The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (47 page)

But Doris, talking to writers by phone from her hospital bed the following day, didn’t seem upset with her husband and stated the obvious: the baby had been born prematurely, far sooner than expected. Ted had been planning to be there for the birth. She explained that he had indeed tried to call the previous night, but she’d been asleep and he hadn’t wanted to disturb her, adding that she hoped to hear from him today. She said their daughter had Ted’s eyes and her mouth. Meanwhile, Doris was enjoying herself watching television, the first patient in Boston’s Lying-in Hospital to be accorded this new perk.
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Furious with the Kaese column, Williams flew up to Boston three days later, on the night of February 1. The flight was delayed, and by the
time it arrived it was 1:45 a.m. Ted told the mob of reporters and photographers awaiting him that he’d learned of the birth about ten hours after the fact and claimed he’d tried to make a plane reservation to get to Boston but had not been able to get a flight until now. Asked if he’d pose for pictures with the baby, Ted replied, “Nothing doing. I don’t care what people say about this, but there’ll be no pictures taken in the hospital.”
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He said Doris and Bobby-Jo would soon move in with friends in the area and he would return to Florida. As for those who thought he’d behaved poorly, he was blunt: “To heck with public opinion,” he said. “It’s my baby, and it’s my life.”

The crowd of reporters followed him over to the hospital, where the Kid did allow himself to be photographed peering in through the glass wistfully at little Bobby-Jo. “What a sweetheart,” he murmured. “A little on the light side, but so was I.… They tell me she has a temper, too.… I wonder where she got that?” Ted added, smiling. Now that his family was growing, he would move out of his apartment and rent a big house in upscale Newton, just west of Boston, so Doris and the baby would have plenty of room. He’d hire a nurse, too. “That gal is going to have everything she wants.”
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Before long, the writers were ready to change the subject. They wanted the Kid’s reaction to two big off-season moves the Red Sox had made.

First was the hiring of Joe McCarthy, the fabled former Yankees manager, to take over the dugout in Boston, replacing Joe Cronin, who’d moved on to the front office as general manager. McCarthy had been forced out of New York in May of 1946 because of complications arising from his well-known battle with the bottle. Still, he had the highest winning percentage of any major-league manager ever, and he’d won nine pennants—one with the Cubs in 1929 and eight with the Yankees—as well as seven World Series titles in New York, so it was considered a coup for the Red Sox to have lured him out of retirement. McCarthy was known for his insistence on discipline and professionalism, and the press was already speculating about whether he and Williams would clash and about whether, or how, McCarthy might try to bring Ted to heel.

The second move was a blockbuster trade with the St. Louis Browns in which Boston gave the Browns $375,000 and nine marginal players in return for All-Star shortstop and slugger Junior Stephens and two frontline starting pitchers, Ellis Kinder and Jack Kramer. Stephens was
considered the most important part of the deal, since he provided a potent bat to hit behind Williams and keep pitchers honest.
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“I’m hoping, of course, that Junior Stephens can pile up some 25 homers this year,” Ted said.
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“That certainly would help the team, wouldn’t it?” As for McCarthy, the Kid didn’t foresee any problems. “It’s kind of queer for me to hear people asking me how I’ll like McCarthy. That doesn’t worry me a bit. I hope I play and conduct myself so that McCarthy will like me.” McCarthy himself was also ready with a conciliatory off-season quote: “A manager who can’t get along with a .400 hitter ought to have his head examined,” he proclaimed.

But it was the baby story—Ted’s perceived callousness toward his wife and his scorn for public opinion—that lingered in the news for weeks and became one of the defining episodes of his career.

The syndicated columnist Paul Gallico wrote an open letter to Ted, fanning the flames of the anti-Williams narrative: “You… were quoted out of Boston as saying to newsmen who interviewed you at Logan Airport upon your belated return from fishing in Florida to visit your wife and newborn daughter: ‘To hell with the public—they can’t run my life.’ These, you must surely know, are the most famous of famous last words.… With them, you brand yourself as not only an ingrate, but a first class dolt. You are not a nice fellow, Brother Williams. I do believe that baseball and the sports pages would be better off without you.”
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Ted did have his defenders, who argued that the press had no business butting in on his private life, including, surprisingly, Dave Egan as well as the
Globe
’s Jerry Nason. Yet the birth of his daughter was a public relations debacle that could easily have been avoided had Ted simply said how delighted he was to be a father and that he would certainly have been with his wife had he only known that the baby was going to arrive early. Once again, Williams wasn’t wired to comply with PR norms. He’d felt cornered by a press he deemed out-of-bounds, and he wasn’t about to pivot and curry favor with the sort he despised.

Ted also thought this episode illustrated the differences between playing in Boston and New York, arguing that DiMaggio and other Yankees stars got a pass and he didn’t. “You can make a case out of anything if you want to, or you can be fair to a guy and not make a big how-do-you-do out of a little thing,” he wrote in his book.
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“I always thought the Yankee players were protected from this sort of thing, that even their real bad actors were written up in angelic terms by the New York press. You can protect a guy and everybody will love him, or you can dig at him and everybody will think he’s an S.O.B. Of course, the
Yankees were winning—you get a good press when you’re winning, and we were losing.”

Joe McCarthy had always insisted that he and his Yankees wear jackets and ties off the field—another point of interest as spring training approached. How, people wondered, would he enforce his dress code on Ted, who of course was famous for disdaining ties? The manager surprised everyone in Sarasota with a disarming gesture: he greeted his star while wearing a shirt with an open collar.

Spring training was thus quickly defused of any tension and unfolded quite boringly, save for an entertaining diversion on March 9, when Ted accepted a challenge from Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the former Olympic track star turned golf champion, to compete with her in a driving contest at a local range. This publicity stunt, lapped up by writers and photographers alike, was engineered by Fred Corcoran, the agent for both Ted and Babe. Ted, who towered over and substantially outweighed Zaharias, sliced most of his drives out to the left, while Babe’s were always down the middle and mostly longer. Soon she was coaching Williams on his swing—and needling him, too. “Let’s see you chase this one,” she’d say. Or: “Here’s one for you to shoot at, Ted.” After finishing his bucket of balls, the Kid cheerfully conceded. “You’ve got me beat,” he said.
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Despite the big-name manager and the new reinforcements from Saint Louis, the Red Sox got off to a miserable start and were 14–23 at the end of May, in seventh place. Ted was hitting, at .374 with 11 home runs and 42 RBIs, but nobody else was. Responding, McCarthy dropped Mickey Harris and Boo Ferriss from the pitching rotation and installed rookie Billy Goodman at first base. The team took off, going 18–6 in June, as Ted hit .460 for the month. By late July, the Sox were in first place, and through August, the month Babe Ruth died, they fought for the top spot with the Yankees and the Indians. In September, with seven games left, the three teams were tied, with records of 91–56.
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Across town, meanwhile, the Boston Braves had clinched the National League pennant. The city was baseball-mad and preparing for a streetcar World Series. The rise of the Braves, who hadn’t won a pennant since 1914, was an intriguing story. While Boston had long been dominated by the Red Sox, the balance of power started to change during the war years, when the Braves were acquired by three wealthy local contractors—Lou Perini, Joe Maney, and Guido Rugo—whom the press quickly dubbed “the Three Little Steam Shovels.”

The Steam Shovels had plenty of money and weren’t shy in spending it to build a respectable team and a loyal fan base. In 1946, they had hired away the successful Cardinals manager Billy Southworth, saw their attendance jump by nearly six hundred thousand to just under a million, and finished fourth. Though the Red Sox won the pennant that year, the Braves had been helped by their rival’s success, when fans, unable to get into sold-out Fenway Park, instead tried Braves Field, which was within walking distance along Commonwealth Avenue.

The Braves had exciting new players, such as Bob Elliott, Warren Spahn, Earl Torgeson, Johnny Sain, and Tommy Holmes. They brought night baseball to Boston a year before the Red Sox did and aggressively marketed the team to the community with such initiatives as a new $50,000 scoreboard the size of a tennis court, a new press box, three troubadours who wandered the stands playing music, and fan appreciation days, when new cars were given away. Many of these ideas came from the Steam Shovels’ indefatigable publicity man, Billy Sullivan, the future founding owner of the Boston Patriots. By 1947, the Braves had finished third and broken the million mark, drawing 1,277,361 fans. In the pennant year of ’48, attendance went up to 1,455,439.

Back in the American League, what many consider to be one of the greatest pennant races ever approached its finale. With three days left, the Indians had pulled ahead by two games over both the Red Sox and the Yankees. Cleveland had three games at home against Detroit. Boston and New York had an off day, then played each other on October 2 and October 3 at Fenway. When the Tigers won their first game, the Indians’ lead over the Yankees and Red Sox dropped to one.

A capacity crowd of thirty-five thousand watched Jack Kramer defeat Tommy Byrne of the Yankees. Boston’s 5–1 victory was paced by Williams, who hit a homer and a double to drive in two runs. He also stole a base and was walked three times, twice intentionally.

The home run off Byrne was especially satisfying for Williams, since the New York pitcher delighted in needling Ted almost every time he faced him, trying to break his concentration. “Hey, Ted,” Byrne would say. “How’s the Boston press these days? Still screwing you? That’s a shame. I think you deserve better.… By the way, what are you hitting? You don’t know? Goddamn, Ted, the last time I looked it up it was .360 or something.” Or later, when he knew Williams was having marital problems, Byrne would bellow, “Ted, how’s the family?” Finally, Ted would turn to the catcher, Yogi Berra, and say, “Yogi, tell that son of a bitch to throw the ball!”
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Boston’s win eliminated the Yankees, while in Cleveland, the Indians beat Detroit to maintain a one-game lead going into the final day. That meant the Red Sox needed to beat the Yankees and have Cleveland lose in order to tie the Indians. In the event of a tie, there would be a one-game playoff for the pennant in Boston.

After the game, Joe DiMaggio drove with his brother Dominic to spend the night at Dominic’s home, in suburban Wellesley. The Red Sox center fielder was getting married on October 7, and his parents had flown in from San Francisco for a family dinner that night. The two brothers drove in silence. Joe was down because the Yankees had lost, but he was quiet and reserved under normal circumstances. Finally he turned to Dominic and said: “You knocked us out today, but we’ll get back at you tomorrow. We’ll knock you out. I’ll take care of it personally.” Dominic, who always played in Joe’s shadow, pondered that for a moment, then replied: “You’re forgetting I may have something to do with that tomorrow. I’ll be there too.”
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Since Joe had already had such great success, his parents were openly rooting for Dom. As it happened, both brothers delivered the next day. Joe doubled to drive in the Yankees’ first run as New York jumped out to a 2–0 lead after two innings. Fans were dividing their attention between the game and the scoreboard, awaiting news from Cleveland, and roared in the second when they learned that the Tigers had scored four runs off Bob Feller. The Red Sox responded with five runs of their own, triggered by a Williams double. But Joe DiMaggio, despite being hobbled by his bad heel and a variety of other ailments, hit a double in the fifth, driving in two runs to bring the Yankees within one. Then Dominic, leading off the sixth, stroked a home run over the wall in left, igniting a pivotal four-run rally that gave the Red Sox a 9–4 cushion. Nevertheless, his brother didn’t give up, singling in a run in the seventh and banging out another single in the ninth. But by then it was 10–5, and Yankees manager Bucky Harris raised the white flag by sending in a pinch runner for the Clipper. As Joe limped off the field, the sellout crowd gave him a long standing ovation—a generous, spontaneous gesture that DiMaggio would later call the greatest thrill of his career. Dominic joined in the tribute, doffing his cap from center field as Joe entered the dugout.

It had been another big game for Williams: two doubles and a sacrifice fly for two runs batted in and a walk. In the two Yankees games, he had reached base eight out of ten times. And the news remained good from Cleveland: the Tigers, behind Hal Newhouser, beat the Indians
and the redoubtable Feller, 8–1, to force the playoff showdown in Boston on October 4.

When the Red Sox arrived at Fenway the next day, they were shocked to learn that Joe McCarthy had selected Denny Galehouse, a journeyman right-hander nearing the end of an ordinary career, to pitch the most important game of the season. Mel Parnell, the left-hander who last had pitched on September 30, had expected to get the start, and Ellis Kinder, more rested, was generally thought to be the second choice. But McCarthy—in what remains one of the most controversial decisions a Red Sox manager has ever made, a decision that is still debated among old-timers and baseball aficionados—eschewed Parnell, Kinder, and the rest of his starting rotation in favor of Galehouse, a reliever who had warmed up in the bull pen for six innings the day before in the 10–5 win over the Yankees.