The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr

Author:Ben Bradlee Jr. [Bradlee, Ben Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail, Sports, Ted Williams
ISBN: 9780316614351
Amazon: 0316614351
Barnesnoble: 0316614351
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Published: 2013-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

Ted’s brilliance in 1957 reverberated well into 1958, producing a burst of glowing press and national recognition. The Associated Press named Ted its 1957 Male Athlete of the Year, and the influential New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voted him its Player of the Year. Both awards, especially the latter, served to somewhat mitigate the injustice of the American League MVP award going to Mantle. And there were fresh assessments of Williams as an all-time hitting great. Besides the eight-page “The Case for Ted Williams,” a statistical analysis published by Look magazine,14 other statisticians poring through the detritus of the ’57 season found more nuggets: Ted’s three pinch-hit home runs in September, for example, gave him seven for his career, which was an American League record. And his thirty-three intentional walks for the year were the most ever recorded in a season.15

All this was further evidence that the tide of public opinion—which had begun to shift in favor of Williams in late 1956, after his deft, self-deprecating mime following his spate of spits—was now surging in his direction, buoyed both by the brilliance of his ’57 season and by a popular backlash against the MVP vote for Mantle. What had long been portrayed in the press as Ted’s ill-mannered, crude, and self-centered behavior now mostly came to be seen as principled nonconformity, a willingness to take unpopular positions and stand up for what he believed. People came to appreciate his assertion of independence—his insistence on flouting convention and going without a tie, his daring to give the writers and even the Marine Corps what for.

Seemingly bulletproof now, Ted drew 150,000 people to his annual fly-casting exhibition at the sportsmen’s show in Boston during the first week of February. On the sixth, Williams popped over to Fenway for his annual contract signing and joust with the now-cowed writers. His salary for 1958 was described in all the papers as the largest sum ever given to a professional baseball player. The amount was not officially revealed, of course, but the writers colluded and set the figure at “an estimated” $125,000. If true, then $65,000 of it was deferred, since the team reported to Major League Baseball that it was paying Ted just $60,000 for the season.

Speaking to a horde of reporters and flashbulb-popping photographers, Williams offered détente on his terms. “I’m looking forward to a great summer and I’m going to be as fair as possible with you fellows,” he said. “But the first time I read one of those stinking, detrimental, dishonest, prejudicial stories, then don’t come around me. You know what I mean. Those stories which disrupt my playing or disrupt the club. Just keep out of my way. And don’t be yelling to have me benched if I’m only hitting .280 in May.”16

Then Ted picked a bone with the New York writers who had given him their Player of the Year award for 1957. He’d been unable to go to New York to pick up

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