Teddy Ballgame
With his best player’s batting average sitting at .3995, Boston Red Sox manager Joe Cronin offers Ted Williams a day off in the season-ending doubleheader against the Athletics 82 years ago today as Philadelphia’s Shibe Park.
Such a move would allow Williams to finish the 1941 season with a batting average that would round up to an even. 400.
Of course, Williams being Williams – that would be, well, prideful, persnickety and downright stubborn – turns down Cronin’s offer and tells him to put him in the lineup.
Batting fourth and playing left field in both games of the doubleheader, Williams goes 4-for-5 with a home run in the first game that Boston wins 12-11 and then 2-for-3 in the second game that Boston loses 7-1.
Williams’ afternoon begins with a single to right field off Philadelphia starter Dick Fowler to lead off the second inning of the opener.
“Just as I stepped in,” Williams later says, “(umpire Bill McGowan) called time and slowly walked around the plate, bent over and began dusting it off. Without looking up, he said, ‘To hit .400, a batter has got be loose.’ ”
Clearly, Williams is loose as five more hits follow in his next seven at-bats – two more singles and a homer in the first game with a single and double against Fred Caligiuri in the second game.
Before the doubleheader, Philadelphia’s pitchers are told by manager Connie Mack through catcher Frankie Hayes that, no, they are not going to pitch around the 23-year-old Williams.
“When Ted came to bat, (Hayes) told Ted that the pitchers had the word from Mr. Mack that they didn’t ought to let up at all on Ted,” Philadelphia relief pitcher Porter Vaughan later tells author Bill Nowlin, “and, if they did, they’d have to pay the consequences.”
Vaughan certainly follows Mack’s directive, pitches to Williams and ends up allowing Williams’ third hit of the doubleheader – a single to right in the sixth inning of the opener.
By the end of the doubleheader in front of a Sunday afternoon crowd of 10,268 at Shibe Park, Williams lifts his season-ending batting average from that round-it-up .3995 to a solid .406.
No eligible batter has hit .400 since then.
Historians note that exactly 19 years to the day after he completes his march to .400 and beyond, Williams takes the final swing of his Hall of Fame career and launches a solo home run off Baltimore’s Jack Fisher in the eighth inning of the Red Sox’s 5-4 victory at Fenway Park.
And, Williams being Williams – again, that would be, well, prideful, persnickety and downright stubborn – proceeds straight to the dugout and ignores several minutes of the Wednesday afternoon crowd of 10,454 chanting, “We want Ted.”
Williams never materializes from the dugout, instead being replaced in left field for the top of the ninth inning by Carroll Hardy and forever going without tipping his cap after the final moment of his monumental career.
“Though we thumped, wept and chanted, ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back,” John Updikes writes in his classic1960 piece, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”
“Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement and a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that 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.”