WILLIAMS, Theodore Samuel 1918-2002 (Ted Williams)

PERSONAL:

Born August 30, 1918, in San Diego, CA; died of cardiac arrest, July 5, 2002, in Crystal River, FL; son of Samuel Steward (a photographer, storekeeper, and U.S. marshal) and May (a Salvation Army preacher) Williams; married Doris Soule; married second wife; children: (first marriage) three.

CAREER:

Baseball player. Played for the San Diego Padres, 1937, Minneapolis Millers, 1938, and Boston Red Sox, 1939-42, 1946-60 (later a consultant and spring training manager); manager with the Washington Senators, 1969-71, and Texas Rangers, 1972; established the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame, Hernando, FL, 1994, and the annual Greatest Hitters award. Sears Roebuck & Co., sports consultant. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, flight instructor, 1942-45, became second lieutenant, 1944; 1952-53, combat pilot, Korean War; awarded two Gold Stars, three Air Medals, unit and individual awards.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named to the American League All-Star Team, 1940-42, 1946-51, 1954-60; Sporting News Player of the Year, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1949, 1957; American League's Most Valuable Player of the Year, 1946, 1949; six batting titles; led the American League in home runs and runs batted in (RBIs) five times; inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, 1966; American League's Most Valuable Manager of the Year, 1969; Hero of Baseball award, Society for American Baseball Research, 1997; inducted into the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame; a tunnel under Boston Harbor was named for Williams in 1995.

WRITINGS:

(With John Underwood) My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1969, 1988.

(With John Underwood) The Science of Hitting, illustrated by R. E. Cupp, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1971, revised edition, 1986.

(With John Underwood) Ted Williams Fishing "the Big Three": Tarpon, Bonefish, and Atlantic Salmon, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1982.

(With Jim Prime) Ted Williams' Hit List, Stoddart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995, Masters Press (Indianapolis, IN), 1996, published as Ted Williams' Hit List: The Best of the Best Ranks the Best of the Rest, Contemporary Books (Chicago, IL), 2003.

(With David Pietrusza) Ted Williams: My Life in Pictures, Total/Sports Illustrated (Kingston, NY), 2001, revised and published as Teddy Ballgame: My Life in Pictures, Sport Classic Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Author of introduction, The Dutch Master: The Life and Times of Johnny Vander Meer, by Paul Lichtman, Vantage Press (New York, NY), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS:

Theodore Samuel "Ted" Williams died in 2002, but he left behind several books about his life in and after baseball. At the time of his death, Williams, also variously called "The Kid," "Teddy Ballgame," "The Thumper," and "The Splendid Splinter," was the last major leaguer to hit over. 400, having hit. 406 in 1941. His lifetime batting average was. 344, he hit 521 home runs, and Williams was second only to Babe Ruth in career slugging average. A full list of statistics is available at Teddy Ballgame, the Web site dedicated to Williams.

Williams was one of baseball's greatest hitters and would likely have set even more records had he not served in the military for four years during World War II and Korea and missed two seasons because of injuries. He had twenty-ten vision, which added to his value as a ballplayer and a pilot. Williams was considered by many to be the most graceful batter in baseball.

Williams wrote My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life with John Underwood. He was fifty when it was published and was at that time the manager of the Washington Senators. Edward Grossman wrote in Commentary that the memoir "is a therapeutic book, forcing us to make friends with a person of definitely human proportions, who once was better than anybody else at a very special task, but who in other respects was as ordinary and confused as any child propelled from an unhappy home to the glare of fame is liable to be."

A child of Depression-era San Diego and of a single mother after his father abandoned them, Williams decided at a young age to be the greatest hitter who ever lived. At seventeen, he was playing pro ball; at twenty, he was a celebrity; and he was the first player to sign a $100,000 contract. Williams was a very private man and no friend of sports reporters. In his sometimes volatile interactions with fans, they booed him, and during one such incident, after he dropped a ball, he spit back at them. After another incident, he vowed never to tip his cap to the crowds, and he never did. He was known to throw bats and tear out plumbing when in a temper, and he nearly ended his own career in 1938 when he put his fist through a water cooler.

Grossman noted that "one remembers that photographs usually showed Williams grinning, in such a handsome, open way that, if only for these instants, he must have been satisfied with his good fortune. Indeed, to have lasted twenty-five years as a professional player must have taken either a good deal of greed or, more likely, the resilience of a fairly simple outlook on all things save the truly complex matter of hitting a pitched ball."

Washington Post Book World's Shirley Povich wrote that Williams "has examined himself as no mere biographer could. No facet of himself has escaped this man of so many contradictions, who was kind and abusive, tough guy and weepy, reluctant call-up and courageous war hero, unsocial but not unliked by his teammates." Rex Lardner of the New York Times Book Review called My Turn at Bat "a fine memoir by a very human, supremely dedicated athlete."

Williams published The Science of Hitting with Underwood the year before he retired from baseball in 1972. S. J. Riccardi commented in Library Journal that the book "provides an excellent insight into Williams's thinking and a good idea of how this fantastic player developed his natural abilities."

When Williams retired to Florida, he had more time to enjoy another favorite pastime in which he excelled. With Underwood, he wrote Ted Williams Fishing "the Big Three": Tarpon, Bonefish, and Atlantic Salmon, a guide that includes dozens of pages of photographs.

In Ted Williams' Hit List, Williams compares baseball to golf and recalls a conversation he had with golfer Sam Snead as to which ball was more difficult to hit. He ranks other hitters, including Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Ty Cobb, Roger Hornsby, Pete Rose, Carl Yastrzemski, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays. Williams names the five qualities necessary to being a great hitter—intelligence, courage, sharp eyesight, power, and timing.

Williams suffered several strokes that left him partially blind when he was in his seventies. He led a campaign to get "Shoeless" Joe Jackson into the Hall of Fame, and during his lifetime, he supported causes that included the Boston-based Jimmy Fund, a charity that fights children's cancer. Williams also advocated for fairer treatment of black players as far back as 1966, when he called for their admission into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown as he accepted his own award.

Williams's final book, Ted Williams: My Life in Pictures, was revised and published as Teddy Ballgame after Williams's death. It contains more than 240 photographs, many from Williams's own collection. They show Williams playing ball, fishing, and in uniform, as well as picturing him as the family man he also was.

Tom Verducci wrote in a Sports Illustrated obituary that "the modern hitter makes use of digital video training, computer-controlled pitching machines, personal nutritionists, personal trainers, personal chefs, maple bats, the DH rule, weight training and legal and illegal supplements. And yet to this day Theodore Samuel Williams, a thinly built man who weighed his bats at the post office and honed his swing in front of a mirror, remains the very definition of hitting in its most advanced form." Verducci said that "in addition to having great physical gifts, Williams took a studious, scientific approach to hitting that was ahead of his time. He didn't keep a written book on pitchers, yet he once noted that he could recall 'everything there was to know about my first 300 home runs—who the pitcher was, the count, the pitch itself, where the ball landed.' That revelation appears in his 1971 book, The Science of Hitting, which remains the closest thing to the bible of hitting."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Encyclopedia of World Biography, Volume 19, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Shatzkin, Mike, editor, The Ballplayers, William Morrow and Co. (New York, NY), 1990, pp. 1178-1181.

Williams, Ted, and David Pietrusza, Ted Williams: My Life in Pictures, Total/Sports Illustrated (Kingston, NY), 2001, revised and published as Teddy Ballgame, Sport Classic Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Williams, Ted, and John Underwood, My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1969, 1988.

PERIODICALS

Commentary, November, 1969, Edward Grossman, review of My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life, pp. 102-104.

Library Journal, June 1, 1971, S. J. Riccardi, review of The Science of Hitting, p. 2004.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 31, 1996, David Shaw, review of Ted Williams' Hit List, p. 4.

New York Times, July 8, 1969, John Leonard, review of My Turn at Bat, p. 41.

New York Times Book Review, June 8, 1969, Rex Lardner, review of My Turn at Bat, p. 47.

Sporting News, April 15, 1996, Steve Gietschier, review of Ted Williams' Hit List, p. 7.

Washington Post Book World, June 29, 1969, Shirley Povich, review of My Turn at Bat, p. 3.

ONLINE

Teddy Ballgame,http://www.teddyballgame.net/ (April 28, 2003).

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Baseball Digest, October, 2002, Jim Street, "Farewell to Ted Williams: August 30, 1918-July 5, 2002: A Baseball Legend and American Hero," p. 22.

Officer, July-August, 2002 (and interview), p. 8.

Sports Illustrated, July 17, 2002, Tom Verducci, "Splendor at the Plate: Over Two Brilliant Decades, Ted Williams Proved He Was What He Always Wanted to Be: The Best Hitter Who Ever Lived," p. 10.

Time, July 15, 2002, Richard Corliss, "A Little Respect for the Splendid Splinter: Ted Williams, 1918-2002," p. 72.

USA Today, July 22, 2002, Rod Beaton, "Baseball Great Ted Williams Dies."*