was unemployed, not terribly solvent, and in view of all the responsibilities he had taken on, terribly worried. Because if the truth be known, he had retired only because Tom Yawkey had been after him to retire for at least two years.
The season had ended for Ted on a Wednesday. Thursday was an off day. “I didn't go to New York with the team, and Saturday morning I got a telegram from George Struthers, the merchandising vice president of Sears, telling me they had something they wanted to talk to me about. I knew exactly what it was going to be.” They wanted Ted to come in and upgrade their entire sporting goods line. “Everything involved with sporting goods. Hunting, fishing, camping, skiing.” They were offering him far more money than he had ever made in baseball. And they were offering him a ten-year contract.
The American League season ended on Sunday, and on Monday the Yankees asked Ted--through his manager, Fred Corcoran--for permission to talk to the Red Sox about signing him for one year, exclusively as a pinch hitter, at the same salary he had been getting with the Red Sox.
Ted has little doubt that if the talks with Sears hadn't been progressing so rapidly he would have given it very serious consideration. “It had got to the point, though, where I was just tired of what had been going on. And I thought, Hell, I'm going to do this with Sears. So I told Fred Corcoran I wasn't interested. And that was the end of it.”
The tantalizing question is whether Yawkey would have given his permission for Ted Williams to end his career in Yankee pinstripes or whether he would have heaved up a sigh and told Ted that if he really wanted to stick around for another year he would match the Yankees' offer.
What does Ted think?
“Yawkey's relations with me were always to do what I wanted to do, more or less. I think that--” Suddenly, his voice took on a tone of certainty. “I don't know how he would have reacted. I think he was pretty sure, like ] was, that I didn't want to play anymore.”
Like everybody else in Boston, Ted Williams genuflected toward
Tom Yawkey in public. There was nothing Yawkey could ask of him, for as long as Yawkey was alive, that Ted wouldn't do. There was also a kind of pretense to a closer relationship than actually existed. Yawkey's island in South Carolina was a hunting preserve, and everybody assumed that Ted spent a great deal of time down there with him. Everybody was wrong. Ted went down to the hunting preserve in South Carolina exactly once.
“It was not a father-and-son relationship,” Ted says flatly. “I felt Yawkey liked me, but I never pursued trying to get extra close to him.” Then, so there would be no misunderstanding: “He was there. He was a simple man. He knew how lucky he had been in his life and he tried to do everything he could to be a good guy. He had an open heart for charity, an open heart for a sad story. He was just a nice easy man, really and truly.”
But, when you think about it, why should Ted have wanted to get close to him? Yawkey wasn't really bright. There was nothing Ted could learn from him. Yawkey did two things: he drank and he played bridge. Ted did not drink, and he did not play cards.
True enough, they were involved in the Jimmy Fund together, but that association was also more apparent than real. As important as Yawkey was in placing the imprimatur of the Red Sox on the Jimmy Fund, Tom Yawkey was a figurehead and Ted Williams was the blood of its heart.
Ted's relationship with Yawkey was not nearly as crucial to Ted's career as was Yawkey's personality and character as the owner of the ballclub.
Yawkey was a frustrated ballplayer who loved all his players and positively worshiped Ted. As a result, the Red Sox became a soft and pampered ball club. The general managers were Yawkey's drinking buddies. The managers were without authority. The discipline was fake discipline, the fines were fake fines.
Yawkey was a rich man's son who had been around baseball all his life. On the death of his father he was adopted by his uncle, William
H. Yawkey, a lumber and mining magnate, who had helped Ban Johnson launch the American League and had maintained a financial interest in the Detroit Tigers all his life. Tom led such a privileged childhood that ballplayers from Ty Cobb on down were invited to the Yawkey estate to play catch with him. He was twelve years old when Bill Yawkey was killed in an automobile accident. As the sole heir of his foster father--and the prospective heir of his even wealthier mother-- young Tom was written up in Sunday feature articles as “the richest boy in the world,” a characterization that owed as much to the richness of the journalists' imagination as to Tom's true place in the hierarchy of wealth. On the other hand, if you're rich enough to be looked on as a contender for the title, what difference does it make?
Yawkey was thirty years old when he bought the Red Sox, a hopelessly bankrupt team that had won only forty- three games the previous season and averaged only 2,365 paying customers. The ball club became his toy. Because he loved his players, he spoiled them rotten. And because he spoiled them rotten, they praised him to the skies. Yet there was always the sense that the praise was so unreserved (“the greatest owner in baseball” was practically engraved on his forehead) that it was being overdone. There was always the whiff of something obligatory about it.
Joe Cronin had little power to discipline his big-name players. As if being a playing manager wasn't tough enough on him, Cronin knew that his biggest stars could always walk the back stairs and cry on Tom's shoulder. When Yawkey purchased Robert Moses (Lefty) Grove,
panion. Mose was a cranky old geezer. He would scream at Cronin for making an error behind him, and there was nothing much that Cronin could do about it. Not when Old Mose could rip him apart to the boss a couple of hours later over the drinks.
Unlike Grove, Jimmy Foxx was a man of enormous good nature and generosity. So convivial a fellow, in fact, that he took a rather
cavalier attitude toward curfews.
his first superstar, Grove was thirty-five years old and Yawkey thirty one. To Yawkey, Grove became Mose, his idol and his dinner corapanion. M, for mak in
the boss a
and gen erc
cavalier art
Tom Yawkey and the Country Club
