[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 132 (Tuesday, September 28, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7609-S7612]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REMEMBERING TED WILLIAMS
Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, baseball celebrates ``walk off''
home runs, the four baggers that bring a game to an end. But 50 years
ago today, the greatest hitter who ever lived, No. 9, Ted Williams, hit
the ultimate ``walk off'' homer. After 21 seasons with our Red Sox,
``The Kid'' homered deep into right field in his very last at bat. At
42, despite the toll of nagging injuries, some of which dated back to
his combat tours, Ted lofted the ball into the right field bleachers,
not all that far from the spot where he hit the longest homerun in the
history of Fenway Park at 502 feet. To this day the record stands and
the seat in those bleachers is memorialized in red. This home run might
not have been the longest but it was a fitting farewell to the game he
loved so much--and excelled at like no other. He was bigger than life.
We revered Ted Williams for many reasons--for what he did on the
field, and off of it as well. It was not just his lifelong commitment
to the Jimmy Fund, but the selfless way he twice walked away from
baseball and served his country in uniform in World War II and in Korea
where he was wingman to another icon, John Glenn. He was a two time
American League Most Valuable Player, boasted a career batting average
of .344, an on base percentage of .551, lead the league in batting six
times, and hammered 521 home runs. Ted Williams was guts and grit
personified--and all of Red Sox Nation was grateful for the special way
he welcomed us into his hearts in his final years, at last tipping his
cap to the fans of Boston, and letting us say goodbye to him one last
time at the 1999 All Star Game in Boston when--on the Fenway mound--he
was surrounded by the great players of the 20th century who were in awe
of our own `Splendid Splinter.' It was one final moment of magic in a
career--and life--seemingly ripped from a story-book.
But it was that last home run that John Updike remembers in the
extraordinary ``Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,'' an essay that captures the
greatness of Ted Williams far better than any of us could--and still
today, 50 years later, speaks to the Red Sox faithful, and baseball
fans across the country. I ask to have this essay printed in the
Record, and I thank the Senate for taking time today to remember an
American icon--Boston's own Ted Williams.
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
(By John Updike)
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a
ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously
sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type
Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and
offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between
Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling
irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the
American League, while its left field is the shortest; the
high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from
home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface
at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday,
September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a
uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall,
picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a
mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the
verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and
uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-
seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and
aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place
only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of
the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore
Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had
been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the
insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up
primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of
the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that
their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED,
KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER
WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. ``WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT
TED? HUB FANS ASK'' ran the headline on a newspaper being
read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams'
retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been
threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey,
the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but
probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal
season of 1959 with a--considering his advanced age--fine
one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had
grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This
was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled
to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games
there.
I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the
field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red
Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray
visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I
[[Page S7610]]
wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads
and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering
through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, ``You
maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do
it . . .''
The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere
summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats,
mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing
hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which
may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis,
Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.
First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young
bridegroom came out of the West, announced ``All I want out
of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say
`There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' '' The
dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary
deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to
their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long
exchange of backbiting, hat-flipping, booing, and spitting
that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The
spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside
courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the
grandstand should be judged against this background: the
left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a
large number of customers who have bought their way in
primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams.
Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams'
case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His
basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they
weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has
quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of
paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his
refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek
to newsmen. It has been a costly theory--it has probably cost
him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable
Player awards, which are voted by reporters--but he has held
to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and
literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the
opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the
tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off
to war.
In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine
pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of
Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who
nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the
Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey,
a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central
jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby
Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny
Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best
paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional
to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was
Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment--and a fair
sample of appreciative sports-page prose--appeared the very
day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in
the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):
Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's] has been a
series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the
only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted
only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in
1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with
the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He
flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-
month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed
pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been
Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-
winning record is proof enough of that.
There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal
weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-
enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home
run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing
effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample
coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him.
He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for
it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he
continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was
gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his
critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten
crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St.
Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians,
and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the
1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the
Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of
Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing
that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The
correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then
suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed,
for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did
nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement
unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.
Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge
those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can,
in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of
Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two
last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me,
``W'ms, lf'' was a figment of the box scores who always
seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard
blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the
radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two
singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell
``blooper'' pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the
park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the
bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's
head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was
still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed
qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit.
For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a
hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing
at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done
well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long
season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out.
Irrelevance--since the reference point of most individual
games is remote and statistical--always threatens its
interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional
heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who
always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and
their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a
sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who
writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers'
dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan
Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports,
baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its
immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men
in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best
suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is
an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my
generation has concentrated within himself so much of the
sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural
skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity
of competence that crowds the throat with joy.
By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser
stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his
craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind
of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed
an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming
back--back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a
shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of
flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without
some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always
looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and
power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his
body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily
publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and
the Williams Shift--the maneuver, custom-built by Lou
Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders
were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a
left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the
ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles
through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average
hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told
him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams
believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a
slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it
through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen
points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought
the occasional home run at the cost of many directed
singles--a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of
a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.
After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted
by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the
end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century.
The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons.
In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were
contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting
around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season
ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the
Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium.
Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed
to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers
would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to
him--a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired
and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good
to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a
sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium,
``There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and
all those people smoking--and, of course, the shadows. . . .
It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium
and even then you're not sure.'') The final outcome in
1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.
The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it
made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the
same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit
.365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams,
though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had
laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the
Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four
successive pinch-hit home runs. ``I feel terrible,'' he
confessed, ``but every time I take a swing at the ball it
goes out of the park.'' He ended the season with thirty-eight
home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either
league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of
thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so
of the ``leg hits'' that a younger man would have beaten out,
it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in
1949 and 1953 had lost batting
[[Page S7611]]
championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey
Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and
filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.
In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around
in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was
even benched (``rested,'' Manager Mike Higgins tactfully
said). Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer
batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his
elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly
turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it
looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded
you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired
together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In
the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status
had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to
that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record
books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and
the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color
to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars--
Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline--served to make Williams appear
all the more singular. And off the field, his private
philanthropy--in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the
Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer--gave him a
civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal
Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and
a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their
good works intersect and they appear in the public eye
together, make a handsome and heartening pair.
Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once
more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was
both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles;
the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a
ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of
time that if Williams didn't come through he would be
benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was
Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season
needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500;
after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a
stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he
played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the
number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521,
thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams
and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a
statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went,
his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star
Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee,
off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a
generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-
two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and
hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine
homers.
In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter
of his era, he did not establish himself as ``the greatest
hitter who ever lived.'' Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for
power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and
Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime
averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack
Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came
close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty.
In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held
by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs,
fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth
in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and
thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons
for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add
another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a
man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a
very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that
these years would have been not merely average but prime
years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was
playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and
later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the
middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field
fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in
the league, and if--the least excusable ``if''--we imagine
him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can
defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable
fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not
incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the
statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made
that in the combination of power and average Williams is
first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally,
there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back
to Shoeless Joe Jackson--another unlucky natural--rank him
and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have
seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had
come.
Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as
black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-
colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead,
came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those
frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen,
often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did
not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up,
on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A
young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that
by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for
a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking
aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole
dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University
emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their
heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to
me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout?
On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the
sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans
came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a
weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in
Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at
the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of
competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a
few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was
abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest
of them two years old, if that. Someday, presumably, he could
tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with
these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard
freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when
a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity;
thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and
lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed
bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from
Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men--
taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders who will
continue to click through the turnstiles long after
everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas.
Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a
joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists--
typical Boston College levity.
The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered
to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox
dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like
maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and
Williams' head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt.
Williams' conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-
inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the
patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young
Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very
powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing
motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he
flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left
but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let
the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with
Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.
A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the
lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have
been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The
loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the
microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox
radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's
brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two
words ``pride'' and ``champion'' as his text. It began,
``Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego,
California . . .'' and ended, ``I don't think we'll ever see
another like him.'' Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of
the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams
with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member
of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a
plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety,
out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss.
Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar
check.
Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and
his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it
seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great
distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut.
His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he
glided, as if helplessly, into ``In spite of all the terrible
things that have been said about me by the maestros of the
keyboard up there . . .'' He glanced up at the press rows
suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters,
incidentally, reported the phrase as ``knights of the
keyboard,'' but I heard it as ``maestros'' and prefer it that
way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision
flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with
erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug
journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ``. .
. And they were terrible things,'' Williams insisted, with
level melancholy, into the mike. ``I'd like to forget them,
but I can't.'' He paused, swallowed his memories, and went
on, ``I want to say that my years in Boston have been the
greatest thing in my life.'' The crowd, like an immense sail
going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking
all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious
little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to
him at the beginning of his career and said, ``Ted, you can
play anywhere you like.'' Leaping nimbly into the role of his
younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be
a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other
cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in
baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded
ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate.
The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after
Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be
permanently retired--the first time the Red Sox had so
honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played.
We cheered. The game began.
[[Page S7612]]
Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in
the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young
pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for
the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he
disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike
zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes
were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly,
the bases were full, with Williams on second. ``Oh, I hope he
gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl
beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and
Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the
pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's
head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the
Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop
in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness,
he looked fine--flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly
substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small
head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his
ankles--all these points, often observed by caricaturists,
were visible in the flesh.
One of the collegiate voices behind me said, ``He looks
old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . .''
``Yeah,'' the other voice said, ``but he looks like an old
hawk, doesn't he?''
With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving
his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an
attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at
once to shout ``Steal home! Go, go!'' Williams' speed afoot
was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit
a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran
home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with
unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit
him on the back.
``Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?'' one of the boys
behind me said.
``It's cold,'' the other explained. ``He doesn't play well
when it's cold. He likes heat. He's a hedonist.''
The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the
inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the
score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall.
Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years,
played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood
there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his
patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of
interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very
interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with
nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to
the left-field line--along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a
first-rate third baseman, played the game--and had peopled
the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh,
or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams'
recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox
infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman
turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the
shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open
window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled
their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber
with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as
it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn
the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning
this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.
Whenever Williams appeared at the plate--pounding the dirt
from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his
left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his
vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an
electric ferocity--it was like having a familiar Leonardo
appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This
man, you realized--and here, perhaps, was the difference,
greater than the difference in gifts--really intended to hit
the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep
center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the
ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the
deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual
east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his
back against the big ``380'' painted on the right-field wall
and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have
been gone. (After the game, Williams said, ``I didn't think I
could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't
good.'')
The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning
the arc lights were turned on--always a wan sight in the
daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession.
Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox
rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He
was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his
last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of
merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances,
we stood, all of us--stood and applauded. Have you ever heard
applause in a ballpark? Just applause--no calling, no
whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute,
burst after burst, crowding and running together in
continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of
the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was
not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting
set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds
and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the
enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one
summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for
Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen
in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation,
switching his hat impatiently, ignoring everything except his
cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a
hush.
Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew
that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch
must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three
innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was
soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will
always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of
the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the
times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density
of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of
the future.
Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first
pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung
mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic
swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its
failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again,
and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into
the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle,
behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight
than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the
Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books
while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest
corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his
reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the
wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the
square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He
ran as he always ran out home runs--hurriedly, unsmiling,
head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out
of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and
chanted ``We want Ted'' for minutes after he hid in the
dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds
passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish,
a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is
nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and
even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and
acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now.
Gods do not answer letters.
Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field
refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the
smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and
escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent
Williams out to his leftfield position, then instantly
replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at
Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform
jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and
we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.
One of the scholasticists behind me said, ``Let's go. We've
seen everything. I don't want to spoil it.'' This seemed a
sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so
exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation,
intention, and execution, that already it felt a little
unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle
collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets
under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my
attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over.
Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3.
In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin
Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz,
pinchhitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry
advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases.
Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but
in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox
infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first
baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the
car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided
not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do
even that, the hardest thing. Quit.
____________________