Ted Williams

The Full Biography

Ted Williams. Hitter. The San Diego kid who made .406 in 1941, left the job twice for the Marines, and spent the rest of a long life trying to prove the swing was a science.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a left-handed swing, the hips already gone, the ball a rumor in the right-field sky at Fenway. They called him the Splendid Splinter, the Kid, Teddy Ballgame. The year might be 1941, the last season anyone hit .400, or 1960, a home run in the last at-bat. What the still cannot show is Theodore Samuel Williams of San Diego, a Salvation Army mother, nearly five prime seasons given to two wars, a fishing life in the Florida Keys, a Hall of Fame speech that named Negro League players the room had not invited, and a family fight over his body that belongs in one honest paragraph and then should be left there.

He was born on August 30, 1918, in San Diego, to Samuel Williams and May Venzor, a woman of Mexican descent who worked the streets for the Salvation Army. The household was not a baseball idyll. The father drifted. The mother was gone for the work of the Army. The boy lived at the playground and at Hoover High and treated hitting as the one subject that would not leave him. The first pressure was to be perfect at a thing he could control. He signed with the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League, then with the Boston Red Sox. In 1939 he arrived in the American League as a skinny left fielder who talked about batting the way a machinist talks about a lathe. He hit .327 as a rookie, with 31 home runs and 145 runs batted in. Boston had found its argument.

1941 is the civic object. He went into the last day of the season at .39955, which the math of the time would have rounded to .400 if he had sat. Joe Cronin, the manager, offered him the seat. He refused it. A doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics at Shibe Park. Six hits in eight at-bats. He finished at .406. No qualified hitter has done it since. The number is not a souvenir. It is a decision repeated over a summer and then again on a September afternoon when sitting would have been the safe story. He also hit .406 in a year Joe DiMaggio hit in fifty-six straight games. New York took the headlines. Williams took the average. He did not pretend he liked the split.

He won the Triple Crown in 1942 — average, home runs, runs batted in — and then he left. Naval aviation. The Marines. He was a flight instructor in World War II and did not see combat in that war, a fact he never inflated. He came back in 1946, won the American League Most Valuable Player award, and took the Red Sox to a World Series they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals. He won the Triple Crown again in 1947. He won the MVP again in 1949. The swing did not change. The argument with Boston did not change either. He did not tip his cap. He spat toward the stands when the stands required it. He was the greatest hitter of his generation and a difficult man in a difficult town, and he did not ask the two facts to make peace. The Fenway bleachers learned his strike zone better than some umpires did, or so he told them. He took walks as if a walk were a hit, which, in his science, it nearly was. The on-base percentage that still looks like a misprint is the habit of a man who would rather take first than swing at a ball he had already decided was a ball. Pitchers who faced him in the 1940s have said the at-bat felt like an examination. He graded them. He graded himself harder. The Triple Crowns are the public proof. The 2,021 walks are the private proof, sitting in the ledger where casual fans do not look.

Korea took him again. In 1952 the Marines recalled him as a jet pilot. He flew thirty-nine combat missions. John Glenn, who would become the astronaut and the senator, was in the same squadron; Williams flew as his wingman. He crash-landed a burning Panther near Seoul and walked away. He missed most of 1952 and 1953. The career totals — .344 average, 521 home runs, a .482 on-base percentage that looked like a misprint — are the totals of a man who gave the prime of the prime to two uniforms. People who only recite 521 have not done the arithmetic. People who only recite the wars have not watched him take a pitch at Fenway until it was the pitch he wanted.

He won batting titles at ages that are supposed to be finished. In 1957 he hit .388. In 1958 he won another title. On September 28, 1960, against the Baltimore Orioles at Fenway, he homered in his last at-bat, a high drive into the bullpen, and did not come out for a curtain call. John Updike wrote the afternoon into an essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” which is as close as American letters have come to a box score. Williams had already said the sentence that is the file’s north star: a man has to have goals, and his was to have people say, there goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.

A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine, to have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.”Ted Williams

The turn is not the last home run. The turn is the Hall of Fame speech in 1966, Cooperstown, when the newly inducted star asked the room to consider the great Negro League players who had not been allowed to stand where he was standing. Satchel Paige would go in the next year. The speech is easy to miss in a career of averages. It is one of the keys to him. He had been a harsh man in a harsh sport. He was also a man who could see a missing name on a wall.

He married. He divorced. He married again. Three children, including John-Henry and Claudia from the third marriage, and Bobby-Jo from the first. The private life was as stormy as the relationship with the Fenway bleachers. Friends from the squadron years describe a professional who could be generous in a cockpit and impossible in a clubhouse. Both are the file. He wrote The Science of Hitting with John Underwood, a manual that is still on the shelf of every serious batting cage. He managed the Washington Senators and then the Texas Rangers from 1969 to 1972, a .414 on-base teacher trying to make other men patient. The teams were not champions. The lesson held anyway.

The later years

The second half of the life was Islamorada and then Citrus Hills, a man in the water with a fly rod, bonefish and tarpon, the same patience he had used on a high fastball. He became, for a generation that had not seen .406, the face of fishing the way he had been the face of hitting: exact, impatient with fools, willing to talk for an hour about a knot. He made television commercials. He threw out first pitches that Fenway treated as sacraments. In 1991, at the All-Star Game in Toronto, he stood on a field of living stars and the game stopped for him. In 1999, at Fenway’s All-Star, he was brought onto the field in a golf cart and the players of a new century left their positions to stand around the cart. He could not stand easily. He could still hold a room.

A stroke and congestive heart failure slowed the body. The mind, for a long stretch, stayed the argumentative instrument it had always been. He was honored until the honors became a kind of weather. The Red Sox, who had spent decades in a complex marriage with him, claimed him without the old fight. He had been, in the 1940s, the man who would not tip his cap. He became, in the 1990s, the man the cap was tipped to. He accepted the conversion with as much grace as a difficult man can accept a conversion. He still corrected people about hitting. He still told the Korea stories when asked and did not dress them up. Glenn remained a friend. The squadron remained a second clubhouse.

He died on July 5, 2002, in Inverness, Florida, at eighty-three. What followed, and it belongs here once, was a fight over the body. John-Henry Williams wanted his father cryonically preserved at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona. Bobby-Jo Ferrell, the oldest child, wanted a cremation and a scattering at sea, which she said had been the wish. Claudia sided with John-Henry. There were lawyers, a note of contested authenticity, a public argument that turned a hitter into a tabloid. The body went to Alcor. John-Henry died of leukemia in 2004 and was preserved there as well. A complete life holds the .406 and the wars and also this last, unseemly chapter. Fond memory that keeps only the swing has cleaned the room. A sneer that keeps only the freezer has cleaned it from the other side. He was a great hitter who became, at the end, a family argument. Both are true.

The late years, in full, were not a long goodbye tour of Fenway, though Fenway kept asking him back. They were a man who had already done the work of being the greatest hitter he could be, who had already flown the missions, who then spent decades on the water and a few summers in a dugout trying to teach patience to other people’s sons. He was named to every all-century list that had a space. He was, for Boston, the face on the wall that younger sluggers had to walk past. He was, for San Diego, the Hoover High boy who had not come home to stay. He was, for the Marines, a pilot who had happened to be famous. The three identities did not always share a room. In Citrus Hills, at the end, they finally had to. The cart at Fenway in 1999 is the honest still of the last public chapter: a body that could no longer hunt a fastball, surrounded by men who still could, all of them knowing the science had a father and that the father was in the cart.

What he would not do, even in the last interviews, was pretend the career totals were the totals he would have had if the wars had not called. He also would not pretend the wars were a sacrifice he wanted praised. They were service. The .406 was the goal. The speech in Cooperstown was the unexpected grace. The fishing was the peace. The family fight was the cost of dying famous in a country that can turn a body into a product. A reader who holds all five has him. A reader who holds only the swing has a poster. In the last Florida years he still took a boat when the body allowed it. Guides who worked those waters have said he could be the same harsh professor on a flat as he had been in a cage, and then suddenly kind when a young angler asked a clean question. The science did not retire. It changed rivers. Citrus Hills neighbors knew him as a man in a cart, not as .406. Both versions signed the baseballs that still turn up at estate sales with a signature that looks like a hook. The Red Sox, when they finally needed a living saint, found that the saint would still correct your feet in the box if you stood wrong. That is a better memorial than a frozen head, and it is the one the ballfield actually earned.

After he was gone

Fenway kept the number nine and the seat in the imagination. The Hall kept the plaque and the speech. The Science of Hitting stayed in print. The Red Sox finally won a World Series in 2004, and the city used his ghost as if he had been waiting with them, which is a kindness the living man would have argued with and then, perhaps, allowed. Alcor remained a sentence in the obituaries. The children remained a broken set. The average remained .406.

He came out of a San Diego playground, hit .406 by refusing to sit, left twice for the Marines, flew beside Glenn, homered on the way out, named the missing men in Cooperstown, fished the Keys, and died in Florida as a family argument. If you only remember the swing, you have the still. If you remember May Venzor, Shibe Park, the Panther, the speech, and the last paragraph, you have him.

Portrait: Unknown author · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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