The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (49 page)

While Williams may not have discussed drying bats with his teammates, he did warn them not to let their bats lie on the ground, where they could absorb extra moisture. But most ignored him, thinking he was over the top in his scientific theories and his exactitude.

In the end, the benefit from all this was likely minor at best. In 1949, the first full year he used a heated bat, Ted’s power production would spike. He hit 43 home runs and had 159 RBIs, compared to 25 and 127 respectively in 1948. But after that, there would be no discernible effect in his power numbers, except for 1957—the year he hit .388—when he struck 38 home runs, by far his largest total of the 1950s.

Two experts on the physics of baseball—Alan M. Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who runs a website devoted to physics and baseball, and Patrick Drane, assistant director of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell’s Baseball Research Center, which tests bats and balls for Major League Baseball and the NCAA—believe Williams probably received only marginal benefits from heating his bats. “I never say never, but all evidence that I have ever seen points to the fact that with heating or drying, you’re probably not going to change much bat performance at all,” said Nathan. “Ballplayers are notoriously superstitious about things. If Ted believed it helped him, who knows? You could imagine he tried it once and hit a long home run, and continued to do it that way. But I’m quite frankly very skeptical that performance would increase very much.”
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“It sounds basically that what Williams was doing was using a scientific basis to take advantage of what’s allowed,” said Drane, whose master’s thesis in mechanical engineering was about the effects of moisture content on wooden bats. In his research he found that moisture had a negligible effect on bat performance, but he said that further tests were needed to determine whether drying could improve performance. “A player typically will have more control with a lighter bat, and a really good player—if they have more control, it will make a difference in the length of long fly balls, and where the ball goes. During the season it gets more humid. Ted may have had a bat he was pretty happy with in April, then it got heavier. Drying it out, he was able to bring it back down to where he liked it. For someone that was meticulous about the weight, it could seem over the course of the summer it would be better to keep the bat he liked at the weight that he liked, so that’s where drying it out would
have some benefits. Ted Williams would potentially be able to hit the ball more squarely. But I don’t see that equaling a hundred and forty-eight miles per hour with a heated bat and nonheated [at] a hundred and fifteen—that’s a big difference.”
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Nathan, a lifelong Red Sox and Ted Williams fan, said he thought both the 115 and 148 figures, which Pressman said the MIT people recorded, were “simply crazy numbers.” Nathan said he had analyzed a total of 8,801 home runs from the 2009 and 2010 Major League Baseball seasons and found that the average batted-ball speed was 100.2 miles per hour. He said only seventy-three of the 8,801 home runs exceeded 110 miles per hour, and the highest recorded speed was 117.4 miles per hour.
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If Williams had truly hit a ball 148 miles an hour, it “would have gone farther than any baseball has ever gone,” Nathan concluded.

A
ssessing 1948, Tom Yawkey and the Red Sox management viewed the season as an anomaly, almost a fluke. They certainly didn’t blame McCarthy, and Yawkey went to absurd lengths to give his manager a vote of confidence. “I’d rather finish second with Joe McCarthy than first with someone else,” the owner told Harold Kaese.
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The Sox felt the Indians had had a once-in-a-lifetime season and that the aging Yankees were in decline, so Boston decided to stand pat and make no major changes in the off-season. As spring training neared, most of the baseball cognoscenti seemed to vindicate this strategy by picking the Sox to win the American League pennant in 1949.

Following a March 11 workout in Sarasota, there was an interesting discussion about the fine points of hitting between the last two men to bat .400 in the American League—Ted and Harry Heilmann—which left Williams a bit rattled. The sensitive topic, still debated to this day, was the extent to which Ted should be willing to swing at a pitch that was off the plate. Heilmann, the former Detroit Tiger who had posted a .403 mark in 1923 and was at the time of the discussion the team’s radio broadcaster, met with Ted in Joe McCarthy’s office. Nicknamed Slug in his playing days for his lack of swiftness afoot, Heilmann was in a feisty mood and recorded the conversation, later reproduced by Austen Lake of the
American:

That was the end of the interview. Ted shrugged and walked off to his locker. Heilmann packed up his recording equipment and muttered: “Guy’s the greatest natural batsman in history. Got everything but ability to accept advice.”
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Another heel injury would keep DiMaggio out of the Yankees lineup until late June, yet the Red Sox couldn’t make any hay. Ted’s hitting kept the team afloat, but Boston generally underperformed over the first half, forcing McCarthy to make some moves—acquiring right fielder Al Zarilla, who had hit .329 in 1948, from the ever-accommodating St. Louis Browns for $100,000; bringing up two young fireballers, Mickey McDermott and Chuck Stobbs, to insert into the starting rotation in place of Jack Kramer and Tex Hughson, both of whom were suffering arm problems; and releasing Denny Galehouse, who would never pitch in the majors again. The Sox won ten of eleven in June to pull within five of New York by the time the Yankees arrived in Boston for a three-game series on June 28.

DiMaggio, always finely attuned to dramatic possibilities, chose that date to make his 1949 debut. The pain from off-season surgery, this time to remove a bone spur in his right heel, had finally dissipated, and Joe made a last-minute decision to fly up from New York that afternoon to join his teammates, who’d already arrived in Boston.

His performance over the next three days was extraordinary. In the first game, still limping slightly and wearing a specially constructed shoe, he singled and hit a two-run homer, took out Junior Stephens with
a vicious slide at second, and robbed Williams in the ninth inning, running down a four-hundred-foot drive to the triangle in right-center, with a runner on third. The Yankees won, 5–4. The next day, he homered twice as the Yankees overcame a 7–1 Red Sox lead to win, 9–7. Before the final game of the series, a plane flew overhead towing a sign that said
THE GREAT DIMAGGIO
. As good as Dominic was, there was no doubt which brother the banner was referring to, and Joe delivered again, this time driving a fastball from Mel Parnell against a light standard over the left-field wall for a three-run homer to key the Yankees’ 6–3 win. The Clipper later said those three days in Boston were “the most satisfying in my life.”
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The Yankees’ sweep left the Red Sox eight games back and their season teetering. But as the weather warmed, so did the team. They sliced two games off the Yankees’ margin by the end of July, then went on a 42–13 tear in August and September. DiMaggio caught pneumonia, and the Yankees slumped. The Indians had faded to third place and were not a factor. Things had jelled for Boston. The hitting and pitching had come together at the same time, and the Red Sox were loose and having fun.

Three of the players perhaps most responsible for the team’s harmony—and, in particular, for keeping Ted relaxed and happy—were Birdie Tebbetts, the catcher acquired from the Tigers in 1947, Mickey McDermott, the flame-throwing left-hander whom McCarthy had belatedly brought up from Louisville in June, and Lou Stringer, the backup second baseman.

Tebbetts, whose first name was George, was one of the leading bench jockeys in baseball, and he loved to needle his own teammates, too, especially Williams. Birdie liked to say that when he was catching in Detroit, Ted was a better hitter than he was now. Williams would always take the bait: “What the hell do you mean?” he’d ask indignantly.
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Tebbetts also knew he could easily irk Ted just by reading the papers to him. So he’d sit in the clubhouse, casually scanning the day’s baseball news. “God, Ted, did you see what they wrote about you today?” he’d ask. “I wouldn’t put up with that crap if I were you.”
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Ted also had had a soft spot for Mickey McDermott since 1947, when McDermott was up briefly to throw batting practice and had decked Williams in the cage at Yankee Stadium. Mickey was throwing bullets over and behind the hitters’ heads. “Bush, take it easy,” Ted had impishly told him then. “Batting practice pitchers come and go. Making it in the game is what counts.”
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At spring training in ’48, the nineteen-year-old McDermott made a splash—both for his live but still wild arm and for being a character. That spring in Sarasota, a photographer had taken a shot of McDermott smiling broadly while a trainer rubbed ointment on his sunburned neck, and the photographer sold the shot to
Life
magazine, which published it as a generic exhibit A of the wide-eyed rookie. That picture was said to have been the inspiration for Norman Rockwell’s famous painting
The Rookie,
which later ran on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post.
The painting depicts Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Jackie Jensen, and Billy Goodman staring skeptically at a gawky, freckle-faced kid carrying a worn suitcase and wearing a poorly fitting sport jacket.
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The Red Sox sent McDermott down again in 1948 because of his control issues, but when he was brought up for good in June of ’49 he was being hailed as the freshest face to hit the Red Sox since Ted himself in 1938. Ted, after perusing a headline that already proclaimed the rookie a star, had seen fit to call McDermott over and remind him that there was only one star on the team, and that was the Kid.

Once, after Mickey won a game, he wanted to take a girl back to Ted’s hotel room. Ted said, “Yeah, but get out by midnight.” Arriving with his date, McDermott was impressed with the suite and the arrangements Williams had made for him: “The lights were low,” he wrote in his book. “Candles flickered romantically. A tray of hors d’oeuvres awaited along with champagne chilling in an ice bucket.” After tending to his primary business, McDermott fell asleep, not to awaken until morning. Later he apologized profusely to Williams, saying, “Ted, where were you? All you had to do was knock on the door.”

“Bush,” he replied, “I know you. No way you’d be out of there by midnight. I rented another suite.”
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Stringer, who’d played for the Chicago Cubs before being acquired by the Red Sox in ’48, told the late David Halberstam he liked to pump up Williams around the batting cage, knowing that his mood improved as he hit the ball better and better in practice before a game.

“Ted, you’re looking great!” Stringer would say as Williams took his cuts. And Ted would reply, “You’re goddamned right. You see that wrist, you see that swing, you see that power? I’m the best goddamn hitter in the world, kid, you goddamn better believe it. The best goddamn hitter who ever lived.”

Stringer’s wife, Helen, was attractive, and Ted seemed to have a crush on her. “Hey, Bush, we’ll keep you around just to keep her around,” he had told Lou after meeting Helen. The next time Ted saw Helen, at
Back Bay Station, she engaged him skillfully. Had he heard about the new prospect the Red Sox were bringing up? No, said Ted.

“He’s gonna be better than you, he’s gonna take the sun away from you.”

“Who’s that?” said Williams, growing more anxious. “Who’s that?”

“Lou Stringer,” said Helen proudly.

Ted roared with laughter and said to Lou, “I wish I had a girl like that, who loved me that much.”
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As the Red Sox approached the last two days of the season—against New York, inevitably, in the Bronx—they led the Yankees by a single game.

The Yankees chose October 1 to stage a day for DiMaggio. The players warmed up, then sat for an hour as the Clipper was honored. His mother and Dominic stood next to Joe as he was showered with gifts. “I’d like to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee,” he told the sellout crowd.

New York started Allie Reynolds against Boston’s Mel Parnell. McCarthy was taking no chances after his Galehouse gambit of a year ago. Parnell had had a career year, winning twenty-five games to that point. Tom Yawkey, meanwhile, was feeling confident enough to have put a special train on standby in Boston to bring the team’s wives down to New York to celebrate a pennant.

Dom DiMaggio and Ted got things going for the Sox in the first inning with singles. Williams’s ball was hit so hard that it bounced off both first baseman Tommy Henrich and umpire Cal Hubbard. Junior Stephens knocked in Dominic for the first run of the game. In the third, Reynolds pitched around Williams and walked two others to load the bases. Yankees manager Casey Stengel’s instructions were to pitch carefully to Williams at all times, though he had a hard-and-fast rule to give him nothing he could hit in the late innings if the game was on the line.
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Bobby Doerr singled to knock in one run, whereupon Reynolds was lifted for Joe Page, who walked two more batters, and the Red Sox were up 4–0. But DiMaggio led off the fourth with a double, and the Yankees rallied for two runs, then struck for two more in the fifth to tie the game. In the bottom of the eighth, Johnny Lindell, facing Red Sox reliever Joe Dobson, slammed a pitch into the left-field grandstand to make it 5–4. Page hung on, and the Yankees won.

Then, just as in 1948, two teams were tied, and the final game was for the pennant. Stengel chose one of his mainstays to pitch—Vic Raschi,
who was then 20–10—while McCarthy tapped Ellis Kinder (23–6), who hadn’t lost a game he’d started since June 6.
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Raschi got the first two Red Sox he faced to make outs, walked Williams, then retired Stephens. Shortstop Phil Rizzuto led off for New York. He faked a bunt to draw Johnny Pesky in slightly at third, then slapped the ball over Pesky’s head down the left-field line. The ball got stuck in a gully and rolled past Williams, who’d been shading Rizzuto to left-center. Rizzuto made it all the way to third. With the infield held back by McCarthy, Henrich grounded to Doerr at second, and Rizzuto scored with the first Yankees run.

Improbably, that run loomed larger and larger as the game wore on. Kinder was holding the Yankees in check, but the Red Sox could do nothing with Raschi. Entering the eighth inning, it was still 1–0, Yankees.

After Birdie Tebbetts made the first out for Boston, Kinder was up next. Though Kinder wasn’t a bad hitter for a pitcher, and though McCarthy had little confidence in his bull pen, he decided to send out Tom Wright, the only left-handed batter available on the bench, to pinch-hit. Wright, who had only recently been brought up from the minors and had just three at bats with Boston, walked, but Dom DiMaggio hit into a double play to end the inning. McCarthy then brought in Mel Parnell, who had pitched four innings the previous day.

Parnell had nothing left. The first batter he faced, Henrich, walloped a home run. Berra singled, and McCarthy belatedly brought in Tex Hughson to face DiMaggio, who grounded into a double play. But Lindell singled, as did Billy Johnson. Williams juggled Johnson’s ball, allowing Lindell to reach third. Then Cliff Mapes walked to load the bases. Jerry Coleman, the number eight hitter, came up. With the count three and two and all three runners on the move, Coleman hit a little flare off his fists to right field. It was a do-or-die play for Al Zarilla, who raced in, dove, and caught the ball, but then watched it squirt out of his glove as he slammed to the ground. He got up and threw Coleman out at third, but not before all three runners had scored to make it 5–0, New York.