Johnny Pesky: “Cronin sat in the lobby until two in the morning waiting to grab him. Sure enough, the door of the hotel opened, and Foxx comes in, half stiff. Cronin gets up ready to blast him. Then the door opened again, and in comes Yawkey. They had been out together. What do you say when the owner of the team is taking your players out?”
That was the team that Ted Williams joined in Boston.
There is a well-publicized exchange in which Bobby Doerr asks Tommy Henrich why the Red Sox weren't able to beat the Yankees in big games. “Weren't we good enough?” Doerr asks. It wasn't that they weren't good enough, Henrich answers. “Your owner was too good to you. The Red Sox didn't have to get into the World Series to drive Cadillacs. The Yankees did.”
Oversimplified, to be sure. But essentially true. And that's where the soft, permissive environment established by Yawkey did hurt Ted. ]'he accusation that has always haunted him is that he was a great hitter but not a winning player. A more generous assessment might be that he was a great hitter on a team that was too undisciplined to become a winner.
Worse yet, it was an amateur operation--not so much a business as a hobby--pitted against the toughest, most professional operation of all time.
Bobby Doerr's answer to Henrich is to point out that immediately after winning the pennant in 1946, the Red Sox lost their three top starting pitchers to injuries. “Does anybody doubt that if Hughson, Ferriss, and Harris had remained healthy we wouldn't have won two or three more pennants?” But that's just the point. When the history of the Yawkey Era is written it could be titled “Always One Pitcher Short.” The Red Sox could always put a powerful, highly salaried starting lineup on the field. The Yankees had a powerful, not-so-well paid twenty-five-man squad.
Ted always was paid more than Joe DiMaggio, you know. Not because Ted wanted it that way, but because Tom Yawkey did. In 1948, immediately after the Yankees had made DiMaggio the first $100,000
player, a pack of writers caught Yawkey on the way up to his office. He had just sent Williams his contract, Yawkey told them, and it was going to be for more than DiMaggio's. “It may be only $1,000 more,” he said, in answer to their prodding. “But Ted Williams will always get more money than anybody else.” It was $115,000, and a year later it was $125,000.
Yawkey had a blind spot toward the value of the supporting cast, however. During the 1949 season, the thirty- six-year-old Johnny Mize was offered to Yawkey by his good friend Horace Stoneham, the owner of the New York Giants. In the previous two seasons, Mize--a lifetime ,320 hitter--had hit forty and fifty-one home runs. “What would we do with him.'?” Yawkey asked. The Red Sox already had a first baseman in Billy Goodman, didn't they? The Yankees jumped at the chance, and Mize became one of eight first basemen Casey Stengel used that year. He also won game after game as a pinch hitter. The Red Sox number-one pinch hitter, Billy Hitchcock, did not get a base hit all year.
It wasn't simply that the Red Sox regulars were overpaid and the Red Sox bench understaffed. There was no firm hand in the front of rice, no guiding philosophy, because the front office, in a perfect reflection of their employer, was always awash in booze.
To put this within its proper context, drinking was so much the occupational disease of baseball in that era that it wasn't even recognized as a disease. Or even as a vice. It proved that you were a real man, or, at least, one of the guys. The Red Sox weren't the only team that did a lot of drinking; they may not even have been the worst. But no other team offered quite the same combination of paternalism and permissiveness, because no other team was being operated as a rich man's hobby. Yawkey not only drank with the troops; he would send the heavy drinkers a bottle of his favorite brand of scotch, Old Forester, as a reward for an especially good performance.
And--just in case--the traveling secretary was always given a wad of money at the beginning of a road trip to bail out anybody who might get into trouble.
In 19z18 Joe McCarthy had been hired to bring some order and disciplineto say nothing of a team concept--to the Red Sox. Tom yawkey, making his final attempt to buy a pennant, gave him what ,as easily the strongest ball club the Red Sox ever had. The new players were Vern (Junior) Stephens, a hard-hitting shortstop, two right handed pitchers, Jack Kramer and Ellis Kinder, and a great rookie, Billy Goodman.
As soon as McCarthy was hired, the Boston papers tried to whip up a controversy over whether he would be able to get along with Ted Williams, with particular emphasis on whether he would try to impose his rigid dress code on Ted. McCarthy's answer was to show up at Sarasota wearing a Hawaiian sports shirt open at the neck. “If I can't get along with a.400 hitter,” he said, “then there's something wrong th me.” Ted liked McCarthy as a manager. “He was all business. His coaches were all business. Just coming into the clubhouse was tmsiness.” But then Ted adds, without exactly saying that Joe Me.,atthy was not the manager he had once been, “I don't know what would have happened if he had been the same man the Yankees play m talked about.”
When it came to managing a ball club, McCarthy was impressive. When it came to managing himself, he was a disaster. Always solitary and aloof, he would sit at the far end of the bench. Ted was the only player who would sit near him. The usual explanation was that Ted was the only member of the team who wasn't a little afraid of him. A perhaps more persuasive explanation might be that he was the only player who could stand his breath.
Joe McCarthy was an alcoholic. Not just someone who drank a lot, ut an alcoholic in the truest sense of the word. Even in his great days with the Yankees, he would disappear for days on end and be found in some seedy hotel lying in his own bodily wastes. To explain his bsence, the Yankees would announce that he had gone to his farm near Buffalo to recover from an attack of bursitis.
He drank when he was under stress, and Boston was the stress capital of the baseball world. Instead of running away with the pennant as they should have in 1948 the Red Sox lost their play-off game to the
Cleveland Indians when McCarthy locked himself in his hotel room with a bottle and received a message from God telling him to pitch Denny Galehouse (8-7) instead of Mel Parnell (15-8).
His wife, Babe, took care of him when the Red Sox were playing at home. Tom Dowd, the traveling secretary, took care of him on the road. During the game, Eddie Froelich, the trainer he had brought over from New York, would keep an eye on him, and Del Baker, who had been hired for precisely this purpose, would take charge when it became apparent that McCarthy was out of it.
Two stories, both classics, tell it all. The datelines read: St, Louis, September 17, 1948, and Boston, June 5, 1950. The first story involves Sam Mele, the second Ellis Kinder.
McCarthy hated Sam Mele, for reasons directly connected with Ted Williams. Ted and Mele were good friends, and Ted, ever the fight fan, had a habit of throwing light feints at his friends, almost as a gesture of affection. In this particular incident, they met in the aisle of a train, coming from opposite directions, and as they squeezed past each other Ted threw a feint and proceeded on his way. When Ted woke up the next morning he couldn't breathe.
