Ted was not alarmed at first, because he was told that the trouble would clear up in plenty of time for him to make the opening game of the season. “It was when it got worse instead of better, and I realized I was going to miss the opener again,” Ted said later, “that I began to really feel discouraged.”
Shipped up to Boston at the end of March, he was fitted with a thick collar, and told that he would indeed probably miss the opener. He missed much more than that. It was another full month before the collar was taken off, and another ten days before he was able to play.
The Kid's Last Game
It was anticipated that he would work his way into the lineup slowly-- as he always had in the past--but Ted surprised everybody by asking to be written into the starting lineup as soon as the club came back to Boston. His muscles were still sore, his hands were still blistered, and he bore little resemblance to the Ted Williams whom Boston fans had become accustomed to cheering and booing. He went twenty-one times at bat without a base hit, picked up a couple of hits, then went nothing for sixteen.
He had forgone the slower, surer route because he felt that he was in terrible condition that only the steady, hard competitive play could bring him around. A terrible mistake. The neck bothered him all year. Since he couldn't move his head, he had to stand at the plate facing the pitcher. “I didn't expect to do real good,” he said, “but I never thought I'd be that bad.”
In mid-June, he was batting. 175 (103- 18). The Red Sox, who had been in fifth place when he returned to the lineup, dropped into the cellar, and for the first time in his life Ted Williams found himself being benched for non- hitting.
He didn't start to hit until after he had failed to make the starting lineup in the All-Star Game again.
And then came a succession of small, nagging injuries to go along with the constant pain in his neck. He skinned the knuckles on his hand sliding. In mid-August, an abscessed tooth knocked him out of a series in New York. By then, Billy Jurges, who had replaced Higgins for the second half of the season, had announced that he was going to “spot” Ted here and there, a nice way of saying that he was being benched again.
In the dog days of August he had always loved in the past, he was deep in another slump. By the last week of August, Ted Williams was batting.233.
He felt old. He was always tired. And, finally, in a night game against Kansas City, he didn't even bother to run back to the Red Sox dugout between innings unless he was due to come to bat. Instead, he took his rest in the Boston bull pen along the left-field foul line.
For the season, he hit only.254. And, despite a final flickering of the flame near the end, he was able to pick up only ten home runs, one short of the number he had needed to catch Lou Gehrig.
As the season came to an end, Yawkey called him to his suite at the Ritz Carlton and told him flat-out that he wanted him to retire. “It hurt me,” Ted says, looking back. “I didn't think I was ready to retire. I thought I could still hit. We agreed that we'd see what happened in spring training.”
Hurt, yes. Surprised, no. During the season, Yawkey had sent Dick O'Connell to sound him out about becoming the manager. That's the way you do it when you're looking for deniability. You send a third party to ask the man you want to hire whether he would be interested in the job “if it were offered to you.” If he turns you down, it is never on the record that the job had been offered. “He told me that he would never give the Boston writers the chance to second-guess him,” O'Connell says. “I've never really been sure whether he understood that the job was really being offered to him.”
“I knew,” Ted laughs. And he also knew why. It was not the first time the job had been tendered. Joe Cronin had offered the job to him during the latter part of the 1954 season. “I said, I don't want to manage. I said, I can still hit. And I proved that for five years. Cronin said absolutely, 'Why don't you take it? The guys all respect you.' They all this and that. They never brought it up again in those five years, but that's the way it all started. And it would have been a terrible mistake.”
He would be facing his final year--as he had faced the previous one--with wracking trouble back in San Diego. His brother, Danny, was dying of leukemia, the disease Ted had devoted so much of his time to combating, and his mother--Salvation May of the invincible faith--had broken under the strain of her younger son's obviously losing battle against death and had suffered a complete nervous breakdown.
As the final irony, Danny had straightened himself out after the war
and had found work as a contract painter and interior decorator. He had married, he had a couple of kids, and he had reconciled with his older brother.
For at least three years Ted had been chartering planes to fly Danny to Salt Lake City for medical treatment (which puts a different light on those missed appointments in Los Angeles, doesn't it?), and he was making sure that Danny had no financial worries as far as his family was concerned. By 1959, he was also flying back to San Diego himself to tend to the care of his mother and, finally, to move her to a rest home in Santa Barbara (which puts a new light on the early arrival and late departure at that exhibition game in San Diego, doesn't it?).
Danny died in March of 1960, at the age of thirty-nine, while Ted was in training camp. May Williams died on August 27, 1961, in the Santa Barbara rest home.
“Those are just the things that happen in life,” is all Ted wants to say. “Sure, I had problems at home trying to help my mother and brother and everybody else who was involved. For sure, it bothered me. I had this responsibility, and I wasn't going to shirk from it, and I really didn't. I did the best I could, and let's let it go at that.”
Training camp was sheer torture for Ted. As if it wasn't bad enough to be grieving over his brother and worrying about his mother, he no longer had the support or comfort that had always been provided by Johnny Orlando, the good old friend who had been his confidant from
the beginning in all matters concerning his family.
Johnny Orlando had been fired.
Johnny's drinking had got out of hand. No question about it. He was showing up late at the ballpark. He was neglecting his duties. But why now? Why couldn't they have waited one more year, until Wil lianas was gone? Orlando had not only been Ted Williams's pal for twenty years. He had been Yawkey's pal even longer.
Johnny had a flair. He would go striding into a bar where baseball people were gathered and say, “I represent the wealthiest franchise in baseball. Drinks for everybody.” And sign Tom Yawkey's name. Why not? He was Yawkey's pal, and he did represent the ball club. A ball
