The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (31 page)

Doris was initially described as an “oh-so-beautiful brunette,” part of “an intriguing romantic mystery,” until she flew back the next day, alone, and identified herself for the pack of reporters staked out awaiting her arrival after midnight.
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Was Ted in love with her? Doris was asked. “Just say we are good friends,” she replied with a smile. Well, did
she
love Ted? At that, her eyes closed and she declined to answer. Did she realize she was the envy of “many girls”? No she didn’t, said Doris. She refused to say where she was from or how they’d met, but said she’d known Ted for about a year.

The shocker for the writers came when Doris allowed that she “hated” baseball. “I like practically all sports except baseball,” she said. “I have seen only two games this season. The reason was to see Ted.” She liked fishing a lot better, and noted that she was with Ted earlier in the summer when he’d caught a 374-pound tuna off Plum Island, north of Boston.

As for Ted and the radio show in New York, he’d been “
wonnn
derful,”
Doris said. Asked by
We the People
announcer, Harry von Zell, to account for his success that year, Williams had replied: “I am not popping off anymore. I am just popping everything out of the ballpark.”

On September 21, following the last home game of the year, Ted’s average stood at .406. There was an off day on the twenty-second and then six more games, three in Washington and three in Philadelphia. Williams vowed to play in all six. “If you hit .400, it’s got to be because you played a whole season,” he said.

Joe Cronin announced that after a doubleheader in Washington on the twenty-fourth, the Red Sox would go right to Philadelphia so that Williams could get all the batting practice he needed during two off days on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth before the final series against the Athletics. There had originally been a game scheduled for the twenty-sixth, but A’s owner and manager Connie Mack decided to play it on Sunday as part of a doubleheader finale that he hoped would draw a large crowd for the Williams denouement.

“We all want to see Ted stay right up there and it ought to help him to get in some batting practice on the off days at Shibe Park Thursday and Friday,” Cronin told Burt Whitman of the
Herald.
Whitman figured Ted needed five hits in the last six games to stay above .400, provided he got his usual complement of walks.
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In the first Washington game, Williams went 1–3 with a walk, and his average dropped a point, to .405. The hit came on a 420-foot fly ball to left-center that old friend Doc Cramer dropped while on the run. The official scorer ruled it a double, though the
Globe
called the hit “tainted.”
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In the first game of the next day’s doubleheader, Williams faced knuckleballer Dutch Leonard, who was going after his nineteenth win. Williams was never able to hit the knuckler as well as he felt he should have, and he went 0–3, walking twice, fouling out, grounding out, and flying out; his average dropped three more points, to .402.
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In the second game, the Nationals’ starter was Dick Mulligan, a left-handed rookie who was pitching in his first major-league game. Ted felt at a disadvantage going up against late-season call-ups he knew nothing about. First time up, a dazzling curve buckled Williams for a called third strike. Next, Ted drilled a grounder that gave second baseman Jimmy
Bloodworth enough trouble to allow Williams to make it to first safely, according to umpire Bill Grieve. Grieve first started to raise his thumb in the out call, then signaled safe, drawing boos from the crowd. Ted failed his last two times up, thus submitting a 1–7 line for the day, the one hit plainly a gift. As the team left for the final series in Philadelphia, his average was down to .401.

The two off days before the first game, on Saturday, September 27, gave Ted ample time to brood and fret. The lighting was a complicating factor for Williams at this time of year at Shibe Park. Early in the afternoon, the sun was on the pitcher’s mound while the plate was in shadow, making it hard to follow the flight of a pitch. Ted continued to vow that he would play all three games—“A batting record’s no good unless it’s made in all the games of the season”
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—but Cronin, citing the shadow problem, said he would reserve the right to pull Williams for the second game of the doubleheader, on Sunday, if the .400 mark was assured.

“You got to admire the Kid for being so courageous about it, but I can tell you one thing: I may yank him in that second game Sunday if he’s got his hits,” Cronin told the writers. “We go on the new time Sunday and with the first game starting at 1:30, it’ll be pretty dark when that second game gets underway. I feel that I have obligations, and I may decide to take him out of that second game, even if he doesn’t like it.”
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In the Saturday game, the A’s Connie Mack started Roger Wolff, a rookie pitching only his second big-league game. Mack, the dignified owner-manager who directed the game from the dugout while dressed in a business suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a fedora, knew Ted disliked going up against pitchers he hadn’t faced before. To make it worse for Williams, Wolff was a right-handed knuckleballer.

His first time up against Wolff, in the second inning, Ted walked on a three-and-two pitch. In the fourth, he doubled to deep right-center. But after that he flied to right, popped up to first, and struck out swinging. The 1–4 dipped his average below .400, to .39955, the first time he’d dropped under .400 since July 24.

Though the statisticians would have rounded his .39955 average up to .400, and though he could have sat out the last two games, Ted knew that history wouldn’t look kindly on that option, so it was really no option at all. As he’d said, he would play the doubleheader and achieve the mark by getting his hits—or he wouldn’t achieve the mark at all.

That night, Williams tried to quiet his nerves by walking the streets of Philadelphia with Johnny Orlando at his side to offer encouragement.

“We walked for over three hours, and my feet were burning,” Orlando recalled. “Ted didn’t drink, so from time to time I’d run into a barroom to get a drink, and he’d wait outside until I got finished.… During the whole conversation all he kept repeating over and over was how determined he was to hit .400.”
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Williams stopped twice for ice cream.
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When they returned to the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, it was 10:30 p.m., half an hour past Ted’s normal bedtime. He ran into Joe Cronin, who was sitting on a couch in the lobby with Tom Daly, a coach. Williams sat down and talked with his manager. Cronin again gave Ted an out, saying he could sit it out tomorrow if he wished, but Williams dismissed the suggestion out of hand.

Ted went to his room, where Charlie Wagner was waiting up for him. They talked about which pitchers he might face the next day. In those days managers did not announce their starters in advance—an effort to minimize any edge that gamblers might try to gain. Williams was “sky high emotionally,” Wagner recalled.

The next morning they got up early, ate breakfast in the hotel, and went out to the park in a cab together. “The ride out was quiet,” Wagner said. “I remember thinking how fast the cabbie was driving and that we’d probably get killed before we got there, the way he was flying through intersections.”
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By the start of the game, at 1:30 p.m., 10,268 fans were on hand at Shibe Park, where the capacity at the time was about thirty-three thousand. It was eighty-two degrees, mostly cloudy, and the wind was blowing mildly from the southwest at thirteen miles per hour, a nonfactor.
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Hoping to keep Williams off balance, Connie Mack again decided to start two rookies who’d been called up earlier that month: Dick Fowler in the first game and Fred Caligiuri in the second. Both were right-handers.

“I remember Connie Mack saying, ‘Don’t do him any favors. Try to get him out,’ ” recalled Caligiuri.
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“I was just a wide-eyed rookie, so I listened to him. I was more nervous because I’d just got married, and my wife was there. I had bigger things to worry about than Williams and .400. We tried to pitch him outside. We tried to change up speeds on him. You keep throwing him the fastball, and he’ll make you pay.”

In eight previous games against the Red Sox, A’s pitchers had walked Ted fourteen times.
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But now Mack had decided to pitch to him. As Williams stepped into the box for his first time up, leading off the second inning, A’s catcher Frankie Hayes let him know of his manager’s decision directly.

“Ted, Mr. Mack told us if we let up on you he’ll run us out of baseball,” Hayes said. “I wish you all the luck in the world, but we’re not giving you a damn thing.”

As the crowd gave Ted a loud, prolonged cheer, home plate umpire Bill McGowan called time, walked around the plate, bent over, and began dusting it off. Without looking up, he said to Williams: “To hit .400, a batter has got to be loose. He has got to be loose.”
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That was a highly unusual remark for a nominally neutral umpire to make to a player, but the umps plainly liked Ted. They respected his great skill, his keen batting eye, his obvious command of the strike zone, and, perhaps most of all, the fact that he virtually never argued with them or tried to show them up. Williams liked to leverage his good relationships with the umpires and would often pump them for information about how rival pitchers were doing: Who had they seen in the previous series they’d worked? And what pitches were being thrown to what hitters in what situations? “It was like having a personal scouting system,” said Vince Orlando, Johnny’s brother.
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“The league got wind of this later and made the umpires stop it.”

The first two pitches from Fowler were balls. Then Ted scorched a grounder to the right of first baseman Bob Johnson into right field for a single. He was back up to .4008.

His second time up, in the fifth, Williams drove a 1–0 pitch over the right-field wall and onto the street, about 440 feet away, for his thirty-seventh home run of the season. His average now stood at .4022. In the sixth, facing lefty Porter Vaughan, Ted again lashed a grounder past Johnson for his third straight hit to creep up to .4035. In the seventh, Ted smacked a line drive over the head of Johnson, who by then was like a target in a shooting gallery. Four for four, and up to .4048. His final time up, Williams hit a hard grounder to second baseman Crash Davis, which Davis bobbled for an error. So at the end of the two-hour-and-two-minute game, which the Red Sox won 12–11, Ted stood at .4039.

Between games, his teammates all congratulated him, knowing that no matter what happened in the second game he was virtually assured of reaching his goal. Jack Malaney of the
Boston Post
came down to the clubhouse to update Cronin on what Ted’s average was, in case the manager wanted to pull him. But Williams, as he’d promised, said he would finish, though the suspense was largely gone. Even if he went 0–4 in the final, he’d still be over .400.

The crowd gave him a standing ovation when he dug in against Caligiuri to lead off the second inning of the second game, and they
cheered him again when he spanked a grounder in the hole between first and second (.4052). His next time up, in the fourth, Williams absolutely crushed Caligiuri’s 2–0 pitch, and years later he would call it the hardest-hit ball of his career. It was a wicked, rising line drive that reached the top of the right-field wall in a heartbeat before slamming into a loudspeaker mounted on the wall, knocking a hole in it, and dropping back to the playing field for a ground-rule double.

Ted got one more at bat, in the seventh (the game was called after eight innings because of darkness), and improbably lofted a routine fly to left fielder Elmer Valo, the only ball of the day that he did not hit hard.

It was a stunning performance. Having eschewed a rounded .400, Williams had bravely put everything on the line and knocked out six clean hits in eight trips to the plate to finish at .4057, officially .406. It was a day that would define his playing career and shape his legacy.

The press raved. Burt Whitman in the
Herald
called it “one of the most spectacular last-day batting splurges in the history of major league baseball.”
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“All hail Thumping Theodore Samuel Williams,” wrote Malaney in the
Post.
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One of the happiest people in the clubhouse afterward was Cronin. “Imagine that Kid getting four singles, a double and a homer the closing day of the season when the chips are down,” he said. “I tell you, I never came closer to bawling right out loud on a baseball diamond [than] when Ted got that third hit. I really filled right up. I was so happy that the Kid had done the trick without asking or being given any favors. I guess I was no different from the whole rest of the club. For if ever a ballplayer deserved to hit .400, it’s that same Ted. A dozen times in the last three weeks he has refused to protect his average by dropping down a bunt. He just kept swinging up there to the very finish.”

Bill McGowan, the home plate umpire who’d given Ted the sotto voce advice to stay loose, also sung Williams’s praises unabashedly and wanted to dispel any notion that the A’s pitchers had been going easy on him. “Don’t let anyone tell you that those kid pitchers weren’t bearing down on Ted,” said McGowan. “For instance, that single Ted hit in the seventh inning against that young left hander, Porter Vaughan, was as beautiful a curveball as I’ve ever seen.”
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After the game, Ted seemed restrained in his joy, almost subdued, but it was obvious he was swelled with pride at his accomplishment. Before the writers arrived in the clubhouse, he took Johnny Orlando aside and said simply: “I’m a good hitter.”

“He said it just like he had proved something to himself,” Orlando said.
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Then he kissed the bat he’d used in the two games. An AP photographer saw that and asked him to do it again for posterity, and Ted obliged. To his roommate, Charlie Wagner, who had pitched in the first game, Williams expressed satisfied surprise: “Geez,” he said. “I hit .406.”
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