He was down to.225 when a Kansas City writer finally broke curity silence and wrote that Ted was obviously washed up. The n, day, as was to be expected, Ted hit a grand-slam home run, the st teenth grand slammer of his career, to give the Sox an 8-5 victor The day after that he slashed out three hits.
It was not until July, though, that he brought his average up to.30 and it was not until a Boston writer accused him of choking in tt clutch that he really begin to move. The day after the magazine ca tying that article hit the stands, Ted hit two home runs and a singk to knock in seven runs in an 11 - 8 victory. One of the home runs wa his seventeenth grand slammer, tying him with Babe Ruth for secom place in that category, behind Lou Gehrig's twenty-third.
By that time, the uneasy peace had already been shattered. On week earlier, in point of fact, Ted had brought the newspapers down on him again by spitting at a Kansas City crowd that was booing him for not running out a ball hit back at the pitcher. “I'm really sorry I did it,” Ted said, after Cronin fined him $250. “I was so mad that I lost my temper, and afterward I was so sorry. I'm principally orr about losing the $250.”
Once the feud with both the press and the public was on again, Ted's average began to move up in the charts like a bullet. On Augus 8, he pushed into a tie with his teammate, Pete Runnels, for the batting lead. Then, with the season running out, he began to slip back. Desperate measures were called for. With a week remaining, Ted landed on the front pages again, brought the wrath of the civilized world dowr. upon him, and, needless to say, embarked immediately on a hittin streak that carried him to another batting championship,
Ted entered the game in question, on September 22, trailing Runnels by six points. He had gone hitless in seven straight times at bat. In the first inning, Runnels singled, and Ted, hitting right behind him, grounded into a double play. Two innings later, Runnels singled again, and Ted took a third strike. Completely disgusted with himself for taking the pitch, Ted turned toward the dugout and angrily flung his bat away. Unfortunately, the bat caught for a moment on the stick, substance he used on it to give himself a firmer grip. Instead of skidding across the dirt, the bat spiraled into the air, sailed into the box seats seventy-five feet away, and hit a sixty-year-old woman. The woman, Mrs. Gladys Heffernan, turned out to be Joe Cronin's housekeeper and a longtime admirer of Ted Williams. Otherwise, the Sox would have had a healthy lawsuit on their hands.
Ted, appalled, rushed to the railing, where the motherly Mrs. Hefleman paused to reassure him before being taken off to the first-aid room. Ted went back to the dugout with tears streaming down his face and emerged only after the umpire-in-chief, Bill Summers, had assuree him that everybody knew he had not meant to throw the bat. Ted took his outfield position to the familiar strains of unrestrained booing. his next turn at bat, he answered the boos by doubling home a run.
Cronin, who was almost as upset as Ted was, told the press, “I was an impetuous act, but no one is sorrier than Ted is. He feel awful. We will take no disciplinary action. It was unfortunate, but we certainly know Williams didn't do it intentionally.” Mrs. Heffernan interviewed from her hospital bed, said, "I don't see why they had to boo him. It was not the dear boy's fault. I felt awfully sorry for hirr
after it happened. I should have ducked.“ Williams said, ”I just almost died."
From the time of the bat-throwing incident to the end of the season, he had nine hits in thirteen times at bat. The Red Sox were ending their season in Washington, and with two games remaining Ted and Runnels were tied down to the ninth decimal point,.322857643. Frank Malzone was Runnels's roommate: “Pete and I were talking before the game. He said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'Just go out and get some hits. You can still win it.'” Runnels started off with a triple. Ted followed with a walk. Runnels then singled, and Ted singled behind him. On his third time at bat, Runnels hit a home run, only to have Ted hit one right behind him.
“He comes over to me,” Malzone says, “and he said, 'He's not going to let me win this thing, is he?' ”
“I said, 'Naw, I guess not, Pete.' I said, 'Got to get another one. If you get another one, he can't catch you.'”
On his fourth try, Runnels finally made out. Ted singled, to take over the batting lead for the first time that season. At the end of the day, Runnels was three for six, but Ted was three for four. On the season, Runnels was.324. Ted was.326.
In the final game, Ted clenched the batting title with a double and a seventh-inning, game-winning home run, that lifted the Red Sox into third place.
“I don't think anyone else in this league but Ted could have beaten me in a race like this,” Runnels said. “It's no disgrace to finish runner up to Williams in a batting championship.”
An equally gracious Williams was saying that Runnels had hit the ball just as hard as he had over that final week, and maybe harder. “I was lucky,” he said, “because my balls had distance and some of his were hit right at the fielders.”
At the age of forty, Ted Williams had won another American League batting title. He was going to have two more years--the dreadful, injury-ridden season of 1959 and a year of injuries and personal anguish capped off in triumph,
I realized what a great guy Tom Yawkey was, and I will always sing his praises as a terrific guy and a man. I knew he would have liked to have a stronger relationship with me, but I never did want to pursue that aspect of it.
--TED WILLIAMS
the of the standard flights of fantasy when baseball fans get toO gether centers on the stupendous feats of hitting that would have been achieved if Ted Williams had been able to play half his games in yankee Stadium and Joe DiMaggio had been able to take dead aim at the left-field wall at Fenway Park.
Ted Williams, for one, isn't so sure. “The thing of it is, when you get in them short ballparks, like DiMag in Fenway and Williams at New York, they pitch a little different to you. All you got to do is look at the statistics. Doggone it, you don't get anything to hit.”
It was Joe Cronin who first gave Ted reason to think about it, and Cronin wasn't talking so much about the ballpark as about the recognition and acclaim. “It was my first or second year in the big leagues,” Ted says, “and Joe took me to a restaurant with his wife and somebody else. He said 'You know, Ted, some day when you're looking back, you may be sorry you didn't play in New York.' I was just a young kid. I didn't have an opinion really. He said, 'No, there are two things you are going to wish you could have done in your career. First, that you didn't play in New York, and also that you weren't a faster runner.' For damn sure, he was right on that last one.”
It could have happened. There were at least two times during Ted's career when there were serious conversations between Tom Yawkey and Dan Topping, the Yankees owner, about a WilliamsforDiMaggio trade. And that's not counting a most intriguing proposition that came to Ted within a week after he retired.
A more fruitful area for speculation, however, would go like this: Forget the fences and look to the ownership. What would have happened, in other words, if Ted Williams had grown up under the hard eyed businessmen who ran the Yankees organization and Joe Di Maggio had fallen under Tom Yawkey's beneficent gaze?
With the Yankees ownership you either toed the line or you were gone. It didn't matter how much the players hated Casey Stengel. George Weiss, the general manager, had impressed on them that nobody was indispensable, and so when Stengel barked at them they jumped, For that matter, the players themselves were known to haul a fresh rookie out into the back alley and show him their knuckles. “You're fooling with our money” was the way that tune went.
On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the Red Sox's permissive attitude was exactly what Ted needed. Birdie Tebbetts, the old psychologist (he has a B.S. in philosophy from Providence College), seems to think so. “Joe Cronin has never got the credit he deserves in the way he treated Williams,” Tebbetts says. “He knew he had a troubled kid, and he held him under a loose rein. He disciplined him only when he had to and then went back to allowing Ted Williams to be Ted Williams.”