The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (45 page)

W
illiams lay low all winter, fishing and brooding over his World Series washout. “It was a long winter,” he said. “I had been humiliated.”
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He flew to Boston in early February to sign his 1947 contract and to attend the annual dinner of the Boston baseball writers. Ted usually enjoyed the harmless hoopla that attended his contract sessions each year, when the writers would fuss over him and often throw out wild guesses about how much of a raise he was going to get, what his total number would be, and where that would put him among baseball’s elite. Given the loss to the Cardinals last fall and his own prominent role in it, Williams assumed there might be some grousing that his new salary would represent ill-gotten gains. But business was business.

Ted was aware that in January, Bob Feller, the Indians ace, had signed a precedent-setting contract that introduced the concept of attendance-escalator clauses. In addition to his base salary, he would receive another $7,500 if home attendance reached 700,000, and another $7,500 for every 100,000 fans over 700,000.
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Ted figured he could draw more people to Fenway Park (not to mention around the league) as an every-day player than Feller could to Cleveland Stadium by pitching every fourth day, so he wanted to take the same approach.

Williams and Feller were friendly, and Ted admired the pitcher’s aggressive approach to business—including the fact that he had incorporated himself as “Ro-Fel” and earned tens of thousands of extra dollars in endorsements, speeches, and radio deals.
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When Ted sat down with Eddie Collins, they quickly agreed on a $65,000 base salary (representing a $25,000 raise from 1946) with escalators topping out at a total of $75,000 if Fenway attendance reached 1.25 million, a figure the team would easily surpass. The writers didn’t pick up a whiff of the escalator provisions, and they generally pegged the salary at $70,000. Collins called it the highest base salary ever paid in baseball, except for Ruth’s.

The writers’ dinner was a mob scene, infested with scores of hangers-on and assorted vacuum cleaner, furniture, and haberdashery salesmen trying to sell their wares to Ted and the other stars on hand—such as Tigers pitcher Dizzy Trout and World Series heroes Enos Slaughter and Harry Brecheen. Ted, wearing a tie for the occasion on the advice of his business manager, Fred Corcoran, was presented the writers’ award as the team’s MVP for 1946, but he said he felt guilty accepting it given his Series flop.

Grantland Rice, the syndicated writer and Williams devotee, tried to buck his pal up in a
Sport
magazine open letter. “I have an idea that this new season of 1947 may be your best year,” Rice wrote. “In a way, baseball needs you more than you need baseball. For we have all too few colorful characters left who can catch the fancy of the crowds. This is the year to show the mobs that you belong with the great hitters of all time. Forget the World Series, just as Ruth, Cobb and Wagner forgot their flops. I can’t recall another ballplayer who ever had the chance you have this season to steal the show.”
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Ted reported to Sarasota for spring training “jacked up,” he said, to atone for his Series failure.
⁴
There was still a lot of talk about how best to combat the Boudreau shift, and, to that end, Williams began working with Paul Waner on hitting to left.

That spring there was more significant news away from Sarasota: Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier on April 15 as a Brooklyn Dodger. Ted—who had crossed paths with Robinson in 1936 on the Southern California high school baseball circuit, when both were named to the All-Star team in the tournament sponsored by the 20-30 Club of Pomona—admired Jackie’s guts and sent him a letter of congratulations. Years later, Robinson’s widow, Rachel, told writer Bill Nowlin: “Jack was very impressed that someone of that stature took the time to do that. That was the kind of person Ted Williams was.”
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In July, Larry Doby was called up by the Cleveland Indians, thus becoming the first black ballplayer in the American League. Whenever the Red Sox played the Indians, Williams would go out of his way to
make Doby feel welcome, offering hitting tips around the batting cage and chatting with him as they passed each other coming on and off the field.

“He’d just say, ‘Congratulations! Good luck!’ ” Doby said. “He just gave me a feeling of being welcome, which was important to me, especially when you had a lot of other people not saying anything.… I don’t think he was that sort of person to make a spectacle of it, just a quiet kind of person, going about his business. Didn’t have to make any big deal out of it. That’s why I feel it was from the heart.”
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Blacks, at least black ballplayers, were not foreign to Williams. He’d been hearing about the exploits of Negro League old-timers since he was a kid, when the father of one of his friends told him of seeing the great Walter Johnson pitch an exhibition contest in New Haven against a team of Negro League All-Stars, giving up a tape-measure homer to one player and losing the game, 1–0. (Williams had confirmed the story by asking Johnson himself about it after he arrived in the majors.
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) At the age of fourteen, he’d gone to watch Satchel Paige pitch in San Diego and marveled at how hard he threw. He’d competed against black players in high school, and against Negro League barnstormers when he was in the Pacific Coast League.

One of the black players who went up against Ted when he was playing for the San Diego Padres was Buck O’Neil, the former Negro League star who went on to become a pioneering coach and scout in the major leagues. “Oh, man, he could swing that bat,” O’Neil remembered. “He said to us then, when he was in the minor leagues, ‘You guys can really play. I can learn a lot from you guys. When I got a chance to hit against Satchel Paige, that’s when I knew I was ready.’ He said that to all of us, just talking like guys after a game.”
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The Boston press had taken note of Williams’s popularity with black fans. In a notes column headlined
TED WOULD GET SOLID COLORED VOTE
, published a week before Robinson’s debut, Huck Finnegan of the
American
reported from Knoxville, Tennessee, where the Red Sox were playing some exhibition games: “If Ted Williams ever ran for office down this-a-way he’d get the solid colored vote. How they idolize him. Bellhops in the hotels gape at him as if he had two heads. Fans at the ball-parks start a-buzzin’ and a rockin’ when he comes to bat. And if he hits one, as he did in dear old Chattanooga, they rock and shout for 10 minutes.”

Two years before Robinson debuted with the Dodgers, the Red Sox had had a chance to sign him—but declined. Tom Yawkey was not
going to be the first owner to break baseball’s color line; in fact, he would become the last.

In the spring of 1945, under pressure from the black press and a Boston city councilman named Isadore Muchnick, the Red Sox had reluctantly agreed to a tryout at Fenway Park for Robinson and two other prominent Negro Leaguers, Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams. World War II had forced the major leagues to reevaluate their Jim Crow policies, since it was difficult to argue with the proposition that anyone willing to die for his country should have an equal chance to play baseball. But when the three men showed up on the appointed day, the Red Sox reneged on the agreement and closed their doors to the players without explanation.

The tryout had attracted no notice in the white press, but Dave Egan of the
Record
got wind of what was happening and decided to weigh in. “Here are two believe-it-or-not items exclusively for the benefit of Mr. Edward Trowbridge Collins, general manager of the Boston Red Sox,” the Colonel wrote. “He is living in
anno domini
1945, and not in the dust-covered year 1865. He is residing in the city of Boston, and not in the city of Mobile, Alabama.… Therefore we feel obliged to inform you that since Wednesday last three citizens of the United States have been attempting vainly to get a tryout with his ball team.”
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The Sox folded quickly, opening Fenway to Robinson, Jethroe, and Williams the very morning Egan’s story appeared. As manager Joe Cronin watched from the stands, coach Hugh Duffy and scout Larry Woodall put the players through a few paces. Robinson stood out, fielding cleanly at shortstop, flashing his speed, and peppering the left-field wall during batting practice. But the Red Sox never contacted the players again.

Cronin shifted his story over the years about what really happened with the Robinson charade, first saying Jackie wasn’t good enough, then admitting the obvious—that the team had made a mistake—then suggesting that the issue was decided over his head. “Cronin told me the American League thought Boston wasn’t a good fit, knowing how tribal we are here, and that the Dodgers would be the best fit,” said John Harrington, who took over as CEO of the Red Sox following the death of Yawkey and his widow, Jean. “They had Montreal as their Triple-A farm team, and there was less racism in Canada. Boston’s farm team was in Louisville, and that was a problem. So according to Joe, this was being orchestrated by the league.”
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Yawkey himself echoed this view, telling the
Boston Globe
in 1971, five years before he died, that Robinson’s was a
“special case.” He said Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, who signed Robinson to a minor-league contract in late 1945 but had been preparing to do so for more than a year, “called me and told me he’d send Robinson to Boston and to take a look at him. Our situations were different and we thought Rickey and Brooklyn were in a better position to work Robinson into the major leagues. Rickey was the man to handle Robinson, and he did.”
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By 1946, the year after the Robinson tryout, Yawkey had emerged as one of the most influential figures in baseball, and that year he was named by the new commissioner, Happy Chandler, to serve on a committee that would advise Chandler on significant emerging issues, like the attempts of “outsiders” to unionize the players as well as “the race question.” Besides Yawkey, the members of the committee were National League president Ford Frick, American League president William Harridge, and three other owners: Larry MacPhail of the Yankees, Sam Breadon of the Cardinals, and Phil Wrigley of the Cubs.

Using contorted, catch-22, and separate-but-equal logic, the committee stonewalled and said the race issue should be put off for another day and studied further by an “executive council,” which was precisely what this group was. Yawkey and the others wrote in their report that black players weren’t good enough for the majors and that major-league teams could not sign and develop players without risking decimating the Negro Leagues. If that were to happen, many major-and minor-league teams that rented their parks to the black ballplayers would lose an important revenue source. And if blacks were to play in the majors in significant numbers, black fans could flock to the games, thereby driving away white fans and diminishing the value of existing franchises.

“Certain groups in this country, including political and social-minded drum-beaters, are conducting pressure campaigns in an attempt to force major league clubs to sign Negro players,” the committee’s report said. “Members of these groups are not primarily interested in professional baseball.… Professional baseball is a private business enterprise. It has to depend on profits for its existence, just like any other business. A situation might be presented, if Negroes participate in Major League games, in which the preponderance of Negro attendance in parks such as Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Comiskey Park could conceivably threaten the value of the Major League franchises owned by these clubs.…

“These Negro leagues cannot exist without good players. If they cannot field good teams, they will not continue to attract the fans who click
the turnstiles. Continued prosperity depends on improving standards of play. If the major leagues and big minors of Professional Baseball raid these leagues and take their best players, the Negro leagues will eventually fold up, the investments of their club owners will be wiped out, and a lot of professional Negro players will lose their jobs. The Negroes who own and operate these clubs do not want to part with their outstanding players—no one accuses them of racial discrimination.”

The committee stressed the need for solidarity on race, warning that “the individual action of any one club may exert tremendous pressures upon the whole structure of Professional Baseball, and could conceivably result in lessening the value of several major league franchises.” This was clearly a finger pointed at Branch Rickey of the Dodgers, whom Yawkey et al. knew was well along in his plans to use Robinson to break baseball’s color line. But Rickey had an ally in Commissioner Chandler, who ignored his committee’s recommendation and the following year signed off on the call-up of Robinson. When the report was released to other owners and to the press, the section on race was deleted. Chandler apparently decided that to include the section would have been too provocative, and its existence did not become publicly known for at least another thirty-five years.
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