Speaker 1 The kid was a great
Speaker 2 nickname for Ted Williams when he first broke in because he was a kid, and for all of his
Speaker 1 scientific approach to hitting for all of his serious study of the game, he always had a kid’s enthusiasm somewhere in there. Think of him rounding first base
Speaker 2 in 1941 when he was still a kid after hitting the game winning all star game Homer in
Speaker 1 Detroit. And he’s clapping his hands and skipping around the bases like a kid
Speaker 2 in a sandlot. And that’s at a time when players tended not to be as demonstrative as they are today.
Speaker 1 And no matter what else surrounded him, no matter what other
Speaker 2 life experiences as he grew to be an elder statesman. Baseball terms 42. When he last swung about in the major leagues,
Speaker 1 there was still a boyish
Speaker 2 enthusiasm for the game that always came through.
Speaker 3 Thank you. You’ve interviewed so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. What was it like to interview Ted and what was anything different about interviewing Ted Williams?
Speaker 1 The first time I interviewed Ted Williams? It was in the late 80s and it was a two hour long radio interview. At that time, he had done virtually no television or radio since he stopped
Speaker 2 managing the Texas
Speaker 1 Rangers. So the idea that Ted Williams was going
Speaker 2 to be on at all, let alone for two hours, was a big
Speaker 1 deal. And we used to do this radio show
Speaker 2 from a restaurant
Speaker 4 in Manhattan
Speaker 1 and people would be having their dinner and they’d be
Speaker 2 eavesdropping on the conversation
Speaker 1 in this case. When I arrived for the interview, there were people out the door. The restaurant could not accommodate them. And where we did it was upstairs and there were people hanging off the banisters and off the stairway to get a look. And when he walked in the room at that point, he was around 70 years old when he walked in the room. Even if you didn’t know one thing about baseball,
Speaker 2 you’d say that’s somebody
Speaker 1 who’s that. He had a tremendous movie stars
Speaker 2 presence about him. Six, three, six, four. This was before his strokes and and health problems.
Speaker 1 He was a charismatic person.
Speaker 3 Fantastic, was he did anything surprise you about him when you first interviewed?
Speaker 1 I was just slightly intimidated at that point, I’d been doing it for a
Speaker 2 while, but after all, for God’s sakes, this was Ted Williams, but the skids had been greased a little bit because Tony Kubek, who at the beginning of his career in the end of Ted’s, had played against Ted. And Ted was always respectful of fellow players. Tony Kubek had vouched for me, and that was why he did the interview.
Speaker 1 Ted was never going to do anything he didn’t want to do. He lived life beginning to
Speaker 2 end on his own terms. So there was a measure of respect there, whether I deserved it or not. And I knew the subject matter. And when that was further proven to him by the fourth or fifth question,
Speaker 1 then he became really engaged and he was really bearing down. And he was
Speaker 2 tremendously revealing about various pitchers that he faced in various episodes in his career. But the one response that stands out the most to me was and I hadn’t prepared this question just dawned on me about halfway through. I said, you
Speaker 1 know, you really are the guy that John Wayne played in all those movies. You are John Wayne. And he paused
Speaker 2 for a second and he goes,
Speaker 4 Yeah, I know it.
Speaker 3 That’s great. No applause, hold the applause in the end, it’s OK if we jump around because, you know, you said something in there that, you know, you couldn’t make Ted Williams do anything you didn’t want to do. We’re not. This film is not going to get into the whole thing about the end and what happened. Right. But Claudia did say nobody made Ted Williams do what he didn’t want to do. What’s your take on that whole controversy of what happened to his body?
Speaker 2 It’s true for 99 percent of his life for certain that nobody made Ted Williams do anything
Speaker 4 he didn’t want to do.
Speaker 2 He lived life on his own terms. But I guess where the question comes in was,
Speaker 1 was he fully capable
Speaker 2 and fully aware toward the end? So was he suggestible toward the end in a way that he would not have been for most of his life? And I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it’s a legitimate question.
Speaker 3 Fantastic. You already answered this, what was his you seem to get along with him.
Speaker 4 I did.
Speaker 3 What was his relationship with the media like in retirement?
Speaker 2 He conceded that his relationship with the media could have been better. And part of it was his fault because he was so stubborn, he wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t ingratiate himself with someone just to get whatever benefit came from that. If he didn’t feel it, he wasn’t going
Speaker 1 to do it. On the other hand,
Speaker 2 the Boston Press at that time, there might have been a dozen newspapers. The Boston Press could be very, very tough.
Speaker 4 There were people that
Speaker 1 no matter how well he did,
Speaker 2 we’re not going to concede an inch to him. And they were going to find the slightest flaw
Speaker 4 and pick at it and pick at it and
Speaker 2 magnify it. And that only increased the hostility and they retreated to their respective corners. There was one writer
Speaker 1 who in one of Ted’s Triple Crown seasons, I think the writer’s name was Dave Egan,
Speaker 4 did not put
Speaker 1 Ted in any of
Speaker 2 the ten slots on his call on his MVP
Speaker 4 ballot.
Speaker 1 And that cost Ted Williams the MVP award. He twice won the
Speaker 2 Triple Crown and was not the most valuable
Speaker 1 player. He told me that he thought that DiMaggio should have been the MVP in 1941. He had no problem with hitting 406 and not winning the MVP. Yankees won the pennant
Speaker 2 and DiMaggio hitting fifty six 56 straight games.
Speaker 1 He had no problem with that. But the two years he won the Triple Crown, a different story.
Speaker 2 And he specifically remembered that Egan had left him off the ballot.
Speaker 3 You know, a lot. Yeah. Really a piece of work.
Speaker 1 So, you know, even even to his last day,
Speaker 4 the day
Speaker 2 of the home run, on that dark, dank day at Fenway Park and John Updike, writing hub fans bid to do when he addressed the crowd. He then said, and to my friends upstairs,
Speaker 1 the Knights of the keyboard, something like that, you know, derisively. But in the early 1990s, when he
Speaker 2 came back to be recognized, I think it was the fiftieth anniversary of the 406 season. He had a cap in his pocket and he pulled the cap
Speaker 1 out, put it on his head, and then
Speaker 4 doffed his cap
Speaker 2 to the fans and paid tribute to them and acknowledged that
Speaker 1 it was something that he should have done
Speaker 2 when he was an active player, but he just couldn’t bring himself
Speaker 1 to do it. He told me and maybe
Speaker 2 told others that when he hit the home run off, Jack Fisher in his last at bat as he rounded second base, the thought went through his mind that he should doff his cap
Speaker 1 and he almost flinched. Now, I can’t do it. I can’t make
Speaker 2 myself do it.
Speaker 1 But in retrospect, you wish he wish you had.
Speaker 3 What is that? That pride. How would you characterize that?
Speaker 4 I think it’s pride, I think
Speaker 2 although sometimes you you can change for him at that time it was principle and very often principle. People are stubborn. All those things.
Speaker 3 So let’s talk just briefly about his personality. Seems to be a figure who we know a lot about his personality. How would you describe it?
Speaker 2 Well, my interactions with him were all long after he was done playing. He was so kind to me that I was almost taken aback by it.
Speaker 4 And whatever
Speaker 2 caused it, the fact that contemporaries of his vouched for me, the fact that I was well prepared and knew my baseball,
Speaker 4 whatever
Speaker 2 it was, he was incredibly kind to me and warm. So his presence could be a little bit intimidating. But once you got to know him and if you were on his OK list,
Speaker 4 it was all all good.
Speaker 2 When my son was seven or eight years old,
Speaker 4 Ted
Speaker 2 called the house having a conversation. And I said, Ted, would you say hello to my son Keith?
Speaker 4 And it’s on the phone.
Speaker 2 Hello, Mr. Williams. And that big booming voice, you could still hear it, even though you weren’t landline back in the day.
Speaker 1 A big boom. Hey, how are you, young man? Are you playing ball? Yes, I. I play Little League. Well, remember, get a good pitch to hit you like just a bigger than life personality. And I’m stage whispering.
Speaker 3 Tell him you sometimes see Stan Musial because
Speaker 1 we lived in St. Louis. Yeah I know Stan Musial. I see Stan Musial. I’ll tell Stan I said he was a great hitter.
Speaker 3 You’re talking you’re telling you’re describing a character who is not the Ted Williams that we read about. Yeah, I’m nineteen thirty nine in nineteen sixty. What what drove him what made him that personality that wasn’t.
Speaker 2 So I’m not going to try to play streetcorner psychologists.
Speaker 4 Let me do it again. I’m not going to
Speaker 2 try to play streetcorner psychologist. There have been many good books and exhaustive examinations devoted to Ted.
Speaker 4 They did a better job than I can
Speaker 2 do in this space. But in the broadest sense, what he said himself was that his only desire was to walk down the street and have people say, there goes the greatest hitter who ever lived. And he has a legitimate claim to that distinction. And that’s what drove him the sense of perfection, as Updike said, as Updike said, should I start over,
Speaker 3 start over from my day? Yeah, OK.
Speaker 2 As Updike said in Hubb, fans bid to do, and I don’t know if I’m quoting this exactly right, but he said that Williams was the perfect
Speaker 4 ballplayer
Speaker 2 for a midsummer afternoon with nothing at stake in the game except the tissue
Speaker 1 thin difference
Speaker 2 between a thing done well and
Speaker 4 a thing done ill, that it didn’t matter
Speaker 1 when it was long after he was already established for who he was. It could be his fifth at bat
Speaker 2 in a game with a score was twelve to two, and he was concentrating and bearing down the same way as if it were the seventh game of the World Series.
Speaker 3 What pushed him to go that far left me at the risk of asking you to analyze the man, but the difference between here and the other side of that tissue.
Speaker 4 He loved the game,
Speaker 2 and I think you naturally love anything that you find out
Speaker 4 you’re gifted to do, but
Speaker 1 the gift is not enough. The gift has to meet dedication and craft and study. And one of the worst human emotions is regret. Mickey Mantle live with a lot of regret, believing that he never got
Speaker 2 100 percent out of what God
Speaker 4 gave him.
Speaker 2 Ted Williams never had to feel that way. I don’t think Ted was a religious man, so I’m not trying to attach spirituality to it. But however you
Speaker 1 view the world, he didn’t have to live with
Speaker 4 regret over not
Speaker 2 getting everything out of whatever he was naturally gifted with.
Speaker 3 How did he feel if someone said, boy, you were such a great natural hater?
Speaker 2 Ted was so honest that he couldn’t even be falsely modest. So Ted would acknowledge that he had certain gifts.
Speaker 1 But when you write a book way before sabermetrics, way before video study, way before all the mechanical breakdowns that we now take for granted in the coverage of baseball, in the teaching of baseball, he was so far ahead, he was generations ahead. When you write a book called The Science of Hitting and you’ve got an entire strike zone filled with baseballs. And you know that if I get it in the sweet spot, I’m hitting four hundred. If you make me swing down there, I’m hitting to 30, even though I’m Ted Williams. It goes without saying that he thought that natural gifts
Speaker 2 were only the start.
Speaker 3 Fantastic that I want to ask you about that strike zone with the balls and stuff. I feel like so many people who just are working on this project feel like, oh, yeah, I remember that book. That book. Yeah, that ball. And Warren Buffet even talks about that that strike zone. It’s being like while you wait for the one you wait pitch, can you describe because I think you’ve talked about it for you growing up. You thought that. Oh yeah. Something to you too.
Speaker 1 Well, when
Speaker 2 that book came out, I think I was 16 years old
Speaker 4 and,
Speaker 2 you know, trying to play high school baseball and not that well. So I had no illusions. Even then, I knew if I was ever going to get to a ballpark without paying for a ticket, it would be to sit where Red Barber and Mel Allen sat, not to stand where
Speaker 1 Ted Williams stood. So it didn’t really have that much of an impact on my own ball playing life. But I took note. And when you think about it, it wasn’t just get a good pitch to hit the idea, at least for a certain hitter
Speaker 4 of an uppercut of the hip
Speaker 1 movement, the weight shift, all this stuff is now standard. It’s understood, but he got it way ahead of everybody else that.
Speaker 3 How much does the you know, we’re talking a lot about his personality, how much does the personality of of an athlete even matter? And and, you know, we’re doing this. This is the first baseball player that American Masters has ever done. American Masters usually does. Scientists are sure. Is Ted a scientist? Is he an artist? How much does the personality of a scientist or artist matter?
Speaker 4 I think
Speaker 2 Ted Williams is both an artist in a certain sense, but more than anything else,
Speaker 1 a craftsman, but just a tremendously gifted craftsman who respected, loved and worked at his craft until he came close to perfecting it. But understand what baseball is. Perfection in baseball
Speaker 2 is one, four,
Speaker 1 three, and he was slightly better than that 344. But they still got him out. Even if you figure in the walk’s, they still got him out more than they more than he got to them. But that’s the nature of the game. So you can do it as close to perfectly as you’re able. And still, the nature of
Speaker 2 baseball is more failure than success.
Speaker 3 Great, so the first half of that question had to do what does it matter then about his personality or what the personality that made him?
Speaker 1 I think for many
Speaker 2 great athletes, success is an expression
Speaker 1 of a kind of character. Michael Jordan had tremendous athletic character and will and devotion to success. Mariano Rivera. It’s an expression of character to have the equanimity
Speaker 4 that he had on
Speaker 1 those few occasions when he didn’t come through, even in big situations, he walked off with the same look on his face as
Speaker 2 when he succeeded. You know, that that’s that’s sort of Zen like
Speaker 1 quality that he brought
Speaker 4 to it.
Speaker 1 It’s not always the same. It doesn’t express itself always in the same way. But athletic excellence is an expression of character, maybe especially so in baseball, because it’s such a day in, day out game. You just can’t you can’t be that much different on
Speaker 2 Tuesday than you were on Monday. The season’s too long
Speaker 3 and there is so much failure.
Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah. Baseball is largely about failure. The highest lifetime batting average, depending on who you listen to, is Ty Cobb, 366 or 367. Either way, it’s failing in a certain sense, more than six out of 10 times unless you count the walks in there.
Speaker 3 But I mean, I was looking at these numbers. It’s crazy. It is on base percentage. But he still
Speaker 1 was
Speaker 2 his on base percentage in some seasons. The handful of seasons, over 500 for his career, well over 400.
Speaker 1 And what was rare about Ted
Speaker 2 was not only did he seldom strike out,
Speaker 1 but he got more than 100 walks every year.
Speaker 2 DiMaggio struck out only 13 times in 1940. One hundred and fifty six straight games, but he didn’t walk nearly as often as Ted.
Speaker 4 Did you take a guy like Mickey Mantle who got a whole lot of walks,
Speaker 1 but his strikeouts and walks
Speaker 2 were almost always equal? It’s still a plus in terms of the on base percentages. Strikeouts are are kind of overvalued as a negative. But Ted neither struck out
Speaker 4 nor I was about to misspeak,
Speaker 1 but Ted seldom struck out but walked more than anybody of
Speaker 2 his era.
Speaker 3 Let’s stick with Ted and DiMaggio. Forty one and a second. But how would you compare Ted and DiMaggio?
Speaker 2 Here’s something I think is very important about trying to understand Ted’s personality and
Speaker 4 character, other players are
Speaker 2 quick to sort of gild the lily about themselves.
Speaker 1 He was never that way. He was perfectly comfortable with who and what he was. And he was very generous
Speaker 2 in his assessments of other players.
Speaker 1 I’ve never heard him slide another player or say, well, yeah, but about another player, he was a fan of
Speaker 2 every other great player.
Speaker 1 And he often said about DiMaggio he was a much better fielder than me. He could run the bases better than me. But I always
Speaker 2 felt in my heart that I was a better hitter than Joe. But he was a great hitter. That’s how he felt about him.
Speaker 3 Oh, back up is he is hitting a baseball, the hardest thing to do in professional sports, the kids think that. Do you think that?
Speaker 2 Well, that’s the cliche, you know, and it’s been in place for so long that it’s accepted wisdom. And if there’s a counterargument, I don’t know that it’s a convincing counterargument.
Speaker 4 You think about it, the
Speaker 2 pitcher is trying to fool you.
Speaker 1 And even if you make contact, not counting the catcher, there’s seven other guys who can catch it. It’s pretty darn hard to do,
Speaker 4 proven by the fact
Speaker 2 that the very best of them still fails more often than he succeeds.
Speaker 3 So I think you’re right. It is a cliche nonetheless. You didn’t say it. I said it.
Speaker 2 No, I didn’t say it.
Speaker 3 You would say it. Would you would you say that a baseball thing in sports? I did, Ted. Think that maybe that’s a better way of getting at it.
Speaker 1 If you simply say hitting
Speaker 2 a baseball is the hardest thing to do, you can, you know, dribble grounders and make
Speaker 1 out a lot of guys who made contact pretty consistently and weren’t great. Hitting a baseball with authority
Speaker 2 on a consistent basis, I think is the hardest thing to do in team sports. Great.
Speaker 3 So what do you think about baseball in numbers? I mean, you’ve got these numbers and I’ve been a baseball fan, I got all these numbers. Yeah. What is it about baseball in numbers? No other sports like. Right.
Speaker 1 Baseball has
Speaker 2 the
Speaker 1 longest continuous history and the richest history
Speaker 2 of any American team sport. And while
Speaker 1 the game has
Speaker 2 changed from era to era, no doubt about it, dead ball, lively ball, segregated, integrated train travel, air travel, higher mound, lower mound, natural grass, astroturf dome stadium, not dome stadium. Advent of relief pitching
Speaker 1 the game has changed, but with the exception of the steroid era, you can make allowances for those changes and still do plausible comparisons. Are athletes better today than they ever were? Of course, but it’s certainly possible to imagine Ted Williams batting against whoever you think is the best pitcher in the major leagues today. You can picture Ted Williams batting against Jake Arietta or Clayton Kershaw
Speaker 2 or Madison Bumgarner, although he would probably say, give me Ariete. I don’t want to face the lefties if I can avoid it,
Speaker 1 you know, but it’s possible no one ever says I wonder if George Mikan could guard Shaquille O’Neal. I wonder if Red Grange was as good as Barry Sanders. They just don’t say it. Whereas in baseball, it’s possible to imagine Walter Johnson in a pitcher’s duel with Randy Johnson. And that’s a cool thing about baseball.
Speaker 3 That’s great. So the numbers and Ted, you know, Almeda joke, we’re going to start it. You make the joke and start right at four of six, like we all live for up six, three forty four. We don’t know what. He’s right. What is it about the numbers themselves that. Has this quote.
Speaker 2 Well, the numbers are, first of all, the shorthand, we know that 300 is kind of a marker of excellence there or or above. Again, outside the steroid era, the idea of hit 50 home runs in a season or approach the babe or Roger Maris in the low 60s. Those those are numbers that even casual fans understand that they that they relate to an earned run average of two or in that vicinity is magnificent. People understand those numbers.
Speaker 3 Oh, the good stuff. Good time to pause, let’s pause there for a moment. How are you on time?
Speaker 2 As long as I’m done by around five, I think I’m all right.
Speaker 3 OK, let I’m just trying to do what you know. I’m going to know what Ted’s numbers mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 OK, um. Are we clear.
Speaker 3 Um, I mean I still hear but maybe you don’t too much. What do you hear. Sirens. Right. OK, yeah, OK, I think we just got through it all right.
Speaker 4 No problem.
Speaker 2 The stuff about the changes in the game and everything that’s OK, the earlier stuff, that was great.
Speaker 4 OK, now it’s clean, is clean, OK. All right.
Speaker 2 All right. So where am I picking up here?
Speaker 3 Numbers for 06. For 06. You know, there’s a there’s a hedge fund company for 06 ventures. A bunch of guys in Boston. Yeah.
Speaker 2 I think I can say this with certainty,
Speaker 1 most people
Speaker 2 who consider themselves hockey fans
Speaker 1 do not know exactly how
Speaker 2 many goals and assists Wayne Gretzky had, how many Gordie Howe
Speaker 1 had. They know they were great. Nobody knows Kareem Abdul
Speaker 2 Jabbar, his final point
Speaker 1 total. In fact, most people don’t even realize that Karl Malone is in between Kareem and Michael Jordan in second place in total points scored. We know Jerry West and Oscar Robertson were great. Were their exact scoring averages. No one knows. No one cares. What was Jim Brown’s rushing total before Walter Payton went past? And who holds the record now? And exactly what is his total and how many yards per carry was his average? People don’t know. Even people who never miss a game
Speaker 2 don’t know, but they’re all kinds of numbers. In baseball, 511 is how many games Cy Young won. No one’s ever going to approach that again. The game has changed too much. Fifty six for 06, I think. Sixty one resonates more than 73. So to 755 or 714 resonate more than 762 because 762 is not authentic, you know. But yeah, those numbers, those
Speaker 1 numbers echo down the corridors of baseball time. Great.
Speaker 3 What is that like? I was walking. OK, good I think but so nineteen forty one. There are thirteen years. Nineteen forty one was one of them. Yeah. Can you tell me about that year.
Speaker 2 Well, America is not yet in World War two, Pearl Harbor happens a couple of months after the end of the baseball season, the Yankees are the most glamorous team. Joe DiMaggio has taken the baton from Lou Gehrig, whose career was cut short.
Speaker 4 Chieko Ruth Gehrig DiMaggio,
Speaker 2 just as eventually DiMaggio’s last year would be Mantel’s first. So there’s a mystique and an aura about the Yankees already and Yankee Stadium and all the championships and the pinstripes and the glamour of New York. And then this wonderful player who’s a great all around player hits in 56 consecutive games
Speaker 1 and at the same time his contemporary and rival, who
Speaker 2 arrived in the big leagues only a few years after him,
Speaker 1 is threatening to hit 400 and does on the
Speaker 2 last day of the season. Rather than accepting his numbers being
Speaker 1 rounded up to 400, he plays in a doubleheader against the Philadelphia A’s. D.J. La Mayhew
Speaker 4 of the
Speaker 2 Colorado Rockies just won the National League
Speaker 4 batting title over
Speaker 2 Daniel Murphy of the Nats
Speaker 4 and La Mayhew didn’t play at all, but played one
Speaker 2 of the last five games. He basically sat out the weekend to protect the batting
Speaker 4 title
Speaker 1 Ted Williams played in the doubleheader
Speaker 2 against the A’s and went six for eight and raise his batting average to four or six.
Speaker 3 Great. I don’t think we can take too many shots of digital media without also
Speaker 2 explaining who he is.
Speaker 3 You don’t have to know without also attacking Jose
Speaker 1 Reyes, correct? Well, the only reason I was thinking Jose Reyes, but the only reason I did is a more recent. Yeah, but you know what? Let’s I can I can rephrase this. I’m going to give it to you in a better way.
Speaker 3 I’m gonna give you a better way. Let’s talk. OK, let’s just do the last day. This is the last day of the season, 1941. What happened?
Speaker 2 Well, last day of the 1941 season doubleheader, Red Sox at Philadelphia Games don’t mean anything. Pennant race is over. Red Sox are out of it long since. And his numbers
Speaker 1 sit at three ninety nine
Speaker 2 something and would have been rounded up to an even 400. And he’s offered the opportunity to sit out.
Speaker 4 You’ve got to wait.
Speaker 3 Yeah, it’s all right. That’s not trying to do everything,
Speaker 2 everything could be Trump
Speaker 4 related now,
Speaker 2 you know, I was I was saying to Susan,
Speaker 1 you know, when
Speaker 4 Bush
Speaker 2 or Obama would come into town, United Nations or Obama, Obama’s taken Michelle to see Hamilton and they go into dinner. It was once, twice, three times a year. You understood that said he’s going to be scrambled a little bit.
Speaker 1 This is going to be all the damn time. All the damn time.
Speaker 3 We’re good, OK? All right, so, yeah, exactly, if you want to go so
Speaker 2 last day of the 1941 season, Red Sox have a double header scheduled at Philadelphia against Connie Max A’s. The games are inconsequential. Pennant race is long since over and Williams batting averages at 399 in a fraction. That would have been rounded up to an even 400. But rather than sit out and protect the numbers,
Speaker 1 as in recent years, players have done to protect, the batting title just sat out. He said, no, I’m going to play. And he got six hits of the doubleheader and raised the batting average to 406. Now, that’s the kind of thing
Speaker 4 that
Speaker 2 enhances a guy’s
Speaker 1 legend. That’s a man’s man thing to do.
Speaker 4 And he did it.
Speaker 3 That’s a John Wayne move.
Speaker 1 That that is a complete John Wayne move. That’s a hitch up your belt. Tug at your cap and let’s go. I’m going to earn it. No one is going to give me anything.
Speaker 4 I’m going to earn it.
Speaker 3 No one’s going to give me anything. Let’s get back to San Diego first thing. I’m not a good childhood.
Speaker 4 No, apparently not.
Speaker 3 Did he when you talked to him, was he a friend at that?
Speaker 1 In my presence, at least, he didn’t do a deep self-analysis.
Speaker 2 Obviously, there was stuff
Speaker 4 there with his dad, with his mom
Speaker 2 working for the Salvation Army, and he found his salvation, if that’s not too
Speaker 4 corny, on the battlefield.
Speaker 2 He found something that he loved and something that he excelled at. And that was the way he could define himself rather than being defined by whatever the circumstances of his family life were to.
Speaker 3 Thank you. So you told me a little bit before about how Ted felt about Joe DiMaggio. The two of them are these kind of, you know, Paul and John or whatever. Yeah, yeah. There’s a thing there. How would you compare Ted and Joe?
Speaker 1 I think they each get their due.
Speaker 2 If you say that DiMaggio was the greater all round player because he was a magnificent center fielder by all accounts, and while guys didn’t steal that many bases in that era, as Yogi Berra said, I never saw him make a wrong mistake on the bases.
Speaker 1 Yeah, he was a tremendous base runner. And Ted willingly and happily conceded
Speaker 2 that he was better in both those areas. And then you give Ted the hitting, even though DiMaggio himself hit three twenty five lifetime in 56 straight games, once it over 380 in a season. So Ted was always quick to say, oh, Joe was a great hitter. But I believe in my heart that I was a better hitter than
Speaker 4 Joe, and he was.
Speaker 3 What about their personalities and their public personas?
Speaker 2 Each is surrounded by a little bit of mystery because Ted wasn’t always forthcoming with the press and he had his battles and he stood on principle, at least in his own mind, and and that often brought criticism.
Speaker 1 DiMaggio could be brooding.
Speaker 2 And there was the mystique connected to Marilyn Monroe and his
Speaker 4 ongoing
Speaker 2 devotion to her
Speaker 4 even after her death. There’s a lot of a lot of mystery,
Speaker 2 a lot of mystique
Speaker 4 attached to each of them
Speaker 3 in some ways, and they’ll leave them alone. I don’t know if you’ve read the Ben Bradlee, but I have ever kid. The feeling that you get is like, OK, was sort of like the better word asshole. But he was admittedly an asshole. There was no guile about him. He wasn’t trying to protect the fact or hide the fact that Joe had this public image.
Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 Joe was the keeper
Speaker 2 of his own flame, the curator of his own image. He insisted that he always be introduced in his later years as the greatest living ballplayer because in 1969, the one 100th anniversary of professional baseball, they elected an all time team, an all time living team. They named the greatest ballplayer of all time. And it was Ruth. And they named DiMaggio as the greatest living player.
Speaker 1 Debatable even then. I mean, Willie Mays was alive and still playing, but
Speaker 2 so Joe insisted upon that,
Speaker 1 whereas Ted didn’t care where the chips fell and in the end they fell on his side of the table. I think people really came around
Speaker 2 to Ted Williams in the
Speaker 4 end
Speaker 1 because there was a generosity of spirit about him. It was good for him that he opened
Speaker 4 up a bit more
Speaker 2 on television and in the press and in public appearances in the latter stages of his life.
Speaker 1 And what he did could not be questioned. It’s there in
Speaker 4 black and white and
Speaker 1 what started to come out. And he never wanted attention
Speaker 2 for this, but it was his devotion to charitable causes,
Speaker 1 how kind he
Speaker 2 was to the clubhouse kids, how generous he was.
Speaker 1 There was something very genuine
Speaker 2 about Ted Williams flaws
Speaker 4 and all.
Speaker 1 And I think in the end, people got it.
Speaker 2 The body of evidence was in his favor.
Speaker 3 We haven’t talked about the years he lost to the war.
Speaker 4 Yeah, you’re
Speaker 3 doing more to was one thing. He is very much a different thing. There’s the impact, first of all, on the baseball career.
Speaker 2 This is the remarkable thing about Ted Williams and lots of great ballplayers of his era,
Speaker 1 including
Speaker 2 DiMaggio and Musial and Feller and Hank Greenberg, they went
Speaker 1 off to war, but he went twice and lost the better part of five seasons to that. So even if you grant him stuff beneath his career averages, he hits about 700 home runs. And since he was in the prime of his career, his lifetime batting average would have been even higher because he would have been at his peak, his slugging percentage would have been even higher. And as it is, it’s mind boggling. So I think that people appreciate the fact that his numbers alone put him in the top echelon and that those numbers were diminished by his devotion to country.
Speaker 3 So how did he feel about serving in Korea and what does that tell us?
Speaker 2 I discussed that with him at some length.
Speaker 1 He had zero regret he never brought
Speaker 2 up well, if I hadn’t missed that season, I might have hit 400 again or I might have hit 700.
Speaker 1 Never, never. So I don’t regret
Speaker 4 one bit of it. I’m glad I did what I did.
Speaker 1 The only time he ever spoke with me about combat and he had to land a plane on an aircraft carrier
Speaker 2 and it came in on its belly about to burst into flames,
Speaker 4 and
Speaker 2 I asked him how he felt. I mean, his life was in danger.
Speaker 1 And in that John Wayne fashion says, you know, I was just so angry with myself because I could have done it better. And maybe if I died, it would have been because I made a mistake.
Speaker 3 Pretty good. How did you feel you didn’t talk to him? I mean, you know, everybody went to Korea. You know, it seemed like he he wanted to get in here with that. Yeah. OK. All right. It seemed from reading the Bradley book anyway. Yeah, the Marines, you know, they still wanted him to promote it, but he didn’t think he was actually going to get called back in. And then when he was called back up, sort of, you know, angry about it, but you never know.
Speaker 1 He might have been angry about it at the time. But in his later years, he never
Speaker 2 expressed regret
Speaker 4 about it. He was patriotic.
Speaker 2 He was relatively conservative, conservative in in one sense. But actually, when it came to certain things, because there was a heart there, there was a humanity there.
Speaker 1 He was
Speaker 2 a guy who stumped for the inclusion of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson
Speaker 4 in the Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2 Ironically, the Red Sox were among not among the Red Sox were the last team to integrate just a year before Ted retired Poncy Green in 1959. But Ted was always effusive in his praise of the Negro League players who had faced of the black players who came in to baseball in the second half of his career, he wanted the Hall of Fame to acknowledge the Negro League players. So in that sense, at least in the context of his time, Ted was kind of progressive.
Speaker 1 But in a
Speaker 2 general sense, I think he was a conservative guy
Speaker 4 and
Speaker 2 his service to country was a point of pride. And although he would never say it is more than smart enough to realize that in the big picture, those two hitches in the service actually enhanced the romance and mystique and appreciation around him,
Speaker 1 more so than the additional numbers
Speaker 4 would have,
Speaker 2 because you’ve always got the What-If aspect.
Speaker 4 Hmm, that’s interesting, um, you know,
Speaker 2 I’d say something else that I don’t know where this fits in. One word, and there are many but one
Speaker 4 word
Speaker 1 that you could always attach to Williams competence. He was extraordinarily competent at almost everything he put his mind to. It wasn’t just hitting those who know this.
Speaker 2 Curt Gowdy always said it. Bob Knight has told me this, that Ted was the best fly fisherman they’d ever been
Speaker 1 around because it was a passion. And he didn’t just go out and do it. He wanted to get better at it and he was great at it. And he wasn’t just a guy who was in the service. He was a first rate fighter pilot. Other other pilots said, you know, forget that he was Ted Williams, he was Ted Smith. He would have been among the best competent John Glenn. Yeah, John John
Speaker 2 Glenn also testified to the same.
Speaker 3 So circling back, you mentioned the Negro Leagues. Do you think that that the empathy or compassion he showed there had to do with the fact that his mother was Mexican
Speaker 2 and that was a part of his upbringing? You know, I’d just be guessing. I’d just be speculating. I think that Ted was a rugged individualist
Speaker 1 and he believed in something that’s really when you think about it, completely American judge a person on their own merits.
Speaker 2 And for all of its flaws, sports, baseball
Speaker 1 is a meritocracy. How could you look at Satchel Paige? How could you consider Josh Gibson? How could you consider all the guys who never got a chance or got a chance to late and say anything other than this was wrong? This on their own merits? How could you look at Jackie Robinson and say he doesn’t belong here? So I think this that fit right in with how Ted viewed the world. Prove yourself. I got to prove myself. This guy deserves a chance to prove himself. And when he does, he deserves no less praise and appreciation than I do right now.
Speaker 3 All right, Ted and the Red Sox, for so many years, they were a good team, but, yeah, never a great team. And then you had the Yankees. Yeah. Year after year after year. And how does Ted fit in, as you know, Babe Ruth. Yeah, the Yankees. And they’re always winning Ted Williams. He’s great, but they’re always not winning.
Speaker 4 Well, Ted played in
Speaker 2 only one World Series,
Speaker 1 1946. Neither he nor Stan
Speaker 2 Musial, who is his rough equivalent in the National League,
Speaker 1 neither he nor Musial had
Speaker 2 a good series, but the Cardinals won a close seven game series and then the Red Sox lost the 1949 pennant. They had a one game lead that went to Yankee Stadium for two games the last weekend of the year, and they lost them both and the pennant slipped away. So in that sense, there’s something missing.
Speaker 1 Maybe he doesn’t have
Speaker 2 the World Series resume of of Ruth or of DiMaggio, his closest rival.
Speaker 1 But I think in a way, it also adds to the mystique in that most of America never really saw Ted Williams play.
Speaker 2 There’s not television during the first half or so of his career, at least for most Americans. Then maybe you see him in a black and white shot and the all star game, maybe.
Speaker 1 So that distance adds to romance.
Speaker 3 And there’s a romance about the Red Sox, too. Sure. Can you talk about the Red Sox and always losing?
Speaker 2 You know, I think this idea of the Curse of the Bambino hadn’t really set in until after Ted retired, the Red Sox obviously were a dominant team in the American League at the turn of the century and through the late teen years, and then some fallow years followed. But they were a good team in the 40s with Ted.
Speaker 1 But the stretch
Speaker 2 of losing hadn’t gone on long enough
Speaker 1 and they hadn’t had
Speaker 2 the near misses that they would subsequently have. You know, that starts with seven games against the Cardinals in 1967 and seven games and heartbreak against the Reds in 75 and 86 against the Mets. That’s when this whole, you know, veil of tears comes into play.
Speaker 3 I guess that’s true. But it does seem like Ted’s inability to, you know, to win the big one and that gets a step in the right games. And most importantly, he had only whatever it is.
Speaker 4 That’s when
Speaker 1 people
Speaker 2 paired DiMaggio and Williams the greatest success of DiMaggio’s teams, which, of course, has as much to do with what’s around you as the star player himself. But the greater success of DiMaggio’s teams ways in his favor, at least to some people, it’s simplistic, but it weighs in his favor.
Speaker 3 Do you think or or do you think there was any merit to the idea that he couldn’t hit in the clutch or he couldn’t win the big one?
Speaker 4 I don’t think Ted believed that
Speaker 2 the sample size was too small.
Speaker 1 In 1962, Willie Mays
Speaker 2 and the Giants played Mantle and the Yankees in a seven game
Speaker 1 World Series, and neither one of them did much. Did anybody really think they weren’t the two best players in their respective leagues? Because in seven games against first great pitching, they didn’t do that much? What the heck? Hank Aaron had a better World Series
Speaker 2 record than
Speaker 1 Willie Mays. There’s still the two best players of their generation.
Speaker 2 I think now we just get more and more obsessed with any scrap of evidence and we try to attach greater
Speaker 1 meaning to it. It it’d be one thing if you had a huge sample size, huge.
Speaker 2 But in Ted’s case, you don’t agree.
Speaker 3 So here it is, the final at bat. Can you? You know, I’m not going to say you got to be Updyke, but can you talk us through the day?
Speaker 1 First thing that strikes you when you learn about it is that there were only about 10000 people there, either way, you
Speaker 2 had to figure, though, they had three games left at Yankee Stadium, which he had already decided he wasn’t going to play. And even before he hit the home run
Speaker 1 was at least his last home game. This would have happened today. They’d be selling
Speaker 2 tickets, you know, on on the secondary
Speaker 1 market for thousands of dollars. There are only about 20000
Speaker 2 people and change at Yankee Stadium the day that Roger Maris hit 61. It’s just a different world. So it’s a
Speaker 1 dark, dank day, a relatively small crowd. He gets a
Speaker 2 walk in one of his at bats and he hits too long fly balls. The ball wasn’t carrying. The air was heavy.
Speaker 1 It’s too long fly
Speaker 2 balls before he comes up for the last time against Jack Fisher of the Orioles
Speaker 1 and Fisher through hard. And Ted told
Speaker 2 me and probably told others
Speaker 1 that he fouled a pitch back
Speaker 2 just before the home
Speaker 4 run and
Speaker 2 to the last
Speaker 1 thinking thinking man’s hitter. He said I could see it going through his mind. The old man can’t
Speaker 2 get around on my fastball.
Speaker 1 So I know. Sure. As I’m standing here up.
Speaker 3 Thank think I’ll do it again.
Speaker 2 You get used to this stuff and these.
Speaker 3 I was at the game,
Speaker 4 get out of town pretty
Speaker 2 good. Well, you’re from Boston, you could have been at the game.
Speaker 1 Easy to get tickets for freshman
Speaker 5 in college at Boston
Speaker 3 University. You got this one? I walked in. I couldn’t afford a ticket.
Speaker 2 I think you probably could have gotten in for a buck.
Speaker 5 I saw the fly ball, but he missed like was the sixth inning. And then I saw the home run. And I was I was sitting there thinking, wow, we Constancia was chilling. I mean, you go
Speaker 4 into the bullpen.
Speaker 5 It was it was a dark age.
Speaker 4 Yeah.
Speaker 5 But, uh, and everybody knew this was it. Yeah. Right around the bases. And here we go. Yeah. Right. And those are the cleats he wore on that.
Speaker 4 That’s fantastic. Amazing.
Speaker 2 All right. Here we go to do it again.
Speaker 4 OK. It’s a dark, dank day at Fenway Park, and when you check it,
Speaker 1 there’s only about 10000 people there. It’s Ted Williams last home
Speaker 2 game for sure. He bypassed the last three games at Yankee Stadium. But people know it’s his last game at Fenway Park.
Speaker 1 If you had an occasion like that today, they’d be selling tickets on the secondary market for thousands and thousands of dollars. You could have walked right up and bought a ticket right at game time. Ted walks
Speaker 2 in one of his at
Speaker 1 bats and he gets to very long fly balls
Speaker 2 before he hits the home run. But the ball wasn’t carrying well that day or one or both of those might have been out as well. And in his last at bat against Jack
Speaker 1 Fisher, hard throwing Auriel right hander, he’s told the story of how he
Speaker 2 fouled one back just before the home run fastball. And he said,
Speaker 1 thinking to the last I can see it going through his mind. The old man can’t get around on the fastball. So sure as I’m standing here, I know that fastballs coming again and this time I’m going to be ready for it. He thinks he can throw it by me, but he can’t. I was just late.
Speaker 4 He can’t. We saw what happened and
Speaker 1 there’s always subplots as he rounds second base and has for third. The young Auriel third baseman is Brooks Robinson. He’s going to cross the path of another Hall of Famer, a future Hall of Famer.
Speaker 2 And Robinson told me once that I sort of looked down because players weren’t as demonstrative, that I looked down and I kind of tugged at my cap like a salute.
Speaker 3 That’s great. Yeah, and and so as he’s rounding the bases, is he thinking I think maybe
Speaker 1 Ted said
Speaker 2 that as he was rounding the bases somewhere between first and second or just as he turned second, the thought goes through his mind,
Speaker 4 I need to tip my cap.
Speaker 1 And he almost kind of flinched, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. Now I wish I had, but then I just couldn’t it wouldn’t have been me. And, you know, after he went into the dugout,
Speaker 4 the
Speaker 2 fans, all 10000 of them, the game didn’t mean a damn thing. So they’re all just
Speaker 1 standing
Speaker 2 and cheering for a long time and beseeching him to come out of the dugout and acknowledge them. But his Updyke so beautifully put it in his essay, Gods don’t answer fan letters.
Speaker 3 I think it’s just gods don’t answer letters.
Speaker 4 Oh, really? OK, we’ll do it again. I’m working from memory here.
Speaker 3 I mean, come on.
Speaker 2 But as Updyke put it so perfectly in his essay, Gods don’t answer letters.
Speaker 3 All right, Michael, you want to first some housekeeping, if you just tell us throughout his career, he never tipped his cap. Baseball, that was the big thing, right? Yeah. I was actually going to go back once you say that, and it’s like, where did that come from? Was that always the case or did that was that a change?
Speaker 2 I can’t say this with certainty, but there’s no footage or picture or account of Ted ever tipping his cap, everything wasn’t as well documented then as it is now. But I would imagine that that just became a matter as a matter of stubborn pride for him.
Speaker 4 I’ve never done it before
Speaker 2 and I’m going to stay consistent and therefore in my own mind, true to myself
Speaker 4 and not do it at the end.
Speaker 3 He actually did tip his cap in 39 40, and when the press sort of turned on him, he said, hell yeah, I do it.
Speaker 2 At the beginning of his career, Ted might have occasionally tipped his cap
Speaker 4 and
Speaker 1 I think for
Speaker 2 whatever reason, he wasn’t distinguishing between the fans and the press. And once the press got on him, he had a kind of me against them attitude about it. And as a point of pride, stubborn pride, he stopped and he was never going to reverse himself.
Speaker 1 But he shouldn’t have been thinking at that about it that way.
Speaker 2 He wasn’t tipping his cap to the press box. He’d be tipping his cap to the fans and they’re appreciative. Applause.
Speaker 3 But what about his relationship with the fans? He didn’t spit at the press box.
Speaker 4 Yeah. When I talked to him about
Speaker 2 spitting in the direction of the fans
Speaker 1 and maybe he conflated
Speaker 2 them because he thought the fans were in part taking
Speaker 1 their cue from bad press,
Speaker 2 and no matter how extraordinary his performances were, it was never enough. There was always something wrong, always something lacking, always a scab
Speaker 1 to pick
Speaker 4 at.
Speaker 1 He he said, I shouldn’t have done that, but he didn’t, like, fall all over himself apologizing. Wasn’t like he was losing sleep over it. I think he his view was that was who I was in that moment. If I could go back and change it maybe. But it was what it was. Here I am
Speaker 4 warts and all great.
Speaker 3 You everything that I did that correct. So famously said all he wanted was to be able to walk down the street and people would say that was the greatest hero. Mm hmm. Can you tell us that again? And do you think he was just. Oh, very good. Oh, yes. It’s loud. I think it’s
Speaker 2 depressing. Are we good, sir?
Speaker 4 All right. Do you want power again?
Speaker 2 After a while, I still pretend to shine.
Speaker 5 Right, just there. Yeah.
Speaker 2 Just stay on top of that.
Speaker 3 Yeah, I. Trump finished his after school. That’s right.
Speaker 4 Nick, what time is it.
Speaker 3 I never hear five. Three.
Speaker 4 I sleep. I don’t even. I don’t
Speaker 2 even care. We’ll just. We’ll finish this. We’ll wrap
Speaker 1 it up. No, no, no. We’ll go a long way to go. Which is more important
Speaker 2 than whether I’m half an hour late for that guy. I was an hour late for you guys. You average it out.
Speaker 1 I’m forty five minutes late and I’ve actually improved my average. Yeah, I’ve improved my average.
Speaker 3 He’s worth. No, no. Yeah. Well it’s. Yeah. OK, thank you.
Speaker 1 I hope he picks up the tab even
Speaker 3 if he doesn’t. Uh he said his ambition to walk down the. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 Here’s the strong and I think persuasive case you can make for Williams as the greatest hitter of all time,
Speaker 4 he and Ruth are at the
Speaker 2 top of the chart when it comes to slugging percentage on base percentage ops, which is now the Holy Grail.
Speaker 4 Even before that came into
Speaker 2 common usage, they were the
Speaker 1 guys.
Speaker 2 Williams’ career goes from 1939 to 1960. So it encompasses a lot of the changes in baseball integration, maybe not fully, especially in the American League. But still there were some black and Hispanic players,
Speaker 1 the early advent of
Speaker 2 relief, pitching some of the changes
Speaker 1 in
Speaker 2 how the game is taught,
Speaker 1 travel, better
Speaker 2 equipment, fielders,
Speaker 1 gloves, that kind of stuff. He goes from one era to the next
Speaker 2 and he excels even at the back end. Even in his late
Speaker 1 in his early 40s, he’s still hitting over 300. The combination of batting average power on
Speaker 2 base percentage seldom striking
Speaker 1 out nobody. With all due respect to Hank Aaron and
Speaker 2 Willie Mays, who may have been greater all round players were greater all round players. Nobody before the steroid era approaches those numbers. And it’s only guys who were juiced. And those numbers don’t count. Barry Bonds in 2001 doesn’t count as just as freakish nonsense. If he was that good, why didn’t he do it before then?
Speaker 3 Well, that’s a different thing, but he’s he’s I wouldn’t this betting like any better the on base percentage still strikes me as like. But that’s crazy. Yeah, it’s not steroids that doesn’t give you a better batting. It is off topic. Yeah.
Speaker 2 I actually actually actually actually steroids can improve your batting average because you have it, but
Speaker 3 right now you’re on base percentage. Well you’re on base.
Speaker 1 Well actually because if you can wait longer,
Speaker 4 if you can wait longer and that
Speaker 2 that then you’re not going to swing it. You’re not going to commit yourself to a pitch.
Speaker 1 Yeah, it has an effect on everything,
Speaker 4 you
Speaker 2 know, fast twitch, muscle fiber, everything.
Speaker 1 That’s why you hit 360
Speaker 2 when he was a 290 lifetime hitter. In addition to all OMERS,
Speaker 1 people think that it’s only a ball.
Speaker 2 It would have died on the warning track. And now it’s ten rows deep. It’s only strength. But if that was the case,
Speaker 1 then Olympic athletes, the only Olympic athletes who
Speaker 2 use steroids, would be like shot putters and weightlifters. WADA track stars use it, you know, but that’s that’s all that’s off topic.
Speaker 1 Maybe I can do this
Speaker 2 a little more concisely. Let me see if I can do this here. Here’s the strong case to make for Ted Williams and I think a persuasive case,
Speaker 1 the combination of batting average and
Speaker 2 power and on base percentage ops, as we call it now,
Speaker 1 the only
Speaker 2 non steroid player, even if some of these statistical comparisons have to be adjusted a little bit for
Speaker 1 changes in era. But the only non steroid player who combines
Speaker 2 those things
Speaker 1 to a greater extent than Williams and then barely so is Babe Ruth
Speaker 4 or
Speaker 1 so. And when you consider the fact that Williams career goes from 1939 to the beginning of a modern era
Speaker 2 in baseball to 1960 and encompasses some of the changes in the game,
Speaker 4 I go with Ted.
Speaker 3 Did he care about Fielding?
Speaker 1 I don’t think he cared about
Speaker 2 any aspect of the game nearly as much as he cared about hitting. I don’t think he was a terrible left fielder. He was just serviceable, you know,
Speaker 4 yeah, showed you how to play left field at Fenway Park. He was just OK.
Speaker 3 Is it true that he would practice is lean he in the field?
Speaker 4 Yeah, I’ve heard that.
Speaker 2 I wasn’t there to witness it. I saw him play once when I was seven years old at Yankee Stadium. But I don’t think that my baseball acumen was that great at that point. It was just like, wow, there’s Ted Williams, there’s Mickey Mantle.
Speaker 3 And maybe, you know,
Speaker 2 I got something from the earlier
Speaker 4 thing that might be useful to you. OK. In 1941,
Speaker 2 baseball is unquestionably the national pastime. In fact, the biggest sports in 1941, somewhat or other, definitely baseball’s number one
Speaker 1 boxing, horse racing, college football. There’s there’s your top four. But baseball is definitely at the top. And yet there’s a romance that comes with just reading about it in the newspaper. Or maybe it’s the beginnings of baseball
Speaker 2 on
Speaker 1 the radio when DiMaggio’s hitting in game after game. People are waiting for the morning paper there in Portland where there’s no big league baseball at all. They’re going, hey, did Joe get another hit? There’s a movie called Farewell My Lovely that stars Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe. And part of the subtext to the movie is Marlowe, as he’s trying to crack the case in this film noir. Always stops by the newsstand in the morning, tosses the kid a nickel. Hell, he’s up to thirty eight, you know, and that’s how people followed it. Can Ted hit 400? There’s a buzz about it, but it’s not it’s not so easy to access.
Speaker 4 And I think
Speaker 2 that elevates it in some odd way.
Speaker 1 It’s out there in the distance. Unless you lived in Boston or you lived in New York, you can’t really see it firsthand. And even then, not that many people attend every game. So there’s that the distance adds to the mystique.
Speaker 3 That’s great. Can we afford to farewell my lovely face?
Speaker 1 The baseball, the baseball network? Did they they did a thing about
Speaker 2 about the DiMaggio streak. And I made the same reference. They they
Speaker 4 got the clip
Speaker 3 and we’ll get that clever.
Speaker 1 You know what you also need to get I mean, you may want to get and I think that that
Speaker 2 my office has told you there’s the radio interview with
Speaker 4 with
Speaker 2 Ted from like nineteen eighty eight I think it was.
Speaker 1 And that the three part
Speaker 2 later interview from the early 90s. Yes, yes,
Speaker 3 yes, yes. That’s fantastic. Michael, you had to say is is, is it important to recount the story that Al’s told me about when Ted shows up at an all star game and everyone sort of. Oh yes, 99. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1 yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 Thank you.
Speaker 2 So that ties into another story too.
Speaker 3 OK, some of that important. I was there too.
Speaker 4 Of course you were
Speaker 1 your freakin Zelig.
Speaker 3 Interestingly, Joe had died earlier that year. Yeah. So Teddy is now unquestionably even if he was before, without it being acknowledged, the greatest winning player.
Speaker 2 Well, Ted is who he is, plus that all star game, that end of the century all star game. And they’re naming the all century team and all the living members of it are on hand. It’s at
Speaker 1 Fenway Park. So it’s a virtual coronation for Ted. And the way the other players responded to him, the
Speaker 4 or that even
Speaker 1 future
Speaker 2 Hall of Famers felt being around Ted Williams.
Speaker 1 And then even though Ted at
Speaker 2 that point, no, he’s lifting the cap and he needs a little assistance getting around and everything.
Speaker 1 But the core of who he was came out because as Mark McGuire leaned over to greet him and this was
Speaker 2 before all the cynicism has set in, some of us were a little skeptical, but still it was OK at that point. And people were still in the afterglow of what happened in 98 with McGwire and Sosa. And as McGwire
Speaker 1 leans in and greets him, Williams actually has a question for him. He says, Can you smell the wood burning when you fouled one back? I mean, he wants to know. He wants to talk hitting. It’s in the middle of a big celebration. We’ve got to start the game. Let’s have a conversation. One time I. I did a radio show with Ted and Tony Gwynn. It was at Ted’s hitter’s museum in 1995.
Speaker 2 The the lockout was still going on or the strike.
Speaker 4 And Gwynn
Speaker 1 had hit three ninety four and
Speaker 2 the season was suspended.
Speaker 1 So that’s as close as anyone has come since
Speaker 2 1941 is one of the all time great hitters, eight time batting titles.
Speaker 1 And as they talked, hitting
Speaker 2 with me just as the intermediary and basically I let them just talk to them, to each other.
Speaker 1 Williams would ask Gwen a question. And here’s Toni freakin Gwen. All right. And he would have the look on his face like the kid in the back of the room who gets called upon and hopes that he has the answer and won’t get scolded by the teacher. So Ted would say, all right, you got two strikes on this situation. That’s what do you want to do? And Gwen, pause for a minute and then in that high pitched voice, well, I’m trying to hit the ball back up the
Speaker 4 middle and
Speaker 1 then he looks and Ted waits for a second. And that’s right for you, but not for me. But that’s the right answer. And the Gwen, like, heaves a sigh of relief. Jeez, you’re not still on probation. You’re Tony Gwynn. But that’s the way people felt about Ted Williams, especially other ballplayers. I mean, he he was the A. And they wanted to get the answer right, they wanted his approval.
Speaker 3 That’s great. So I first saw the ninety thing. You can hear him saying that to to Maguire.
Speaker 4 Yeah.
Speaker 3 Radio show in 88. He talked to you about that? Yes. So that was something he and nobody else had ever come to. My understanding, nobody else had ever smelled that before.
Speaker 1 But again, he would never embroider his own image if he didn’t think it was true. So one time I asked
Speaker 2 him, you know, they said that your eyesight was so good you could read the label on a spinning phonograph record or you could I.D. a license plate from two blocks down the street while it was speeding away. I know that’s not true. I was sure I had good eyesight 2010 when they checked it when I was in the military. Twenty, ten.
Speaker 1 Now, that’s good. And it helped me a lot. But could I read a license plate? No, that’s bull.
Speaker 3 You are Dana
Speaker 1 Carvey. I’m closer to Dana Carvey than Ted Williams or John Wayne.
Speaker 3 That’s great. So. All right. Is there anything to be said about the ad? I realize we’re in your overtime and Rido and you can consider us in overtime as well. So whatever you need
Speaker 2 to raise, I’m charging a thirty dollars extra like the driver
Speaker 3 I the drive. I’m going to get the money from him. The is there anything we can say about the irony of it being Ted Williams, who is the man who is potentially frozen as an immortal, you know that that he would be the one in a cryogenic container?
Speaker 2 I’m not a scientist, I’m not a futurist. I’m just skeptical.
Speaker 1 I just don’t really think that in the year twenty, eighty one or twenty forty one, if we like
Speaker 2 symmetry,
Speaker 4 that they’re going
Speaker 2 to attach Ted’s
Speaker 1 head to somebody else’s young athletic body and that all of Ted’s hitting knowledge will be transported from head to toe and all of a sudden a new century’s Ted Williams will appear. If it happens, I hope I’m around to see it, but
Speaker 4 I’m not counting on it.
Speaker 3 OK, great. I’m just going through and picking off the stuff he’s in the same way that he was so generous about DiMaggio. He’s very generous about modern players. Yes. Madingley Boggs in a way which I find somewhat surprising given his, again, that persona of.
Speaker 2 Yeah, this is one of the things I was always
Speaker 4 struck by about Ted
Speaker 2 Williams, how generous he was toward other players, contemporaries,
Speaker 1 modern players. He wasn’t sparing with his praise. He was a fugitive. He was a fan. And he never felt like he had to in any way embroider his
Speaker 2 own achievements or his own
Speaker 1 image. He was satisfied with what he had done, take it or leave it. And nothing that anyone else did could diminish that. So he wasn’t worried about his own image. And I think that that left him more open to appreciating other people and other players.
Speaker 3 The shift, I mean, now it’s you know, it’s everywhere, right, invented for him. What was his attitude towards it? Did he try and beat it?
Speaker 1 I guess he did bunt
Speaker 2 toward third base a handful of times, but
Speaker 1 basically
Speaker 4 he tried
Speaker 1 to hit the ball through the shift, through it or over it, you know, and I guess he felt and
Speaker 2 he didn’t do anything without considering it, at least on a baseball diamond.
Speaker 4 He felt that
Speaker 2 if he tried to go the opposite way too often, that in the big picture would diminishes productivity.
Speaker 5 Let’s pause with that second.
Speaker 4 Like when he said, by the time I got it. Here we go.
Speaker 2 One of the words that’s misplaced today in sports is legendary
Speaker 1 Michael Jordan is many fantastic things, unless you’re talking about him getting cut from his high school team. There’s nothing
Speaker 4 legendary about
Speaker 2 Michael Jordan because
Speaker 1 we saw it on Satchel Paige
Speaker 4 is legendary.
Speaker 1 Michael Jordan is not great as he was. Ted Williams is legendary. Joe DiMaggio is legendary. It’s very hard for modern athletes to be legendary because a legend is by definition, something that’s subject to interpretation. There’s a Rochman aspect to it. Stories are passed down. Julius Erving in the ABA, legendary Julius Erving in the NBA. Just great.
Speaker 3 Interesting. So you’re picking up on Al’s Homeric idea is is that what contributes to Ted’s largeness of image myth really?
Speaker 2 Yard distance romance
Speaker 4 are a kind of
Speaker 2 mists of memory type thing, and also the
Speaker 1 fact that great as he was, he wasn’t perfect and there were conflicts
Speaker 2 and bumps along
Speaker 1 the road. Those things add to it. There’s a texture to the story. It’s not cookie cutter.
Speaker 3 He, uh, he loved the game.
Speaker 1 Yeah.
Speaker 3 Let’s call it the center of my heart is there. When he returned from Korea. I don’t know if you know this. I can’t remember whether you asked him about it. Did you know they said, well, you know, showed up at Fenway in batting practice. Do you know that story? They brought him back. It wasn’t really going to play. And they said he went down. He’s hitting and hitting and hitting and hitting home runs. Right. And his hands started to bleed the love of the game. Can you talk about. Yeah. Love of the game.
Speaker 2 I know that to the end of his life, Ted watched a lot of baseball
Speaker 4 in Florida, watched a lot of
Speaker 2 baseball
Speaker 4 and enjoyed it, but watched it analytically,
Speaker 2 you know, had his observations
Speaker 1 and they were still kind, sharp observations when he was around 50
Speaker 2 and managing first the senators and then the Texas Rangers,
Speaker 1 he would occasionally get in the cage
Speaker 4 and
Speaker 1 rip line drives more consistently than some of his own players. And that only reinforced the or
Speaker 2 that they all had for him. You could be bound for the Hall of Fame yourself. Still, Ted Williams. I remember once Ted said to me and he probably said it in other places, too.
Speaker 4 Boy, oh, boy,
Speaker 1 if I could run like Mickey Mantle before he got hurt, I would have hit 400 every year. I didn’t get any leg hits at all. No one did me any favors. I couldn’t run. Boy Mickey, he could run while he was really something to watch. You know, I wish he hadn’t struck out so much, but he just wouldn’t listen. And because I apparently like it all star games or players
Speaker 2 didn’t fraternize as much around the batting cage as they do now. But it all star games they would.
Speaker 1 And Mickey said to me once
Speaker 4 I’d go to the all star game
Speaker 1 and I’m hitting 340, and Ted would say to me, you know, when you’re batting left hand that as opposed to right out, you shift your weight, what pitch you are looking for. And I’d be so screwed up, I’d go into a slump for two weeks. He goes, I went to the all star game hitting three thirty by August. I’m hitting three ten. So, you know, it’s not for everybody. It’s not for everybody. You know, Ted, Ted did what worked for him and was what suited his personality.
Speaker 3 But without those guys who would just, you know, see the ball hit the ball kind of guy, that
Speaker 1 there’s a bunch of them, see ball hit ball. Well, it’s it Yogi Berra, how can you think? And hit at the same time. And then Hank Aaron, one of the all time greats.
Speaker 2 And of course, he really was a thinking man’s hitter, but it’s still one of those delightful stories.
Speaker 1 He comes up to bat in the World Series. The Braves are playing the Yankees. And in this case, it’s Yogi behind the plate. And he says, hey, the trademark is supposed to face your trademarks facing away. And Hank said, I didn’t come up here to read so
Speaker 3 much like Ted would ask his, you know, his teammates, what he throw you, what kinds of questions he would ask when. Yes, he did feel like if you don’t know these answers, what are you doing?
Speaker 1 Right. He kept a mental book, if
Speaker 2 not an actual
Speaker 4 book on all the pitchers he could
Speaker 1 remember in detail.
Speaker 2 You could ask him about an at
Speaker 4 bat against Bob Feller in
Speaker 1 1942.
Speaker 2 I guess he was in the service by then, but
Speaker 4 I’ll do it again.
Speaker 1 Ted kept at least a mental book and
Speaker 2 his memory was razor sharp about all the pitchers. Now it’s commonplace for a
Speaker 1 hitter to review all of his at bats against that night’s starting pitcher or even during the course of the game. If someone comes out of the bullpen and there’s a pitching change, you can go back in and review what you know about this guy. There’s so much data. This is why Ted was so far ahead that data didn’t exist and no one was feeding it to you. He was keeping his own mental inventory. And you could talk to him decades and decades later about specific
Speaker 2 at bats against Bob Feller
Speaker 1 or Whitey Ford. And he would go pitch by pitch. Billy Crystal said to him, the first time you met him, I saw Whitey Ford strike you out in the second game of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium in 1950, whatever.
Speaker 4 And Ted said Curveball low and away.
Speaker 3 That’s great. That’s really, really great. The. Circling back, you mentioned the crash landing in Korea, which was, if you could take it again, it wasn’t actually on an aircraft carrier, it wasn’t know if he was just returning to base.
Speaker 4 You know,
Speaker 1 I thought I thought he said it was on an aircraft carrier.
Speaker 3 May have also had something on an aircraft
Speaker 4 carrier,
Speaker 1 went on the radio. He told
Speaker 2 me it was on an aircraft
Speaker 4 carrier. Definitely.
Speaker 2 And maybe, I don’t know, maybe those two separate incidents. But he
Speaker 1 he said that it came in on its
Speaker 4 belly and and and it it did
Speaker 2 burst into flames.
Speaker 4 Maybe not blow the whole thing up, but it did catch on fire right after he jumped out.
Speaker 1 That’s what he definitely told me. And I don’t think I don’t think he would A, falsely recollect or B, knowingly lie.
Speaker 3 Certainly not. So.
Speaker 1 All right. Do you want to just skip over it or
Speaker 2 I can rephrase it here. How about this?
Speaker 4 Let’s let’s do this. At the time,
Speaker 2 Ted would not have been human if he didn’t have some misgivings or maybe even resentment that he gets called back for a second tour of duty. You know, given a lot of himself in World War Two and now here’s Korea and he’s still in the prime chunk of his career. But I think he was so honestly patriotic that in retrospect, he felt good about what he had done and the service he had rendered. And I think he was also smart enough to know it
Speaker 1 actually didn’t hurt
Speaker 2 his baseball resume because that what might have been aspect is part of the fun, the speculation. If he had just had those seasons and it hit 700 career home runs, then what would there be to speculate about?
Speaker 1 It actually elevates him that for all he accomplished, he was denied accomplishing even more. It elevates him. And the only thing he ever said to me
Speaker 2 about his service was
Speaker 1 that there was one rocky landing.
Speaker 2 He’s a fighter pilot. It’s a rocky landing. And the plane has to come in on its belly and his life is in peril. He’s the only person in the plane. His life is in peril.
Speaker 1 And after he jumps out of the plane, part of the plane burst into flames. And so I
Speaker 2 said, were you frightened? Did you think your life was on the line? Yeah, I guess so. But mostly I was just mad at myself
Speaker 1 because it was my mistake. And if I was killed, it might have been my fault. I could have done better. That’s what I thought. I said, damn, I could have done better than that.
Speaker 3 It’s really good. All right. Maybe we can bring this back in the Joe versus Ted Yeah. Thing to come up for a second about class. The people that Ted hung out with were comfortable with.
Speaker 4 We’re not. No.
Speaker 3 So you know where I was going for that. What can you say about Ted and the kinds of people he like to be with?
Speaker 2 There was no pretense that I’m aware of about Ted Williams. That wasn’t one ounce of social climbing in Ted Williams. He was a glamorous figure because of just the way
Speaker 1 he looked, the way he played, what he accomplished, the
Speaker 2 legend attached to him. But he wasn’t seeking out glamour. One of his closest friends was the clubhouse guy, Johnny Orlando.
Speaker 1 And in later life, although he did relate to other people
Speaker 2 in sports, Bob Knight was a close friend of his
Speaker 4 and among others.
Speaker 1 I think you just had to pass
Speaker 2 muster with him as a person and that’s how he made his decisions. You might be someone of some fame
Speaker 4 and and notoriety or you might not.
Speaker 2 But the first part was not the point of entry. It was how he felt about you.
Speaker 3 Right. Thank you. The Jimmy Fund, another sort of surprising aspect. Yeah, he didn’t even want, you know, he went and saw kids
Speaker 4 the day I did the final home run.
Speaker 3 Why didn’t he want people to know about that?
Speaker 2 Ted didn’t suffer phonies, and I think that in his mind, if you sought credit for something that you just did because it was the right thing to do, then
Speaker 4 that diminished it. That made you phony. He did whatever he did, his
Speaker 2 generosity to clubhouse guys visiting kids in the hospital, raising money for the Jimmy Fund, giving his time to any ballplayer past a president who asked for advice. He did it because it was the right thing to do. He wasn’t looking for a round of applause.
Speaker 3 He was also really good with kids.
Speaker 4 Yeah.
Speaker 1 This is true of a lot of people who are not
Speaker 2 always comfortable with adults, but while that could be misinterpreted
Speaker 1 so as the present world. So let’s go back.
Speaker 2 I don’t think you have to be Sigmund Freud to
Speaker 4 figure out that if you have
Speaker 1 a less than fully happy childhood,
Speaker 2 you always have an affinity for children, especially kids who are sick or having a rough time or a disadvantaged. Ted probably saw a little bit of himself
Speaker 4 in in kids like that, you
Speaker 2 know, and he also saw
Speaker 1 innocence. Kids, you don’t find many phony kids. And I think that the TED like that,
Speaker 2 the honesty of that kind of relationship
Speaker 4 and I think
Speaker 1 not an egotistical way, but in a human way, he realized that he could lift their spirits, that if he walked into the room, he could lift their spirits and he would rather have used that power of celebrity that way
Speaker 2 than the way others tend to use it.
Speaker 3 In your dealings with him, did you feel like, oh, this is just a big overgrown kid, or did you feel like a successful man who knows how to handle tough?
Speaker 2 By the time I first met him, he’s in his late 60s or early 70s,
Speaker 4 and no matter how flinty tough you are through most of your life, you’ve mellowed a little bit by then.
Speaker 2 I think he had some perspective on his life, a lot of perspective on his life and career. And he wasn’t sacrificing any principle. He wasn’t bending just to be accepted.
Speaker 4 But you evolve a little bit.
Speaker 2 And I intersected with him. I think luckily at the stage of his life, when he was still Razor-sharp, when he still had lots of energy and passion, when he still
Speaker 1 had all that that charisma and presence.
Speaker 2 But when a little bit of perspective and a little bit of mellowing had set in,
Speaker 1 he was maybe more
Speaker 2 accessible at that time of his life before the health problems diminished him a little bit,
Speaker 1 maybe more accessible,
Speaker 2 at least to people outside his inner circle than at any other time in his life.
Speaker 3 Can you speak anything about I mean, we know he cared about baseball. We know he cared about vision. You speak to us, you can ask our families, did he care? You know, Claudia. Yeah, Henry. Complicated relationships. And Bobby Jindal also. Right. Did he care? And was he unable to be good at it or.
Speaker 2 I can’t speak with any authority to things that I only have sketchy knowledge
Speaker 4 about,
Speaker 1 but in his later years,
Speaker 2 no matter how people interpret
Speaker 4 what happened with
Speaker 2 with his head post death, I, I can do more elegant job than that. I can’t speak with authority to things I have only sketchy knowledge
Speaker 4 of, but
Speaker 2 however
Speaker 1 people interpret
Speaker 2 his end of life relationship with John Henry
Speaker 4 and they’re both gone now. John Henry, having died young,
Speaker 2 in my experience, he adored the kid
Speaker 4 and he
Speaker 2 relied on him. Ted obviously didn’t have perfect marriages and perfect relationships with his kids, but I don’t have any doubt that he
Speaker 4 loved them and and
Speaker 2 that it was important to him toward the end of his life, very, very important to him.
Unidentified All right, um.
Speaker 3 How would you describe Ted Williams to someone who knew nothing about him? I mean, I unfortunately know a lot about the person who doesn’t even know baseball. Would you describe.
Speaker 2 John Wayne in a baseball uniform, we’d hope the person had a frame of reference about John Wayne, John Wayne in a baseball uniform. Perhaps the greatest hitter
Speaker 4 who ever lived and
Speaker 2 the personification
Speaker 4 of
Speaker 2 the pursuit of perfection and quality of craftsmanship that you appreciate no matter what the walk of life is, his field was baseball. He was the embodiment of the pursuit of perfection at at least one aspect of baseball hitting.
Speaker 3 What type of man who volunteers for a pay cut after winning a batting title?
Speaker 4 It’s almost unthinkable now
Speaker 2 when guys go to arbitration after hitting 247 and they get a raise of millions of dollars,
Speaker 1 but Ted was
Speaker 2 embarrassed that for the one and only time in his career in 1959 and hobbled by injuries and
Speaker 1 age, he had hit under 300. So I’ll come back for another year, but I don’t deserve. Forget about a raise. I don’t deserve the same amount I used to make. I need to take a cut. And he didn’t do that to make any statement that aligned with his view of the world. I’m accountable. I don’t want anything that I didn’t earn and I didn’t earn that.
Speaker 3 Right. Um, so you touched on it managing. Was he a good manager? What did he do? Well, did he care about all aspects?
Speaker 1 As I remember, he was manager of the
Speaker 4 year one time,
Speaker 2 and usually the manager of the year is someone who has taken a woeful team and improved it rather than someone who’s taken an excellent team and won the pennant with it.
Speaker 1 So he was part of a turnaround, but I think he lost
Speaker 2 patience with it after a while. And my guess would be
Speaker 1 that when he couldn’t actively do when he won, he could guide and perhaps put the chess pieces in place, but he couldn’t take it from there. I think that probably wore
Speaker 4 on him a little bit.
Speaker 1 And he was still relatively young and filled with energy and he couldn’t just get out there and be part of it.
Speaker 2 I think that was frustrating for him.
Speaker 1 But I think he was able to teach or at least make good observations about pitching, not just hitting, because in order to hit as well as he did, you had
Speaker 2 to understand pitching to a certain extent
Speaker 3 in that.
Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. I’ll do it again. Phone stops off that phone. Here we go. Now we’re going to we’re almost
Speaker 2 we’re almost done anyway.
Speaker 4 We’re almost done anyway. Here we go. All right. Here we go.
Speaker 1 Ted one, the manager of the year award
Speaker 2 one season, usually that award goes to someone who’s taken a mediocre or lousy team and improved upon it rather than someone who’s taken a good team and won the pennant. So that was the case. The senators and the Rangers weren’t very good.
Speaker 1 So he helped them improve. And I think his presence, his mere presence probably
Speaker 2 elevated the team’s confidence. But I also think he’s only in his early 50s then he’s still young and he has lots of energy. And it was frustrating for him
Speaker 1 that he couldn’t take a more active
Speaker 4 hand,
Speaker 2 probably wanted to get out there and affect the outcome more directly. And that might have that might have frustrated him.
Speaker 3 All right, um, ALS or anything?
Speaker 5 Well, I have one question that’s not very important then.
Speaker 1 But then let’s skip it.
Speaker 5 Well, but it’s something that I want to read and I want to know whether you heard it when Williams used to be compared to the Monchaux that was. And Williams once said, look, there was too much. She was the one. I looked at the paper the next day. I looked at what Musial did with music. Did you ever hear that?
Speaker 4 I never heard that specifically. But I can
Speaker 2 fashion something here. It’s natural that Ted would be continually compared to DiMaggio, Boston, New York, Red Sox, Yankees, not only in the same league, it’s just one league. No divisions are playing each other 22 times a year.
Speaker 1 But perhaps the closer equivalent is Musial,
Speaker 4 both left handed hitters, their
Speaker 2 almost exact contemporaries. Ted hit 344 Lifetime. Stan hit three
Speaker 4 thirty one lifetime.
Speaker 2 They each saw their lifetime averages diminished a bit as they played on still excellent,
Speaker 4 but not quite at their peaks.
Speaker 1 So they stand. Might have been a
Speaker 2 closer equivalent as a
Speaker 4 hitter to to Ted.
Speaker 2 But there’s no question that DiMaggio was the greater all round ballplayer and Ted himself conceded that
Speaker 4 well, while
Speaker 2 also stating, not immodestly, but stating that he was the better hitter of the two. And both both those are are fair assessments. There’s an endearing story
Speaker 4 about
Speaker 2 Ted and Dom DiMaggio, Joe’s brother, who is the center fielder for the Red Sox. And when DiMaggio was in the midst of his hitting streak,
Speaker 1 Ted would get the word
Speaker 2 from the guy in the scoreboard at the base of the green monster. And so he’d
Speaker 1 yell over whistle or yell over dummy, dummy. He got another one. Forty three. So that’s how and that and that age,
Speaker 2 that’s how Dom got
Speaker 4 updated.
Speaker 3 All right. That’s great. The he never wanted to diminish what any other ballplayer was doing. No. In part I think this was only a radio show, maybe not later because he had seen old ballplayers records. Wanted to be I. Yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 1 There were a lot
Speaker 4 of old time
Speaker 2 ballplayers who were very skeptical,
Speaker 4 even resentful about modern
Speaker 2 players,
Speaker 1 Rogers Hornsby, who had
Speaker 2 the third highest lifetime batting average after
Speaker 4 Cobban
Speaker 2 and Joe Jackson Hornsby hit 356 lifetime.
Speaker 1 He was he was very
Speaker 2 disparaging about modern players, almost contemptuous of modern players, and probably said a thing or two that wasn’t fair about Ted Williams. But, hey, just because you’re Rogers Hornsby doesn’t mean your every utterance is sanctified.
Speaker 4 He was full of shit.
Speaker 3 I think it was that he heard Williams heard Hornsby disparaging DiMaggio and thought, I don’t want to ever do that.
Speaker 2 Yeah, I’ve heard I’ve heard that story as well. It’s said to be the last person to tell you that he was a perfect man,
Speaker 1 but he had many admirable qualities,
Speaker 4 one
Speaker 2 of which was he was not insecure, at least not about himself as a baseball
Speaker 1 player. He was not insecure. He was perfectly good with what was true. Here it is. This is true for 06, 344 lifetime. This is true. And it’s also true that I wasn’t the best left
Speaker 2 fielder who ever lived and I certainly wasn’t the best baserunner who ever lived.
Speaker 1 He was happy with it. He was happy that Willie Mays was Willie Mays. He was happy that there was a
Speaker 2 Stan Musial and Joe
Speaker 1 DiMaggio. He was happy to have known them, to have appreciated them, to competed against them. Nothing they did diminished him
Speaker 2 in his own mind. He wasn’t concerned about those comparisons.
Speaker 1 His concern was his own pursuit of excellence. And how close did I
Speaker 2 come as a hitter? The thing that concerned the most,
Speaker 1 how close did I come to what I was capable of doing? And one of the worst emotions that any human being can feel for any reason is regret would have, should have, could have, if
Speaker 2 only changed this one thing
Speaker 1 when it came to what mattered most to him hitting a baseball. He could live all those years, forty plus years
Speaker 2 post career without losing any sleep over it.
