WILLIAMS, Theodore Samuel ("Ted")

(b. 30 August 1918 in San Diego, California), powerful baseball hitter who had a lifetime batting average of .344 with 521 home runs and who hit a record-setting .406 in 1941.

Williams was the second son of Sam and May Venzer Williams. His father, who claimed to have served withTheodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, named his son "Teddy," after the president. Williams changed his name to "Theodore," but from an early age everyone called him "Ted." His father, who held a series of jobs including that of photographer, was rarely around after the boy's first years. His mother worked for the Salvation Army, and Williams was always a little ashamed that his mother was out on the streets collecting money and trying to convert the homeless.

San Diego was a navy town, and as a young teenager Williams and his friends played pickup baseball games with the sailors. He also played for Herbert Hoover High School, from which he graduated in 1936. At age sixteen he was six feet, three inches tall, weighed 148 pounds, and dreamed of being a pitcher. As a high-school junior he hit .583, which effectively ended his pitching career. He had a natural, fluid, left-handed swing, although he threw with his right hand.

Shortly before Williams was eighteen in 1936, he signed a contract with the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League for $150 per month. One of his teammates was the second baseman Bobby Doerr, who later played for many years with him on the Boston Red Sox. Williams hit .271 the first year and .291 with twenty-three home runs the next. Eddie Collins of the Red Sox was impressed enough to buy Williams's contract, and he promised to pay him $3,000 the first year and $4,500 the second.

The Red Sox sent Williams to the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association in 1938, where he had a spectacular year and won the triple crown, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in (RBI), but he was less than spectacular in the field. He dropped easy fly balls, turned singles into triples, and often seemed awkward and distracted. But when he stepped into the batter's box, Williams was completely focused. He had already learned to take many pitches and to wait for a pitch he could hit. He also had learned that his power came from his hips. When he turned his hips and whipped his bat through the strike zone with a slight uppercut, he usually drove the ball with power to right field.

In his rookie season with the Red Sox in 1939, Williams played right field; the next year he switched to left, where he remained for the rest of his career. Never a great fielder, he did learn to play the wall at Boston's Fenway Park expertly. In his first game for the Red Sox he hit a double off Red Ruffing of the Yankees, one of the best pitchers in the league. He went on to hit .327 in his rookie year, with 31 home runs and 145 RBI. One of his home runs cleared the right field roof in Briggs Stadium in Detroit, the first ball ever to be hit out of the park.

Before the 1940 season the Red Sox remodeled Fenway Park to make it easier for their prize player to hit home runs. They shortened right center field to 380 feet by placing the bull pens in front of the bleachers. Some began to call this section Williamsburg. In 1940 Williams had another good year, but his relationship with the Boston sportswriters deteriorated. He had a temper, and his mood swings caused him difficulties during his entire career. But especially during his first few years he often exploded in anger, and a reporter would inevitably describe the incident in his paper. Perhaps because there were seven newspapers in Boston in the early 1940s, all competing for readership, the sportswriters exaggerated. "Ted Williams is a grown man with the mind of a juvenile," one Boston writer decided.

The last year before the United States entered World War II, 1941, was one of the greatest baseball seasons ever. It was the year Williams hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio had a fifty-six-game hit streak. Williams and DiMaggio were often compared during their careers. Probably Williams was the better hitter and DiMaggio the better all-around player. Williams was hitting .405 when the All-Star game was held at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. The American League (AL) trailed 7–5 with two men on and two out in the ninth when Williams lined a pitch into the seats in right field to win the game. He leaped around the bases and was greeted by his joyous teammates. He later called it the most thrilling home run of his career. The Yankees won the pennant, but Williams entered the final doubleheader of the season in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, hitting .3995. He would have been credited with .400, but he played both games, garnering four hits in five at bats in the first game with one home run and two for three in the second to finish at .406, the first player to finish above .400 since 1930. He had 37 home runs, 120 RBI, only 27 strikeouts, and 145 bases on balls, with an incredible on-base percentage of .551.

Williams played the 1942 season even though the United States was at war and many baseball players, including Hank Greenberg and Bob Feller, had enlisted. The Boston reporters, who thought Williams should be in the service, criticized him. He did sign up for the naval aviation program during the year and was activated after the season was over. He spent the war years training pilots in Florida and Hawaii. On 4 May 1944 Williams married Doris Soule, whom he had met in Minnesota in 1938. It was never a happy marriage and ended in a bitter divorce in 1954.

Williams, along with the other stars, returned to baseball in 1946, and he returned stronger at six feet, four inches tall and 185 pounds. He was surrounded by a supporting cast of Rudy York, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dominic DiMaggio, among others, and the Red Sox ran away with the AL pennant. At the All-Star game played in Fenway Park he went four for four including two home runs. The second home run was hit off the Pirate Rip Sewell's high-arching "eephus" pitch. On 14 July at Fenway Park, Williams hit three home runs and a double in the first game of a doubleheader against Cleveland. In the second game, Lou Boudreau, Cleveland's player-manager, unveiled his "Williams shift." The second baseman played a shallow left field, but everyone else was on the right side of the diamond daring Williams to hit or bunt to left, which he stubbornly refused to do. Chicago had used a similar shift against him in 1941, and he had defeated it by hitting to left field. Even in 1946 he occasionally hit to left field including an inside-the-park home run that clinched the pennant for the Red Sox.

The 1946 season ended in disaster when Boston lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, and Williams hit an anemic .200 with no home runs. His critics, over the years, charged that he never hit well in crucial situations, citing his World Series performance (the only series he ever played in), the single playoff game against Cleveland in 1948, and the two-game series against the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season. He hit well leading up to those crucial games, but the critics were never satisfied. They even criticized him for not being present when his daughter was born on 30 January 1948. He was fishing in Florida, his favorite activity away from the baseball field.

The fortunes of the Red Sox declined during the 1950s, but Williams continued to hit and to talk about hitting. His career was interrupted in 1952 when he was called back into the service during the Korean War. He flew thirty-nine combat missions in a jet fighter and had a narrow escape when he landed his badly damaged plane and barely escaped before it burst into flames. The Boston fans were often critical of Williams, but they greeted him warmly when he returned to the Red Sox in August 1953. He hit .407 with thirteen home runs in an abbreviated season. Even more remarkable, he hit .388 with thirty-eight home runs in 1957, the year he turned thirty-nine.

Williams finally retired in 1960. His last at bat at Fenway Park on Wednesday afternoon 28 September 1960 was immortalized by John Updike's famous New Yorker article, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Williams barely missed a home run early in the game, but on his last at bat he drove a ball beyond the bull pen in deep right center field. "Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming," Updike wrote. "He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap." Williams was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on 25 January 1966, the first year he was eligible.

He married Lee Howard in 1961, but the couple quickly divorced. Later he married Dolores Wettach, with whom he had two children, but that marriage also ended in divorce. He returned to baseball briefly to manage the Washington (D.C.) Senators in 1969, but he always was known as a hitter not a manager.

In 1939 when Williams arrived in Boston as a brash twenty-year-old rookie, he announced, "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.'" At the end of the twentieth century, Williams was one of two or three contestants for the honor. Despite losing five seasons to military service and portions of two others to injuries in nineteen seasons, he had a career average of .344, the seventh-best all time and best of the modern era, with 2,654 hits, 521 home runs, and 2,019 bases on balls with only 709 strikeouts. He hit for both average and power. He won six batting titles, led the league in home runs four times, had two triple crowns, and two Most Valuable Player awards.

But Williams's success included more than statistics. He was a presence in the batter's box and away from the field. When he took batting practice, even opposing players stopped to watch. Red Sox fans often asked, "How did Williams do?" before they asked about the team. In the batter's box he had absolute concentration. Out of the box he was sometimes out of control, but that added to his persona and made him even more prominent on the sports pages. Between 1939 and 1960 baseball would have been a different and lesser game without him.

Williams with John Underwood, My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (1969), is a casually written autobiography filled with lively stories and portraits of teammates and opponents. Williams with John Underwood, The Science of Hitting (1971), is a fascinating book that spells out Williams's theory of hitting. Michael Seidel, Ted Williams: A Baseball Life (1991), is the best biography. Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson, Red Sox Century: One Hundred Years of Red Sox Baseball (2000), is organized year by year and includes a great deal about Williams. John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," New Yorker (22 Oct. 1960), is the classic article by a leading novelist, critic, and Red Sox fan.

Allen F. Davis