The Competitive Instinct

The Competitive Instinct (See Cover)

Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox looked as fit as an Indian buck. After a winter out of doors, including a month of lazy fishing at the edge of the Florida Everglades, he was tanned to a light mahogany. His brownish green eyes were clear and sharp, his face lean, the big hands that wrapped around the handle of his 34-oz. Louisville Slugger were calloused and hard. He had 198 lbs., mostly well-trained muscle, tucked away on his 6 ft. 3 3/4 in. frame. He expected, he conceded, "to have a pretty good year." But as usual

Ted Williams had a number of worries at the back of his mind.

Most of his worries had to do with his specialty: batting at a consistently better clip than any other player of his time. It is his earnest and sorrowful conviction that the pitching in the American League is getting better & better as time rolls on. If so, this will obviously make it even more difficult than it has been in the past for Ted Williams to do what he wants to do every time he comes to bat, i.e., hit the ball into the right-field stand.

Simply & Forever. Fortunately, when it is his turn at bat, Ted is usually able to push all such pessimistic reflections well back in his head, leaving him in just the right state of mental tension and physical relaxation to give close attention to what the pitcher is throwing him. In St. Petersburg, Fla. last week he showed the World Champion New York Yankees just how this delicate adjustment of worry and ease is supposed to work. It was the last of five grapefruit-circuit games between the Yankees and the Sox; each team had won two games. In the first inning Williams came up wearing a solemn and purposeful frown; he looked at one pitch from Yankee Pitcher Bob Porterfield, found it not to his liking, and swung on the second. The ball took off and sailed over the right-field fence 340 ft. away. Since the Yankees did not score at all, that was the ball game. But Ted Williams did not have a full day, though he had won the game. On his next three times at bat the scorer added a "0" to the Williams line in the box score.

What would satisfy any other man in baseball is not enough for Theodore Samuel Williams. As a boy in San Diego, Calif, he resolved, simply and forever, to become the best ballplayer of his generation. Big Ted has never forgotten his boyish decision, and, at 31, he has come within a bat-length of achieving it.

Hits & History. There are plenty of fans who maintain that Ted has already achieved it. They consider him a greater player than even jolting Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees and Stan ("The Man") Musal of the St. Louis Cardinals. As proof, they point to Ted's 43 homers last year (265 in eight seasons*) and his eight-year batting average with the Red Sox. At .353 it is the third highest in modern baseball records, right behind Ty Cobb's .367 (for 24 seasons) and Rogers Hornsby's .358 (for 23) and ahead of such immortals as Ruth (.342 for 22 seasons), Gehrig (.340 in 17) and Jimmy Foxx (.325 in 20). That makes Ted the best hitter, at least, in the game today.

His teammates loyally assert that Ted is also the best leftfielder in the business --a statement that arouses derision even in many sections of Boston. Ted has injudiciously said many times, "They don't pay off on fielding." Often enough, he does manage in the heat of the season to look like a tired and slightly bored businessman, slouched back on one heel, his shoulders drooping, when he is on station in left field. Nonetheless, his long legs cover a lot of territory, his long arms take in a lot of sky, and he works slickly with crackerjack Center-Fielder Dom ("The Little Professor") DiMaggio (Joe's little brother). Despite legend and his own old scorn of the fielder's art, Ted has become one of the best outfielders in the big time.

Last year, for the second time, Ted was voted the Most Valuable Player in the American League. Tom Yawkey, millionaire owner of the Sox, evidently agrees, for he is paying Ted about $110,000 this season--the highest salary in baseball history. Like the rest of Boston, Yawkey counts on Ted and such other veterans as Shortstop Vernon Stephens, Third Baseman Johnny Pesky, Second Baseman Bobby Doerr and Dom DiMaggio to sew up the pennant for the Sox this year.

Pitching & Prophecy. At bat, the well-heeled Sox are the most dangerous club in either league. Comparatively weak in seasoned pitchers, they boast two fine ones on 1949 form: Left-hander Mel Parnell, 27, who won 25 games, and Right-hander Ellis Kinder, 35, who won 23. Back of them are two young lefthanders, Chuck Stobbs, 20, and Speed Artist Maurice Mc-Dermott, 21, who are both marked "promising." On paper the Sox have the best first team in the business, but they are weak "on the bench," i.e., in replacements. Midseason injuries to such mainstays as dependable Bobby Doerr and hustling, hard-hitting (39 homers last year) Vernon Stephens could well put the Sox out of the running.

Pennants are never won on paper, and for the past two seasons the Sox have been nosed out of the race on the last day. This year, as last, the Yankees may well outrun them, but no expert would care to guarantee the outcome of the 1950 race. As the Yankees' manager, wily old Casey Stengel, puts it, "We'll all be knocking our heads together this year . . . Detroit is much better. Cleveland will be a lot tougher, and so will Connie's Athletics." (The A's are out to win one more pennant for 87-year-old Connie Mack, to celebrate his 50th, and perhaps last, year as their manager.)

Sox Manager "Marse Joe" McCarthy, who could teach taciturnity to a quahog, agrees it will be a tough race. Ted Williams, never a bawling optimist, figures the Sox have a 50-50 chance ("at the outside"). Says Ted: "I'd sure like for us to get it. It would be one of the greatest thrills of my life."

Golden Platitude. Williams has been getting thrills out of baseball since grade-school days: "I was always the first to get there in the morning," he remembers, "so as to be on hand when the janitor opened the closet where they kept the athletic equipment. By the time the other kids showed, I'd have the bat in my hand, to be first up. We'd play until school started and then again at recess."

When Ted was still a schoolboy, his father and mother separated. Mrs. May Williams worked for the Salvation Army, maintained herself, Ted and his kid brother Danny in a modest frame house in the North Park section of San Diego. Ted got permission to go to Herbert Hoover High in another school zone because it was smaller--he wanted to be sure of making the school nine.

The principal of Hoover High told him once that he would get out of life "only what you put into it." For Ted the platitude still shines like gold: "I've sure tried to put everything I have into baseball. And everything I have I owe to baseball. I've tried not to let anything interfere with that."

A block and a half from his house was a public playground where he went, all through his high-school years, to practice batting. "Hundreds of kids have the natural ability to become great ballplayers," he says, "but nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability. I used to go out all the time with another kid named Wilbur Wiley who was just as enthusiastic as me. We'd take turns pitching to each other . . . Come to think of it, one of my greatest thrills came when I was 14, the day I discovered I could hit whatever Wilbur threw."

"Keep Swinging." After that, Ted knew he was on his way. To build up size and strength, the skinny kid went on an eating spree. Even in his sleep, Ted would shout: "Big arms! That's what I need!" Today he still eats like a starved man; he has been known to fork down two dinners in immediate succession and top them off with a couple of malted milks.

At 18 Ted was a professional ballplayer and a star performer for the San Diego Padres. At 19 the Red Sox decided he was big enough to buy (for $25,000 and five players), brought him east to the Sox spring training ground at Sarasota, Fla. He was no great shakes as a leftfielder in those days, but he could hit and he knew it. Had not the great Lefty O'Doul, twice batting champion of the National League and manager of the San Francisco Seals, himself told him never to change his stance? "You'll be a great hitter," Lefty had said. "Keep swinging as you do until you die."

Ted's swagger and his brash honesty about everyone and everything he disliked seemed, to older Sox, an almost intolerable cockiness for a green rookie. Ted greeted Manager Joe Cronin with a palsy-walsy "Hey, Scout!" But after Cronin, now general manager of the Red Sox, had appraised his new recruit, he farmed him out to Minneapolis for further seasoning. On the way to the station, Ted told Johnny Orlando, the Sox's clubhouse factotum, that he would be back the next year. "That," says admiring Johnny, "was the first of a hundred true predictions Ted has made."

The Magic .400. The next year, in 1939, the fresh kid hit 31 homers for the Sox. Two years later his batting average was .406 and Outfielder Williams was the only American Leaguer since 1923 (when Detroit's Harry Heilmann hit .403) to get into the .400 set.*

No one could deny that Ted was great, but some players, scores of sportwriters and not a few thousand fans thought that he was also a great pain in the neck. They rode him for blurting that his 1940 salary of $12,500 was chicken feed for a star of his magnitude, and for saying, in a rare moment of complete discouragement, that he would rather be a fireman than play baseball. The fans razzed him for seeming to loaf in the outfield, and for ignoring the tradition of tipping his cap to the applause after he had hit a home run.

Ted's reaction to the riding he took (and still takes) was typical. Boos burned him up, though he asked for them, and he could not help hearing every loud taunt from the bleachers. He had what ballplayers call "rabbit ears," which pricked and blushed at every hostile sound. "Why do they cheer me for hitting a homer," he asked, "and then boo me for grounding out the next time up? I'm still the same guy, ain't I? ... They can all go to hell. I'll never tip my cap to them." Baseball Immortal Eddie Collins, now Red Sox vice president, says with resigned melancholy, "If he'd tip his cap just once he could be elected mayor of Boston in five minutes. I don't think he'll ever do it."

Ted spent three years in the service, a year as a Marine pilot instructor at Pensacola. A Navy doctor found that he had the eyesight of one man in thousands. It pays off handsomely at the plate, though Williams himself thinks his eyesight is not the secret of his success. The ability to stand up to a fast, close pitch without flinching comes first, according to Ted, and eyesight is next. The third most important factor, Ted thinks, is "power, and the power is all here, in the wrist and forearm. Timing comes last. If you have the power you'll get the timing naturally."

When he went back to the Sox in the spring of 1946, the sportwriters wrote reams of copy about "the new Williams." Marine discipline, combined with the calming influence of his pretty, husky-voiced wife, had made him apparently less cocky, more affable. "But that's all balo-neyhead talk," Ted says. "I'm always nice enough in the spring, before I read what those obscenity-heads print about me."

Fishing & Forgetting. Since spring training began, five weeks ago, home for the Williamses has been a $350-a-month furnished apartment near the Red Sox camp at Sarasota. Ted has great admiration for clamp-jawed Manager McCarthy, but under McCarthy, spring means hard work, and work makes Williams wistful. He sorely misses fishing. "Fishing is how I forget my troubles. I go out alone, or with one other guy. We don't talk much. Boy, I get really relaxed!"

His moans about his "troubles," heard from his pinnacle of success, make some fans snicker with envy or disbelief. But the fact that his troubles stem largely from a walnut-hard competitive instinct, an inch-short temper and a worry wart as big as a baseball, makes them no less real to him.

When he can't fish to relax, Ted plays with his daughter, ties trout flies, or putters with his collection of cameras. He is generally in bed by 11 p.m. and up at 7:30 for a huge breakfast. Loudly congenial in the clubhouse or when on the road with the club, he spends all the time he can with his family, with friends who are not ballplayers, and alone.

"My personal life," he keeps repeating, "is nobody's business but my own." His passion for privacy is one of the things that has made him unpopular with gossip-hungry sportwriters and fans. It has also helped conceal an extremely generous nature. On the road he is known to waiters and bellhops as a "buck-tipper" and a soft touch. He divided $1,000 of his 1946 World Series check among the clubhouse helpers. He sends his mother upwards of $7,000 a year, likes to visit shut-in children in hospitals, provided there are no reporters around.

In spring training, Ted's working day begins about 11 a.m. Sometimes he drives direct to the park; other times, his baby-blue Cadillac pulls up first before the swank Hotel Sarasota Terrace, where most of the Sox live. Studiously ignoring the murmurs of the fans which his arrival generally creates, Ted uncoils from behind the wheel and strides head down into the lobby. In natty slacks and sport shirt, but without a hat or tie,* he may pause a moment to chat with the girl behind the cigar counter and to pick up a copy of Sports Afield or else his new favorite paper, the Wall Street Journal.

"You know what I'd like to do when I retire?" Ted asks, punching a finger at the Journal by way of a hint. "This stuff. I'd like to know enough about stocks to be a regular trader. I've got some blue-chip stocks myself--I don't guess I'll ever be taken in--but I wish I had more education." Ted won't say how much he has to invest ("Naw, that's part of my privacy!"), but he has made around $550,000 from baseball and from such outside sources as personal appearances, a ghostwritten column in the Boston Herald and advertising testimonials.

Thunder & Sunshine. Ted strolls the dusty lot from the hotel to the clubhouse, announces his arrival there by whistling, then calling "Hey, hamhead!" at someone, or by setting up a richly profane squawk about the set of the wind or the whereabouts of his spikes. His teammates, who know that Ted's outbursts are his way of working off the impatience that perpetually gnaws at him, let him thunder away. When he subsides, one of them (often it is burly, chirpy Birdie Tebbetts, the first-string catcher) calls out: "Hey, that's telling them, Theodore!" Ted rewards such replies with a sunny smile, falls silent as he fusses with his shoe lacings to get just the right tension.

He takes equal care with his pants, adjusting the elastics that hold them far down on his shins. Ted's detractors have accused him of wearing his pants long to attract attention. Actually, the purpose is to hide his slat-skinny legs. Williams' weight is in his shoulders and club-heavy forearms.

The first thing Ted does when he reaches the bench is to pick up one of his bats. Awaiting his turn in the batting-practice cage, he looks as enthusiastic as he was at 14, and more so than he ever seems in the outfield. His level eyes take in each pitch and every swing.

Cure for the Shift? When his own turn comes, Slugger Williams steps up to the plate, gingerly paws a hole for the heel spikes of his left foot, then takes a yard-wide stride forward with his right foot. He places his bat on the far corner of the plate, to prove that he can cover all of it with his swing, and flexes his legs and hips, twisting his long brown hands around the bat handle and wrenching them in opposite directions. "The important thing," he says, "is to be relaxed, yet able to hit whatever comes over that plate." His alert, smooth-muscled confidence is the envy of other ballplayers.

His only known weakness at bat is his notorious tendency as a left-handed power hitter to pull at least 75% of his hits toward right field. In 1946, Cleveland Manager Lou Boudreau experimented with an exaggerated defensive shift against Williams: he ordered everybody but his leftfielder into the right-hand half of the diamond (see chart). It worked well because Williams consistently refused to try to poke the ball into undefended left field. He likes his extra-base hits too much, and he loses power when he has to hold up and shorten his swing to chop the ball to left. Soon every team developed a modified version of the shift, and it cost Williams dozens of hits a season.

In the first exhibition game against the Yankees this year, he switched on the shift and won a game. He had tied it up in the tenth inning by lining a screaming double to dead right field. In the twelfth he sewed up the game by shifting his feet and poking a towering fly ball into undefended left. Said he: "Jeez, if I could do that three times in a row it would cure that shift business." But nobody thought Ted Williams would ever just poke at a ball three times in a row.

"Don't Be Scared." He had a particularly big grin on later in the training season when he and his teammates were flying back to Sarasota from an exhibition game with the Yankees at Miami. Ted was flying especially high, for he had hit a towering 375-footer over the Scoreboard in right center. He sang in a high, simulated falsetto, bowed to his mates' jeers, then went to the pilot's compartment, put on the earphones, handled the controls for a while. As the plane headed down for a landing, Ted came scrambling back into the passenger compartment and yelled,

"Don't be scared, you guys. I'm going to let the regular driver take it in."

A Boston baseball writer, known as a Williams needler, spoke to a passenger alongside as if confessing his sins. "You know," the writer said, "I'm falling in love with that character. He has never been so nice. He can be a terrific guy and he's always terrific copy, nice or not. I hope the stiff hits .494."

It sounded like a new and unprecedented era of good feeling. Actually, the newspaperman was talking about the semi-relaxed, grapefruit-circuit Williams; with spring busting out all over and the teams heading north for the opening league games April 18, the cordiality and enthusiasm were highly seasonal. Before long the situation would no doubt return to normal: Ted Williams would be rattling the right-field fences and Boston fans and sportwriters would be booing him as usual.

*As compared with Babe Ruth's 714 in 22 seasons.

*Last National Leaguers to do it: the New York Giants' Bill Terry (.401 in 1930) and the St. Louis Cardinals' Rogers Hornsby (.403 in 1925).

*Ted has been known to wear a tie only half a dozen times in his life. On one occasion he wore a tie to a baseball writers' banquet in Boston simply to cross up the reporters; a friend had assured him that they had already written their stories and reported him tieless.

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