The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (46 page)

The arrival of Robinson, Doby, and other black players was far from enough impetus to stir the Red Sox to integrate. In 1948, the team had a chance to atone for the Robinson fiasco by signing Willie Mays, but again declined. George Digby, who had become the Red Sox’s first southern scout in 1944, was urged to check out Mays, then a wispy seventeen-year-old racing around center field for the Birmingham Black Barons. Digby’s tipster was Eddie Glennon, general manager of Birmingham’s all-white club in the Double-A Southern League, the Barons. The Black Barons had ties with the white Barons, a Red Sox affiliate, and used their park when the white club went out of town.

“Mays was a young, skinny kid then, but he did everything you looked for—he could run, throw, and hit, and I could see he was gonna have some power in his swing,” Digby recalled. “That’s what made me think he was gonna be an All-Star.”
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Glennon asked Digby how he liked Mays. Digby said he liked him fine. Glennon said the Sox could have him for $4,500. Digby: “So he said, ‘Let’s go call [Joe] Cronin.’ He said, ‘I got Cronin’s home number,’
so he called Cronin.” Cronin then told Digby he would send Larry Woodall, the chief scout in Boston, down to take a look at Mays.

That was a sign the decision had already been made, for it was Woodall who had helped run the sham Robinson tryout. Woodall came to Birmingham as instructed but apparently didn’t even watch Mays play. When it rained for three days, he got tired of waiting around and returned to Boston. “I’m not going to waste my time waiting on a bunch of niggers,” Woodall is reported to have said.
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“The GM in Birmingham came in and said, ‘Woodall didn’t like him,’ ” Digby recalled. “I didn’t talk any more to Cronin [about it]. He was my boss, and I wasn’t going to contradict him; I wanted to keep my job. They didn’t tell me anything. Cronin told Eddie Glennon they weren’t ready for any black players.”

It wasn’t until 1959 that the Red Sox finally joined the rest of the major leagues and brought up a black player from the minors to play in Boston. This tardiness on race and its lingering effects put the team at a competitive disadvantage for years and was far more responsible for the extended World Series drought in Boston than the 1919 sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees—the so-called Curse of the Bambino. As Jim Bouton, the ex-Yankees pitcher of
Ball Four
fame, would put it, the real culprit was the “Curse of the Albino.”
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Williams would try to make the Sox’s first black player, Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, a shortstop from California, as comfortable as possible by playing catch with him in front of the dugout during warm-ups before each game. “The spring of fifty-nine, when I first went to spring training with the Red Sox, my impression was like all others who meet the great Ted Williams, the best hitter of all time,” said Green. “I was in awe. He went out of his way to help me. He’d ask questions and would spend extra time talking to me, especially about hitting. He’d talk to you as long as you’d stay and listen to him. Ted didn’t make any extra effort because of my color. He treated you like you should be treated. Sometimes I could sense people trying to do too much. Ted was just a regular person.”
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Williams’s own Mexican roots, and his witnessing firsthand the discrimination that some of his family members were subjected to, likely shaped his views on race and the egalitarian ideal. “Ted was the most unbiased man I ever met,” said Curt Gowdy, the longtime Red Sox broadcaster. “He didn’t have a biased bone in his body.”
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Added Larry Taylor, a retired Marine Corps major general who became friendly with Williams late in life: “He was a guy that believed baseball was the ultimate meritocracy. It didn’t matter where you came from or your
background. He liked the Marine Corps for the same reason: they didn’t care who you were—just what you did.”
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Beyond race and the arrival of Jackie Robinson, there was another intriguing development that April of 1947—this one taking place behind closed doors—that could have drastically altered the arc of Williams’s career.

One night, apparently during the Red Sox’s first trip to New York, from April 22 through April 24, Tom Yawkey and Yankees co-owner Dan Topping were biding their time at Toots Shor’s saloon when the conversation turned to the baseball icons of the day, Williams and Joe DiMaggio. As fans often did, they talked of how frequently DiMaggio’s long outs in Yankee Stadium’s vast left field would be home runs over the short wall at Fenway Park, and how easily Ted’s deep flies in Fenway’s cavernous right field would find their way into New York’s short upper deck in right. The two stars were playing in the wrong home parks. The conversation grew more and more serious. Finally, after both Yawkey and Topping were well lubricated, they agreed to make the trade. They would sleep on it and confer again the next day.

But when Topping called Yawkey in the morning, the Red Sox owner was having second thoughts; his people back at Fenway didn’t like the deal. DiMaggio had slumped the previous year, with numbers that paled next to Ted’s .342 average with 38 homers and 123 RBIs. Plus the Clipper had had surgery in the off-season to remove a bone spur from his left heel and had yet to return to the lineup. Ted, who was making twice as much money as Joe, was twenty-eight and still in his prime, while DiMaggio was thirty-two and likely in decline.

“If you want to make the deal,” Yawkey told Topping, “you’ve got to throw in your little left fielder,” a reference to the rookie Yogi Berra, who was also a catcher. Yawkey, whose Red Sox were still trying to live down the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, was probably looking for a graceful exit, knowing his demand for Berra would be a deal breaker, and it was. Topping refused.
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The Sox erected lights, and night baseball came to Fenway in 1947. Williams displayed increasing skill hitting to left field, doubling off the wall regularly, and on May 13, he hit his first two home runs into the screen in left. After Ted complained that the huge advertisements on the wall for Calvert liquor, GEM razor blades, and Liberty soap distracted him at the plate, the Sox took the ads down, so the wall was now an even more hitter-friendly clean green.

Yet both Williams and DiMaggio complained that balls weren’t carrying as well as they used to. “The ball was deadened near the close of the ’42 season and hasn’t been hopped up since,” Ted said in May. “What’s the percentage going for the home run? Why, I can’t even hit one into the bleachers in batting practice. I’ll tell you this, and I mean it: I’m going to stop going for home runs and hit for average.”

Another reason it was becoming more difficult to hit homers: opposing pitchers gave him little to hit, especially with men on base. Williams had been walked 156 times the previous year and was on pace to increase that total in 1947. And not only was it getting boring for fans at Fenway and around the league who came to see the Kid hit, but American League owners felt the walks to Williams were starting to hurt them at the gate. In a highly unusual move, they met around the All-Star break and agreed to order their pitchers to let Ted swing more often when the season resumed.
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In the All-Star Game itself, Ted singled and doubled off the Cardinals’ Harry Brecheen to exact a small measure of revenge from the man who’d humbled him in the World Series, as the American League edged the Nationals, 2–1.

The Sox then kept it close for a while, but Boo Ferriss, Mickey Harris, and Tex Hughson, the mainstays of the pitching staff who in 1946 had combined for sixty-two wins, all went down with arm problems, and the team went on to finish in third place, fourteen games behind the Yankees. And while Ted hit .343 with 32 homers and 114 RBIs to win the Triple Crown, he was robbed of the MVP when the writers narrowly gave the award to DiMaggio. The Yankees had won the pennant, but Joe’s statistics were again clearly inferior to Williams’s: DiMaggio finished with a .315 average, 20 home runs, and 97 runs batted in, but compiled 202 votes to Ted’s 201.
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Ted tried to find solace in some pleasant family news: Doris was expecting, he announced. The
Traveler,
in a breathless story headlined
MRS. TED WILLIAMS TRAINS FOR STORK LEAGUE DEBUT
, revealed that Doris had made arrangements for her “confinement” in Boston in January.
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Since Ted’s return from the war, he and Doris had lived quietly and modestly in a five-room apartment, the middle unit of a brown-shingled three-decker in Brighton, a blue-collar section of Boston. Tex Hughson, the pitcher, and his wife lived in another apartment in the same building. Word had quickly spread that Ted had moved into the neighborhood, and kids would always hang around outside the residence hoping to get an autograph.

Doris had indulged the insatiable Boston press and consented to several at-home-with-Ted features in the previous few years. The papers all agreed she was pretty, usually noting her icy blue eyes, husky voice, and petite stature: even in heels she stood an inch or two below Ted’s shoulders. She liked to cook and bake, but said she had to prepare meals for six because Ted ate like a horse. She still rarely went to Fenway Park, but would listen to the games on the radio, both to gauge what kind of mood her husband might be in when he returned and to know when to start dinner, since Ted insisted on eating as soon as he walked in the door. They avoided talk about baseball—Ted didn’t want to bring any of his problems home, and Doris didn’t care for the game anyway. They both liked the movies, and they had the radio or record player on all the time, playing swing, jazz, or anything upbeat.

Doris seemed able to keep Ted’s temper in check. She wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, and might handle a tantrum with a droll put-down or by just keeping quiet and waiting for the storm to pass. But they both seemed to enjoy mixing it up, usually when fishing.

“He’s always making me cast over again,” Doris complained to a reporter. “He taught me, but he has no patience with me. And I have none with him.… We have some rows that literally rock the boat. Sometimes we fight because he won’t go home and it gets so dark I have to light matches so he can see to bait the hook. Then he’s always butting in when I have a bite, telling me how to haul the fish in. Usually I tell him to shut up.”
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The Williamses wintered back in Doris’s hometown of Princeton, Minnesota. On January 6, the Kid, dispensing with the annual contract-signing press extravaganza in Boston, sent the Red Sox a telegram from Princeton agreeing to the same exact terms for 1948 as he had in ’47: a base
salary of $65,000 with easily achievable attendance escalators topping out at $75,000.

Williams sent Doris on to Boston to prepare for the delivery of their baby, which was due on February 15. Doris would be staying with friends in Brighton while Ted would go down to Florida to resume fishing in warmer climes.

“I hope it’s a boy,” Ted told the
Globe
by phone.
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“And I hope he breaks every record in baseball, as I’ve been trying to do since I first joined the Red Sox.” Doris, for her part, said she wanted a girl.

The birth came suddenly, nearly three weeks ahead of schedule, on January 28. It was a girl, weighing five pounds and six ounces. The child was formally named Barbara Joyce, but they would call her Bobby-Jo. Williams’s daughter would later say that her father called her Bobby-Jo because it reminded him of a boy’s name, and he always wanted a son.

Ted, who had been planning to arrive in Boston to be with Doris the first week in February, was off fishing in the Everglades when the baby was born. Doris, her family, and their friends all tried to locate him—telegrams were sent, calls made. Finally a reporter in Miami tracked him down at a house in Everglades City and gave him the news.

That night, someone on the
Globe
sports desk called him. The reporter asked when Williams was going to come to Boston to be with Doris and his new baby. Ted, who considered virtually any call from a reporter an invasion of his privacy, was cranky and defensive. The conversation, which the paper recorded, wasn’t pretty:

A softer, sanitized version of this conversation was published in the
Globe
of January 29 in an article that carried no byline. The original transcript—which would make the rounds of the paper for years to come, always eliciting amusement—is contained in Harold Kaese’s archives, under the cheeky headline
BLESSED EVENT
. In a column the same day, Kaese dug at Williams for not being at his wife’s side when their daughter was born, claiming that “almost everybody in Boston seems to be mad about it.” The support for that assertion was interviews with ten unnamed people, five of whom spoke in favor of Ted, five against. Still, Kaese concluded: “Everybody knows where Ted Williams was when his baby was born here yesterday. He was fishing.… Once again, Williams finds himself standing in a corner wearing a dunce cap.”
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