawkey said to Ted, sympathetically: “That fellow in the bleachers was certainly riding you today.”
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“Yeah,” Ted snapped. “He was plenty loud, the cheap punk. I’d like to have busted him in the puss.” Yawkey broke up laughing and confessed. The following month in Cleveland, Williams had a room directly below Yawkey’s at the Lake Shore Hotel. Yawkey called out the window to him, waited until he looked up, then doused him with a pitcher of ice water.
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But understanding that in the matter of the right-field fence Williams was in no mood to joke, Yawkey agreed with his star and began to take steps to rectify the situation. On September 24, six days before the end of the season, the Red Sox made the official announcement on Fenway Park’s new dimensions: the distance down the right-field foul line would be shortened from 332 to 302 feet, and bull pens for the home and visiting teams would be moved from the sidelines to right and right-center field, thereby shortening the fence at the base of the right-field bleachers from 402 to 380 feet. It would still be a poke even at that range, especially as the new fence would angle out gradually as it approached the deepest point in the ballpark in right-center, 420 feet from home plate.
In making the announcement, the Red Sox said nothing about the purpose of the change, but it was widely interpreted in the press as a move to help Ted. The newspapers quickly labeled the shortened right field “Williamsburg,” and Ted seemed to embrace the designation by gleefully posing for pictures with construction workers as they built the new fence in the off-season. “Boy, won’t I be glad to see those shorter fences!” he said following the announcement.

The team finished with a solid season, 89–62, but still ended up in second place, seventeen games behind the Yankees, who won 106 games and captured their fourth straight American League pennant. But the second-place finish took no luster off Ted’s season. He was Rookie of the Year by acclamation at a time when there was no such official award, finishing with an average of .327, 31 home runs (14 at Fenway, 17 on the road), and 145 RBIs. He thus achieved his goal of besting the great DiMaggio’s rookie line of .323, 29 homers, and 125 RBIs. Ted’s RBI total topped the American League, the first time a rookie had led in that category, and he finished fourth in the Most Valuable Player balloting behind DiMaggio, Bob Feller, and Foxx. His fourteen Fenway homers were eight more than all other left-handed batters combined hit in Boston.

The day before the season ended with a September 30 doubleheader against the Yankees in New York, Williams reflected on his year by writing to Earl Keller, the San Diego reporter who had covered him when he was in high school and with the Padres.

“Well Earl, I guess there’s no one in the world happier about me having a good year my first year than myself,” Ted wrote on Commodore Hotel stationery. “I hoped all last winter that I’d have this kind of a year. Really though, Earl, the big leagues is easier to play in than the minors, and I really see very little difference in the pitching. There’s a few, like Feller, Bridges, Ruffing, and a few others that are really tough, but outside of that, it’s the same. Everything is just a little better. A little better pitching, fielding, backgrounds. Even the steaks are better up here. Mr. Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, and Joe Cronin have treated me great. So have all the other fellows, especially Jim Foxx.… Boy, a fellow doesn’t realize what cities these are until he’s in them a while. Today I went to the top of the Empire State Building, and as soon as I looked over the hundred-odd stories, I just went ‘Oh!’ The cars look like flies. Well Earl, I guess I’ve popped off enough, so I’ll close. As ever, Ted.”

All in all, Williams felt no one could have had a better, happier first year in the big leagues than he did. “The fans in right field were yelling
with me and for me all the time, really crowding in there to see what I would do next, and that year, nobody tipped his hat more than I did,” Ted wrote in his book.
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“I mean, right off my head, by the button. Nothing put on, nothing acted, just spontaneous.”

He also wrote he was “unaware, I suppose, that my troubles were just beginning.”

T
here seemed no troubles on the horizon for Ted that winter of 1940, as spring training neared. He had a pleasant off-season, eschewing San Diego to return to Minneapolis and his minor-league glory days. He hunted and fished and stayed in baseball shape by working out at the University of Minnesota’s indoor cage.

He returned to Boston in January to have his tonsils taken out and later to attend the Boston baseball writers’ annual dinner. They had voted him the Red Sox’s Most Valuable Player of 1939, and, to everyone’s surprise, Williams showed up to receive his prize wearing a tuxedo. He spoke off-the-cuff and charmed the crowd. “Thank God I ain’t got any notes,” Ted said. “This is really the greatest and happiest honor I’ve ever achieved in my short baseball career.”
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Meeting later in his hotel room with a reporter, Ted fretted that he weighed only 187 pounds, and he showed off an array of muscle magazines he’d been consulting in an effort to get stronger. But he betrayed no lack of confidence about the upcoming season, and he fairly salivated over those shortened Fenway fences in “Williamsburg.”

“Last year I hit 14 home runs in this park,” Ted said. “This year, at a conservative estimate, and I mean really the most conservative one, I ought to hit at least 20. That fence has shortened the right field bounds by 20 feet, and at least 10 of the balls I hit last year missed being homers by just about that much, do you see what I mean?”
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Everyone did, and expectations were raised higher still on April 13, three days before the Red Sox were to open the season in Washington, when Ted put on a show in batting practice before a rained-out exhibition game against the Boston Braves at Fenway. He hit fifteen balls into
Williamsburg, including seven of the first eight thrown to him, despite the cold, foul weather. Further underscoring the perception that the shortened fences were made for him and that he would take full advantage of the new dimensions, Williams posed after the workout for a
Boston Sunday Advertiser
photographer, pointing to right field. The photo ran prominently the next day under the headline
HOWDY, BOSTON—THAT’S MY SPOT
.
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Besides Williamsburg, there were two other significant changes for Ted in 1940. First, he would be playing left field, not right. The left fielder the previous year, Joe Vosmik, had been sold to the Dodgers, and Dominic DiMaggio, Joe’s younger brother, had been acquired from the San Francisco Seals in the Coast League to play right field. Ted would have less ground to cover in left and a shorter distance to throw, the thinking went, and those keen eyes of his would be spared the harsh glare of the sun field.

Second, he would switch places with Jimmie Foxx in the batting order and hit third rather than fourth. Joe Cronin felt Foxx would protect Ted, since opponents would be less willing to pitch around Williams with Double X waiting on deck. But if Cronin thought this would help the team, Ted was thinking more about how the change would affect him: “Heck sakes, there goes my runs-batted-in championship,” he said when the move was announced.
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The comment foreshadowed a fundamental shift in Ted’s mood, and it was not long before the attractive, boyish charm and innocence that Williams had radiated all during the previous season—as well as that winter and spring, right through his batting-practice show on April 13—faded altogether and Williams unveiled his dark side.

He got off to a bad start, getting only two hits in five games the first week the Red Sox were home. After a few fans jeered him for early hitting and fielding miscues, the highly sensitive Ted overreacted and told a few teammates that he would never tip his cap again.

When some reporters wrote that he was not hustling on every play, Ted was outraged and started a vendetta against the writers. He began to brood and sulk and complain that he was underpaid. Some teammates got angry with him. Fans also reacted negatively to this churlish behavior, and when more than a month passed without Ted hitting even one home run into Williamsburg, resentment grew among some of the patrons. A faction decided that Williams was a spoiled child undeserving of the special treatment the Red Sox had accorded him.

On the team’s first western trip, Ted confessed to Harold Kaese of the
Boston Evening Transcript
that he was in a funk. “I wish I had a disposition like Jimmie Foxx’s,” Williams said. “I’ve got a rotten disposition.”
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Cronin decided he had to address Williams’s darkening mood. The manager told the
Boston Globe
’s Gerry Moore that Ted’s fixation with hitting was adversely affecting his “hustle and concentration” and therefore the team’s chances at the pennant. “Nobody wants to see the Kid become a great star more than I do,” Cronin said. “That’s why I must impress on him that all great stars… first of all have been great team players.… Ted is still only a boy and I know he wants to win as much as anybody on our club. He’s just so wrapped up in hitting, that he forgets himself now and then.”
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Not that Williams wasn’t hitting. As of May 21, he was batting .347, but he only had two home runs, none yet in Williamsburg. The failure thus far to meet the fans’ power expectations—and those he himself had so publicly set—was probably the chief source of Ted’s problem. But whatever it was, Cronin thought it had to be nipped in the bud. He told Harold Kaese in a May 22 story that he had decided to bench Ted.

“I didn’t want to do this,” Cronin said. “I don’t want Williams to get this kind of reputation, but there’s no other way.”
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Kaese added that owner Tom Yawkey had become “sick and tired of watching the Kid go through the motions. He as well as nearly every player and coach on the team talked to him and tried to wake him up. It was no go.… If it continues, if he sulks and complains on the bench, one of his teammates undoubtedly will punch him on the nose. The players, an ideal group of hustlers, are down on him.”

After listing the possible causes of Ted’s gloom—his bad start at home, the booing by some Fenway fans, his low home-run production, and the likelihood that he would lose any chance at the RBI title as a result of hitting third—Kaese concluded his article with a cheap shot: “Whatever it is, it probably traces to his up-bringing. Can you imagine a kid, a nice kid with a nimble brain, not visiting his father and mother all of last winter?”

Kaese himself had second thoughts about that non sequitur and wired his paper to have it removed, but in a composing-room snafu, it was left in. Kaese apologized to Ted the next day and always regretted that the gratuitous remark had run.
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But to Williams, this was an unpardonable sin, representing an unacceptable invasion of his privacy. The Kaese story was a pivot point, turning what had been a simmering feud with sportswriters into a vitriolic campaign that he chose to wage his entire career.

Still, Ted couldn’t seem to stop talking with reporters about almost anything that popped into his mind—an undisciplined habit that would always cause him difficulty. Speaking with syndicated writer Harry Grayson in late May about all the pressures he was feeling, Williams contrasted his lot with that of his uncle John Smith, the Westchester County fireman whom Ted had visited several times. Being a firefighter wouldn’t be a bad life, Ted said, thinking out loud. It was a throwaway line, offered in jest, but Grayson took it and snidely played it straight—that Williams would rather chuck his baseball career and become a fireman—as part of a larger piece about the Kid’s malaise.

The Grayson story focused further attention on Ted’s state of mind and gave rival bench jockeys plenty of ammunition. At a June 3 game at Fenway, for example, Chicago White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes screamed when Williams came to bat that “Teddy wants to be a fireman!”
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Dykes then had his players whistle to imitate siren noises. When Williams finally hit his first home run into one of the new bull pens at Fenway, the
Globe
took caustic note with a banner headline:
TED LOCATES WILLIAMSBURG
.

Nevertheless, on June 4, perhaps realizing that was going too far, the
Globe
’s Victor Jones wrote what would become the first of several sympathetic columns penned by various Boston writers over the next several weeks that seemed an attempt to save Williams from himself. “This sure is a mighty tough world for a kid of 21, particularly a sensitive kid like you, if he can’t get in the dumps occasionally,” wrote Jones in what was effectively an open letter to the struggling Red Sox star. “The trouble is that a guy in your position, no matter what his age, can’t afford the common luxury of a sulk or a ‘mad.’ Whether you like it or not, you are a public character, and as such you’ve got to stand the gaff.… You’re a great kid, a great ballplayer with maybe 20 years of major league ball ahead of you. Don’t go and spoil it all.”

But Ted seemed bent on doing just that. The morning of August 13, he was in the clubhouse at Fenway Park, packing his equipment and getting ready to fly down to New York to meet his teammates for a doubleheader against the Yankees later that afternoon. He’d been out of the lineup for several days with lower back pain and had stayed home while the team was on the road. He was hitting .333 with 14 homers and 68 RBIs. The Red Sox, who in mid-June were in first place, had long since faded from contention.

Austen Lake, the
Boston Evening American
columnist, walked into the clubhouse. Trying to avoid Lake, Ted, dressed in blue overalls, walked
out toward the field and sat down in a box seat. Lake followed him outside. Williams seemed in a foul mood, and Lake asked, “What’s the matter with you, Ted?” Then it all poured out.

Venting for the next twenty minutes, he said that he had asked Cronin and Yawkey—many times—to trade him. He couldn’t stand Boston’s fans, its press, and the city itself. He also said he would have to be paid “plenty” more next year than the $12,500 he was making now, declaring that he’d earned it. “And you can print the whole rotten mess just as I said it,” Ted insisted. “I don’t like the town. I don’t like the people and the newspaper men have been on my back all year. Why?”
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The headline on the story was
TED WILLIAMS BLASTS BOSTON, WANTS TO BE TRADED TO YANKS.
The first paragraph said: “Young Ted Samuel Williams, adolescent Red Sox outfielder, detests Boston!” The second paragraph: “Theodore wants to be traded to some other major league town.” He rejected Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago as cities where he might go, saying he’d hold out first. Asked if he wanted to go to New York, Ted fell silent, and Lake inferred that was his destination of choice.

“Plainly,” Lake wrote, Ted had been “nursing his torrent of spleen” during the week that he had spent alone in Boston while injured. “He felt what he did with a vast conviction. He didn’t like Boston’s streets, the way the houses were built, the parks, the people, the Riverway. Phooie! But most of all he didn’t like the human crows who perch on the rim of the ballpark and write typographical sneers.”

Lake said he had considered not printing what Ted had told him, so that he and the team might work out their differences in private, but decided that “the situation is such that inevitably the ulcerous condition will have to be lanced publicly.” Williams’s private behavior and thoughts were his own business, Lake wrote, “except where he wants to get away and is saturated with that desire, or where he detests the uniform he wears and abhors the people he represents. That is a public matter.” Lake said he had nonetheless offered to let Ted take whatever he wanted back, and have it be off the record, but again Williams said that everything could be printed.

“They pay you on your record,” Ted said. “The bleachers can boo, the newspapers can sneer, but right out there [pointing to the field] is where you get the dough or you don’t, and I’m going to get mine.”

Not surprisingly, the story reverberated. Tom Yawkey—furious with Williams—denied that Ted had ever asked to be traded. “No player in baseball is greater than the game itself, and Teddy Williams will discover
that fact to his sorrow unless he mends his way,” Yawkey said.
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He also let it be known that Ted was essentially on his own in dealing with the press. “While I don’t condone his feud with newspapermen and any fans away from the ballpark, I’ve decided to let him work out the situation on his own after talking to him once on that matter and getting no results.”
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Ted thought the team could have done more to help him deal with the writers, though it was debatable how much the Red Sox could actually control their volatile star. And some critics would conclude that Yawkey and the team’s management had no interest in helping Ted with the press, especially in the second half of his career, since his ability to command headlines and dominate coverage served to deflect attention from the consistently poor teams the Red Sox fielded in the 1950s.

After the Lake story appeared, Cronin, like Yawkey, also denied that Ted had ever approached him demanding a trade. And Jimmie Foxx told the writers he thought Ted was “a spoiled boy. How long it will take for him to grow up remains to be seen. But he’ll have to grow up the hard way now.”
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