EDITOR’S NOTE: This excerpt from “The Franchise: Boston Red Sox: A Curated History of the Sox” is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org or TriumphBooks.com/FranchiseRedSox.
Most athletes have goals, meant to propel them to unimagined heights. Usually, they use them as fuel, to push themselves when the going becomes rough.
Some aim for championships, to experience the ultimate satisfaction of being the last teams standing. Some think in more individual terms, with designs on a particular statistical achievement or All-Star recognition or a personal best performance.
A number of these are never made public, as a means of serving as private motivation.
And then there’s Ted Williams.
Williams was, in so many ways, not like anyone else. He wasn’t known for his modesty or his lack of belief in himself. He could be brash, or downright cocky, with an ego as big as all outdoors.
So, it should not shock anyone that his goals were different, too. Not for Williams was there any talk of making an All-Star team or winning a batting title.
Those ambitions would have been too pedestrian for Williams, more suitable for mere mortals.
Williams, instead, aimed higher. Much higher.
“All I want out of life is that, when I walk down the street, people will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’”
Note the “All I want” (italics mine), as though he had been hoping for a nice sunrise or a juicy steak.
Williams aimed impossibly high, as high as he could.
Damned if he didn’t succeed.
It was true a few years into his major league career, when he hit .406, the last time anyone reached the .400 milestone. And it remains true today, more than 60 years after he played his last game, more than 20 years after he passed.
In death, as he was in life, Williams remains the gold standard by which all hitters are measured. From an offensive standpoint, Williams did everything well—except run.
Moreover, he did so many things well before they were even considered important parts of a player’s profile.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that much value was placed on on-base percentage, but long before it became exploited as a market inefficiency in Moneyball, Williams finished with a career OBP of .482. Decades and decades before people got around to understanding the value of a walk, Williams, ever ahead of his time, averaged nearly a walk per game.
Launch angles? They became all the rage in the second decade of the 21st century, as if everyone conveniently forgot that Williams swung with a natural loft to his swing, driving pitches over the heads of infielders and, often, over walls, too.
And it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that, long before infield shifts became commonplace, Williams inspired the first ones, so desperate were opposing teams to keep him off base.
In other words, before we had a way to measure a hitter’s excellence, Williams was already demonstrating what it was like to be the best of the best. While others were satisfied with a “grip it and rip it” approach, Williams was turning hitting into an art form. Hell, he wrote a book on the subject and presciently called it The Science of Hitting.
The amazing thing, really, is that Williams may have undersold his ambition.
Beyond being, inarguably, the greatest hitter who ever lived, Williams was so much more. When he wasn’t on the baseball field, excelling where mere mortals failed, Williams was establishing himself as the standard-bearer in other areas.
He was an expert fly fisherman and deep-sea fisherman, elected to the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame.
In World War II and again in the Korean War, Williams proved himself an expert fighter pilot, serving as a flight instructor in World War II before fl ying 39 combat missions for the Marine Corps, earning two gold medals. No less an authority than former astronaut John Glenn, his Korean War wingman, called Williams one of the best pilots he had ever known.
It was as though Williams had grown bored becoming baseball’s best hitter and sought new horizons, new fields to conquer.
(It should be noted that Williams did not exactly go willingly into service. After first attempting to reclassify his draft status due to being his mother’s only viable means of financial support, Williams somewhat reluctantly enlisted. And he bristled that he was chosen from the inactive reserves to see combat in Korea. But he twice passed up opportunities to serve his hitch as a member of the armed services baseball team.)
In so many ways, Williams came to represent the 20th century American male archetype. Tall and handsome, accomplished at everything he tried, he was almost mythic in his achievement.
Though flawed in his personal life—he was married three times and, by his own admission, often an absent, inattentive father—his public persona was unmatched.
Williams was the embodiment of an All-American. And for the entirety of his playing career, he belonged only to the Red Sox.
From the beginning, as a 20-year-old rookie, Williams proved to be something special. Just past his teenage years, he led the American League in RBI and total bases and, in a precursor of seasons to come, intentional walks, too. Even in his first year, no one wanted to pitch to Williams if they didn’t have to. Ballplayers must earn their reputations, and that is something that can take years. But Williams had gotten the attention—and the respect—of pitchers and managers right from the start.
Throughout his career, Williams sometimes had adequate protection in the rest of the Red Sox lineup, though sometimes he did not. Whether he was surrounded by Jimmie Foxx or Joe Cronin or Bobby Doerr, or, as was sometimes the case, run-of-the-mill major leaguers, Williams still dominated.
His hitting philosophy, for all its intricacies—Williams also highlighted “heat maps” decades before the practice was commonplace—was sometimes remarkably simple.
“Get a good pitch,” Williams would counsel, “and hit it.”
That would be akin to Picasso advising aspiring painters: “Pick out a color you like and work with it.” Easier said than done.
When Williams had the benefit of Jimmie Foxx or Bobby Doerr hitting either ahead of him or behind him, he was more likely to get better pitches. But his approach didn’t change much depending on his supporting cast.
For Williams, the act of hitting was like a game of cat-and-mouse. Just as the best hitters can’t connect on every swing, Williams understood that even the best pitchers couldn’t be expected to locate every pitch with precision. When the pitcher failed to keep the ball out of the middle of the plate, that was the time for the hitter to pounce.
In essence, Williams saw each at-bat as an exercise in probability, the same way an expert card shark might regard each new hand. With every pitch thrown, the circumstances changed and so did the odds. It was Williams’ job to assess how to best mitigate against all the independent factors—the pitcher, the score, the count, the umpire—and capitalize on the best opportunity.
It is likely that no major leaguer ever spent more time thinking about hitting. While stationed in left fi eld, Williams was known to take practice swings in between pitches, like an overeager Little Leaguer counting the minutes until his next turn at bat.
When he wasn’t swinging or thinking about hitting, Williams loved to talk hitting. He frequently sought out the game’s best—he became friendly with both Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby—and would listen to their philosophies and contrast them to his own.
The notion of Williams seeking out former greats to tap into their hitting expertise would come full-circle in Teddy Ballgame’s later years.
He was less enamored with baserunning or playing defense.
To Williams, those were mere interruptions to what he wished to do most. (Had the DH existed in Williams’ day, he doubtless would have campaigned to fi ll that role, discarding the other aspects of the game as mere nuisances. And it’s scary indeed to think what he might have been able to do with the benefit of video. Imagine the game’s greatest hitter having the ability to break down his at-bats in super slow motion, evaluated in real time?)
Even now, his numbers seem cartoonishly inflated. Many baseball historians regard his 1941 season, when he was all of 22, as perhaps the best ever for a hitter. That season, Williamsled the major leagues in homers (37), runs scored (135), on-base percentage (.553), slugging percentage (.735), and intentional walks.
His OPS+—which aims to measure a player’s ability to get on base and hit for extra bases, measured against the rest of the league, and adjusted for the player’s home ballpark—was 235+, meaning he was 135 percent better than the league average for that year.
And, of course, using more traditional statistical measures, he hit .406 that season, a feat not since duplicated.
Two players came close in the span of four years. In 1977, Rod Carew hit .388 and in 1980, Kansas City’s George Brett hit .390. Both times, their pursuit of the elusive .400 milestone made national news; both times, they came up short. Neither, it should be noted, came close to matching Williams’ all-around excellence at the plate. Carew managed just 14 homers that year and, for the only time in his Hall of Fame career, knocked in 100 runs. Meanwhile, Brett benefited from playing only 117 games.
Baseball’s analytic revolution in the 21st century devalued the notion of batting average. For most, on-base percentage and slugging percentage came to serve as the best measuring sticks of a hitter. Where once winning a batting title was the ultimate achievement for a hitter, now it’s outmoded.
Still, there’s something to be said for a statistical achievement that has gone unmatched for more than 80 years and counting.
