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.”
On that assessment, Ted agrees completely. “I know how lucky I was--I know how lucky I was--that I played for a manager like Joe Cronin. Joe Cronin came closer to treating me like a father, with good advice, friendly advice, intimate advice, than any other single man in my life. He had a beautiful family, and he was a tremendous father. Lovely kids. Lovely wife. He was a handsome Irish guy, and I envied him how he could bullshit the press. He could get a guy he didn't like and have him going out of the office thinking Joe Cronin was a helluva guy. Joe Cronin would have been as good a politician as a ballplayer.”
With the passage of time and the clouding of memory, Ted has wondered why Cronin didn't use his diplomatic skills more often in the early years (“I was just a young kid”) to smooth the relationship between Ted and the sportswriters. “But maybe I don't know how protective he was of me. And maybe I didn't always listen to him. I'm not making excuses for myself. I just want to say he was so great with me. I loved him.”
The trade talks are of interest for the light they shed on the relationship between Ted and Tom Yawkey. In the spring of 1946, Larry MacPhail, having pulled off the baseball deal of the century in taking over the ownership of the Yankees, along with Dan Topping and Del Webb, proposed to Yawkey that they get the brave new postwar world off to a glorious flag-waving start by pulling off the dream trade that would put Joe DiMaggio in Fenway Park and Ted Williams in Yankee Stadium. In later years, MacPhail would maintain that the deal was all set until Ed Barrow, with malice aforethought, pulled the rug out from under it.
The way the story goes, Ed Barrow was a guest of Yawkey at his sland estate in South Carolina, and although Barrow was still nominally the Yankees general manager, MacPhail, who was a little crazy in a genius kind of a way, had stripped him of all his authority. Hating MacPhail as he did, Barrow--who just might have invited himself down to the island for that purpose--told Yawkey he'd have to be crazy to trade the twenty-seven-year-old Williams for the thirty-year old, ulcer-ridden DiMaggio.
In the winter of 1948, Yawkey and Dan Topping shook hands on a Williams-for-DiMaggio trade during a drinking session in New York. The next morning, Yawkey was supposed to have told him, “I think I ought to get another player. If you throw in that little left-fielder of yours, it's a deal.” The little left-fielder was Yogi Berra.
“I'm sure that story was true,” Ted says. “No question about it. The way I heard the story, it was a matter of these guys getting together one night, half looped. Players were like prize possessions to them, I guess, and they made this deal, and supposedly they agreed on it, and the next day Yawkey called Topping and told him, 'You know I'm a man of my word, but I just can't go through with it.' ” Ted has heard the Yogi Berra version, too, and he doesn't completely discount it. “DiMaggio wasn't at the height of his career and I was. But of course the great DiMaggio was such a great player. He would have hit better at Fenway Park, and I might have hit better at Yankee Stadium.”
Ted is also sure--no question whatsoever about this--that he came very close to signing with the Yankees a few days after he played his final game for the Red Sox. When Ted left the ballpark that day, he
