The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (44 page)

Williams unburdened himself to Grantland Rice, the syndicated columnist, after game 6, conceding that he had been trying to outguess the Cardinals pitchers too much. “They’ve been smarter than I am,” Ted said. “They’ve outguessed me.” Rice, who was emerging as the Kid’s Series confidant, called this “a pretty honest statement” and went on to consider Williams’s psyche. He called the conventional wisdom that Ted is conceited “entirely incorrect. The main trouble is that Ted suffers from an inferiority complex. He also admits that he does things he knows he shouldn’t do, and doesn’t do things he knows he should.” Williams told Rice that Red Sox fans had been swell to him during the three World Series games in Boston, “where I was a flop. I wanted to lift my cap to their applause. For some reason, I couldn’t do it. And I knew I was wrong. I’d rather win, or help to win this Series, for Tom Yawkey alone, than anything I ever did. I’ll probably lose it.”
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This was a startling admission, which seemed to underscore Williams’s insecurity. That night he was sitting alone with his thoughts in his room at the Chase Hotel when a writer stopped by and knocked on his door, which was slightly ajar. There was no response. The room was dark. The writer peered inside and could see Ted sitting at the window,
silhouetted against the lights from the city below. Unsettled by the scene, he left without disturbing Williams, and the next day he told Rice what he’d seen. “I’ll see he doesn’t sit alone in the dark tonight,” Rice replied.

With an off day scheduled to give the Cardinals more time to print and sell tickets for game 7, Ted stewed in his own juices, but he seemed upbeat during the Red Sox workout. Some of his teammates were stirred by the news that the losers’ share in the Series would be $2,094 per player, or less than the $2,500 each umpire would earn. “We can’t let that happen,” said Rudy York. “If we’re not worth more than the umpires, we shouldn’t be in the business.”

When batting practice began, and it was Ted’s turn to step in the cage against pitcher Mace Brown, many of the Red Sox stopped to watch number 9, hoping he’d find his groove and set the proper tone for the team. After a few languid swings to get loosened up, Williams began talking quietly to himself. Hy Hurwitz of the
Globe
pressed against the cage to listen.

“There’s a 3–2 count on me, the bases are full, and it’s the last of the ninth with two out,” Ted said to psych himself, just as a Little Leaguer might. “Throw me a low fast one, and I’ll blow it out of the park.”

Brown delivered it low and hard, and Williams drilled the ball over the pavilion roof in right field and out onto Grand Avenue, where fans were waiting in line to buy tickets.

Then the chatter began. “Now you’re swinging,” said Bobby Doerr from behind the cage. “You’re not pushing it the way you have been. You’ve got your shoulders into it.”

“Attaboy, Teddy,” chimed in York. “Cut at all of them that way and you won’t be an out man.”

Williams kept ripping the ball for the next fifteen minutes—line drives, rising line drives, deep, towering fly balls, many of them home runs. His teammates “began to acquire new confidence that they’d be better paid than the umpires,” Hurwitz wrote. Said one unnamed player: “Hits like that tomorrow and somebody’s gonna get murdered.”

Back in the clubhouse, Brown said to Williams: “You hit the ball good, Ted, and I had good stuff out there today.”

“You’re darn right you had good stuff. Are you sure I hit the ball good?” Ted replied, the insecurity creeping back in.
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But when the writers came around looking for quotes, Williams put his bravado back on, saying he’d gotten good wood on the ball today and had a feeling he “might break loose tomorrow.”
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That night, Williams was again alone in his hotel room when Grantland Rice called and insisted they go out to dinner. Ted quickly agreed. He was glad to have company, so he took Rice and a writer pal that the columnist brought along to a restaurant in South Saint Louis that served a good steak. Rice, sensing the Kid’s vulnerability, tried to get Williams to relax by talking about hunting and fishing. But Ted, who had two glasses of wine with his meal, only wanted to talk about the seventh game. “I’d give anything in the world if we could win that game tomorrow,” he said.

“And if you could get a couple of home runs?” Rice asked.

“I wouldn’t care if I didn’t get a single, unless it could mean winning the game,” Williams replied. “Naturally I’d like to get four singles. Or four home runs. But if I struck out four times, I’d be happy—if we could just win. Tom Yawkey… Joe Cronin… all the fellows on the ball club… have waited so long for this. I hate like hell to think they might miss it.” Rice thought Ted meant he hated to think the Red Sox might lose because of him.
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It was sunny and warm the day of the deciding game, in the mid-seventies. Boo Ferriss was starting for the Red Sox; slight right-hander Murry Dickson for the Cardinals.

The Sox opened with a run in the top of the first. Wally Moses led off with a single, Pesky singled Moses over to third, and Dom DiMaggio hit a sacrifice fly to score Moses. Williams then hit a bomb more than four hundred feet to dead center, but the ball lingered in the air just long enough to allow center fielder Terry Moore, who had been positioned in right-center in the shift, to race over and make a beautiful catch.

Williams made a nice defensive play of his own in the bottom of the first, fielding Red Schoendienst’s leadoff single cleanly and throwing him out at second when he tried to leg out a double. But in the bottom of the second, with a runner on third and one out, Ted didn’t appear aggressive enough in left field, catching a fly ball of medium depth and not even attempting to throw the runner tagging at third out at the plate.

Leading off the fourth, with the score 1–1, Williams crushed another four-hundred-foot drive, to left-center, and this time left fielder Harry “the Hat” Walker raced over to make another fine catch, nearly colliding with Moore. “Ted turned disgustedly toward the bench, his cup of woe overflowing,” wrote Austen Lake in the
American.
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The Cardinals got to Ferriss for two runs in their half of the fifth. Ted, batting with two outs and a runner on first in the sixth, flied to right.

The score remained 3–1, Saint Louis, until the Red Sox came to bat in the eighth inning. Utility infielder Rip Russell, pinch-hitting for catcher Hal Wagner, singled to lead off. Outfielder Catfish Metkovich then pinch-hit for pitcher Joe Dobson, who had replaced Ferriss in the fifth, and doubled. With runners on second and third and no one out, Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer pulled Murry Dickson and brought in Harry Brecheen—again. The Cat had pitched nine innings just two days earlier, after throwing another nine in the winning game 2.

Brecheen struck out Wally Moses and got Johnny Pesky to line out to right field. That brought Dom DiMaggio up, and Dyer went out to the mound to confer with Brecheen. First base was open, but DiMaggio knew he would not be intentionally walked with Williams on deck. Brecheen pitched carefully to DiMaggio, a right-handed batter, nibbling the corners, staying out of the heart of the strike zone. With the count three and one, Dom guessed Brecheen would come with his most effective pitch, a screwball on the outside corner. He guessed correctly and laced the ball off the top of the right-field fence, about two feet from a home run.

“When I got to first base, I thought if I could just get to third they’re going to be very careful, because Ted Williams is hitting behind me,” DiMaggio recalled. “If they make the slightest passed ball, I’m going to score. Well, that was a bad mistake, because as soon as I turned first base and dug for more, I popped my hamstring.”
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DiMaggio was lucky to hobble into second safely, much less reach third, but two runs had scored, tying the game. DiMaggio had to leave the game and was replaced by outfielder Leon Culberson.

Now Williams dug in against Brecheen for what was easily his most important at bat of the Series. The momentum was back with the Red Sox, and the go-ahead run was at second, waiting to be knocked in. It was a pivotal situation, a moment when the hitting star of the team was expected to deliver. But it didn’t happen. Ted merely popped up to Schoendienst to end the inning.

In the bottom of the eighth, the Cardinals quickly capitalized. Enos “Country” Slaughter led off with a single to center. Red Sox reliever Bob Klinger retired the next two batters and then faced Harry Walker. Slaughter noticed Klinger was not holding him close enough at first, so
he took off for second with a big jump. Walker swung away and hit a soft liner that fell between Williams and Culberson, who had replaced DiMaggio in center. The ball landed just as Slaughter was reaching second, and he raced ahead, the play unfolding before him.

Culberson retrieved the ball, but without the sense of urgency that the situation required. Then, making things worse, his relay to Johnny Pesky lacked the requisite zip. Slaughter, well aware that Culberson’s arm was weaker than DiMaggio’s, had made up his mind even before he hit second that he was going to try and score, and he was flying around third by the time Pesky, in a play that lives on in baseball lore, hesitated slightly before firing to the plate. He was not nearly in time to nail the sliding Slaughter. “I’m the goat,” Pesky said afterward, bravely, and so it has played in the books, but in truth, Culberson shared much of the blame for Slaughter’s mad dash because of his lackadaisical approach to Walker’s hit—as did Klinger, for not holding Slaughter on first properly to begin with.

The Red Sox had their chances in the ninth when York and Doerr led off with consecutive singles, but the next three men went down quietly, and the Cardinals won, 4–3. Ted never got a chance to redeem his eighth-inning failure.

It had been a thrilling World Series, but the blame game began immediately. The
Globe
’s Harold Kaese said the Sox were beaten by “the three W’s: World Series inexperience, winning the pennant too early, and Williams’s batting slump.” Cardinals shortstop Marty Marion was more specific: “We won the Series by stopping Williams,” Marion said, and that seemed to be the consensus in the Saint Louis clubhouse.
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Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer revealed to the
Globe
’s Roger Birtwell that his team had systematically drawn up a plan to stop Williams. Since it was a foregone conclusion that the Red Sox would win the pennant, the Cardinals had dispatched two of their scouts, Ken Penner and Tony Kaufmann, to follow Boston starting in August. Penner and Kaufmann were to gather daily information on all the Red Sox but pay particular attention to Williams. (National League president Ford Frick provided Saint Louis with money to hire another scout, and the Dodgers, after losing to the Cardinals in the playoffs, turned over their dossier on Williams, which corroborated what the others had found.)

“Williams was the key man,” said Dyer.
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“We came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was pitch him tight, but we needed more than that. We could not put every pitch to him in the same place.” Dyer, Penner, and Kaufmann concluded that Ted was fundamentally a guess
hitter: he would study opposing pitchers closely and learn their tendencies in a given situation so that when he faced that circumstance, he would be looking for a certain pitch from a certain pitcher. So the Cardinals told their pitchers what Williams would be expecting from them in a variety of situations and then ordered them to keep him off balance by throwing something different.

The plan worked. Williams did not get one extra-base hit in the Series, scattering just five singles over five games and striking out five times for a .200 batting average. He did reach base five more times through walks. And a combination of good defense and the shift took away several potential extra-base hits on balls that Ted hit on the nose, but that was part of Dyer’s plan, too.

When it was all over, Ted gave the Cardinals their due, singling out Brecheen. “Brecheen, the Cat, was the big hero of the Series,” he said in his column. “I think his mere presence on the field inspired the Cardinals.… I had hoped my bat would do the talking for me in the Series, but it was tongue-tied by some great Cardinal pitching.”
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When the writers and photographers were allowed in the clubhouse, Williams sat woefully on the bench in front of his locker, hunched over, staring at the floor, disconsolate. Pitcher Mickey Harris sat next to him and struck a similar pose, and the two were pictured in a bleak tableau in the next day’s
Globe.

Ted was the last player to dress and the last to leave the clubhouse, having lingered in the shower, where, according to a consoling Johnny Orlando, he “cried like a baby.… Cried because he knew he’d been a flop.”
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Outside, scores of Cardinals fans were lying in wait for him, hurling invective inside. “Where’s Williams?” they screamed. “Where’s Superman?”
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When he finally came out, the fans had formed two raging lines on either side of the door, forcing Ted to run the gauntlet of abuse. Police stood by, watching only to make sure he was not assaulted.

Williams took the insults impassively, yearning now only for the train and the privacy of his own compartment for the long ride back to Boston. He gave his Series check to Orlando as a tip for the season, and in a coat pocket he discovered twelve tickets—six each for the last two games—which he had forgotten to give away.

When the team finally reached the train, Ted made his way to his room, shut the door, and wept.
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After a time, when he looked out the window, he saw scores of people gawking at him, a mix of glee and malice in their eyes.

Williams wrote that his year had ended “in a frustration that grew,
like the importance of the .400 season, to a terrible dimension as the years passed. Who was to know at the time I would not get another chance? The first World Series Ty Cobb played in he batted .200, but he got two more chances. The first World Series Stan Musial played in he batted .222, but he got three more chances. Babe Ruth hit .118 in the 1922 Series, but he played in six [
sic
] others.… This was it for me.”
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