The Wingmen by Adam Lazarus

Author:Adam Lazarus [Lazarus, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2023-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Hampered all year by the pinched nerve in his neck, Ted Williams slogged through a miserable baseball season in 1959. Five weeks into his return to the starting lineup he was hitting .173 with just two home runs and had already been benched by Red Sox manager Pinky Higgins.

“I know a lot of people are saying the old guy is washed up, but it just isn’t true,” he insisted in late June.

By season’s end, Williams gave little indication otherwise. In 103 games, he had hit just ten home runs and batted .254, nearly a full one hundred points below his career average. Still, he signed a contract the following January to return for one more year.

Opening Day for the Red Sox was at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his final year as commander in chief, threw out the game’s ceremonial first pitch. In the top of the second inning, Williams walked to the plate for his first at-bat of the season. Seated next to his boss, Vice President Richard M. Nixon told Eisenhower, “Ted Williams is coming up this inning and it will probably be his last season. I’d like to see him get off to a good start. Let’s root for him to get a home run.” On cue, Williams smashed a Camilo Pascual pitch so high and so far over the 31-foot-tall, 420-foot deep center field wall that it was called “one of the longest home runs ever witnessed in Washington.”

Nixon—one week after an unopposed victory in the Illinois Republican presidential primary—was so impressed that he wrote Williams a letter that evening.

“While both the President and I were rooting for the Washington Senators today, I can assure you that no one could have gotten a bigger charge out of your tape measure homer than we did,” the letter read. “After all, we ‘old men’ (in our forties that is) have to stand together.”

At forty-seven, the vice president was hardly an old man, especially among his colleagues: the United States Senate over which he presided included seven members at least seventy-five years old. At forty-one, however, Ted Williams was the oldest player in Major League Baseball. And in the chilly East Coast April weather he struggled to play consecutive games without a day off. On the afternoon following his Opening Day home run in Washington, Williams smashed another. The blast down the right field line, fittingly at Yankee Stadium, was the 494th of his career, and with it he surpassed Lou Gehrig for fourth on the all-time list. But while rounding second base, he pulled the calf muscle in his left leg, relegating him to pinch-hitting duties for the next several weeks.

Back in D.C. for a series in late April, Williams remained on the bench for the duration of a Saturday afternoon victory over the Senators. The Red Sox’ third win in four days made for a cheerful scene beneath Griffith Stadium, perfect for Williams to introduce an old friend to his teammates.

John Glenn,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.