Ted Williams was a great everything, but more than anything, he was The Hitter

by Jerry Izenberg
The Newark Star-Ledger
http://www.nj.com/sports/
Sunday July 12, 2009, 6:30 AM

Ted Williams could do anything better than most people. And the thing he could do best of all was hit."He lived in a tunnel and he didn't let many people in." ... Mickey McDermott, Williams' former teammate

"Williams was the REAL -- as opposed to the REEL -- John Wayne.''
... Sandy Grady, USA Today

Everything that he was came into play on a day when the blue February sky over North Korea was pock marked with the deadly black punctuation marks that only a trail of anti-aircraft fire leaves. He had been there before. From the time he was called back into the service for a second war, Ted Williams flew 39 combat missions.

On this day, the reflexes and the eyesight that made him the greatest hitter in the history of baseball and the focus and patience that one day would earn him induction into the Fishing Hall of Fame, would combine to enable him to cheat death in a war that smug diplomats, safe and sound back at the United Nations a world away, would call called "a police action.''

On this day, his F-9 was ripped hard by shells designed to kill both him and his plane. His hydraulics were gone. He could not control his wheels. His radio was gone. He was physically and electronically alone. But Ted Williams, who through his whole major league career rarely swung at a bad pitch, didn't panic, and he didn't bail. Which is how, at 225 mph, he landed his burning plane, scraping its belly on the runway for 2,000 yards.

Small wonder that someone once said Ted Williams was the man John Wayne wanted to be.

He could out-hit any ballplayer who ever lived -- even though two military stints gave him exile time that triggered awesome thoughts of what his numbers could have been.

He could out-cuss any long-distance truck driver with a flat tire on Route 66 outside of Barstow, Calif.

He could out-fish almost any professional guide. A good fly-fisherman with a decent salmon rod should be able to cast 50 to 60 feet. Williams' average cast was 85 to 95 feet, he said.

Seventy years ago this season, he came to the Red Sox as a rookie. Forty one years ago, he made his debut as a major league manager. He will be celebrated at the All-Star Game on Tuesday in St. Louis and honored as the subject of an HBO documentary Wednesday at 9:30 p.m.

But in the hearts and minds of those who can see past the auras of Cobb, Aaron, Rose and DiMaggio there emerges a single undeniable truth:

Ted Williams was The Hitter.

He was 83 years old when he died in 2002, but because he was The Hitter ... the purest hitter of baseballs ever, with a .344 lifetime average. The gift of shared memory passed along will link the title and his name for as long as grown men play this spectacular little boys game called baseball.

In the pantheon of baseball artistry, The Hitter and Ted Williams are synonymous. If you don't know that, then you never saw him unleash the swing that could launch a thousand metaphors ... never saw firsthand the way he planted his left foot in the batter's box as though he were planting his own personal battle flag. And the way it stayed there, even when the catcher cocked his arm and fired the ball back to the pitcher. It was as though he had put it there to mark the perimeters of a private war.

Throw inside at him and he didn't go down. He leaned back as though the whole tableau were being played out in a kind of slow motion and he was its director.

His swing was theater and his reflexes were the kind of hair triggers that, as baseball men say only of the greatest, could pluck the pitch out of the catcher's glove.

The Hitter.

If you never had the golden gift of seeing that swing unwind before your eyes, then you were robbed by the calendar in much the way people were who were born too late to hear Isaac Stern or Charlie Parker live or to see Sir Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud do Hamlet.

The Hitter was a pure artist at what he did as much as Goya or El Greco; as much as Ernest Hemingway or Eugene O'Neill. But the poetry of baseball leaves no words and no pictures in its wake. It lives only in the blink of an eye and the special corners of memory.

How do you measure the skills and the beauty of them in action of a man who hit .400? Say he played the Met or Carnegie Hall or Broadway or his work was hung in the Louvre and then multiply by 1,000.

This was the prodigy who went from teenager to major-leaguer at a time when there were only eight teams in each league . . . who claimed and gave you no reason to doubt that he could pick up the stitches on a baseball as it roared toward home plate . . . who closed out his entire career with a walk-off home run that boggled the imagination.

And it was those special reflexes that brought him out alive in Korea after he crash-landed a flaming jet and fought it for 2,000 feet along the tarmac. That was his second tour of military service, and who knows what it ultimately cost him as a hitter of baseballs?

In the twilight of his life, The Hitter mellowed. He unexpectedly deferred to the role a media-driven history had dealt Joe DiMaggio -- even though logic and, at times, DiMaggio's overbearing attitude gave him reason to do otherwise. The Hitter, after all, was still who he was:

An obsessive individualist who was rude and angry with the media, rude and angry with the fans, rude and angry with anyone who crossed the line into his world without an invitation.

But do not let the game face deceive you.

This is who The Hitter really was:

Larry Doby is the first African-American to break into the American League. Few teammates even speak to him. Pitchers throw at him -- not to drive him away from the plate but to drive him out of the game. Now he is playing against the Red Sox for the first time. He is headed to the outfield and Williams passes him on the way in.

"Good luck, kid," he says to Doby. He looks him in the eye and he smiles.

And this also was The Hitter:

He was a tireless worker and contributor to the Jimmy Fund, a Red Sox-sponsored fund to aid children with cancer. And on so many Saturday mornings -- during which he tolerated no writers, no cameras and no publicity -- he drove the in-house train that took the kids on their hospital beds to the treatment rooms.

And this, too, was Ted Williams:

Without fanfare, he secretly chartered a plane to fulfill the request for a visit from a boy who was dying in a North Carolina hospital.

On the field, he was an artist who respected his medium. One day he argued with his manager, Joe Cronin, that home plate at Fenway had slipped off center. Cronin told him he was nuts and he was going to teach him a lesson. He brought in a surveyor. Home plate was a fraction off.

He was an outfielder who hated defense. But he played that left-field wall at Fenway, the one they call the Green Monster, like a pool hustler who knows every carom off every cushion. He was supposed to be a blase outfielder, but in 1950 he broke an elbow running into the wall during the All-Star Game at Comiskey Park -- and held the ball.


One April 16, 2004, the Red Sox unveilved the Ted Williams Jimmy Fund statue outside the Gate B entrance to Fenway Park at the corner of Ipswich and Van Ness Streets. Crafted by sculptor Franc Talarico, the 1200-pound, eight-and-a-half foot tall statue depcits Williams placing his upon the head of a young boy with cancer. it is a testament to the half-century of public appeals the late Hall of Famer made on behalf of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and its Jimmy Fund — the official charity of the Red Sox.

In 1969, he took over as manager of the expansion Washington Senators. It was a lousy ballclub. That spring I went over to Pompano Beach to watch this team take shape. They were hitting when I got there and Williams was standing behind the batting cage, shaking his head over and over, saying not a word.

When I walked over he broke his silence.

"What the hell do you want?"

"I want to talk to you?"

"What for?"

"Well, I was wondering where you stand on the Balkans and also whether your team can hit."

He turned away for a minute, poised between curiosity and anger, then turned back and said, "No, they can't hit. Let me tell you why."

He spoke for 20 nonstop minutes, never taking his eyes off the cage. Most geniuses can't tell you the "how" of what they did. But as Williams spoke he broke down every element of the eternal batter's war against the pitcher.

His team, arguably the worst in baseball going into that spring, actually finished 10 games above .500 that season.

You couldn't bottle what he knew. You couldn't bottle the kind of respect he had for his art that made him refuse to sit out the final day of a season when he could have had his .400 in the book and the way he attacked the pitchers that day to make it happen with honor.

It could be no other way.

He was The Hitter.