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Friday, August 14, 2020Culture

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We don't know if Ted Williams's mother ever taught him that lesson, but we do know that it was something he learned the hard way in his baseball career.

Dick
Flavin

Did your mother used to tell you, when you were meeting someone for the first time, to stand up straight and be polite, because first impressions last a long time?

Mine did, too. As in most things, our mothers were right.

We don't know if Ted Williams's mother ever taught him that lesson, but we do know that it was something he learned the hard way in his baseball career. When he first came up to the big leagues, he was, at best, an indifferent fielder. Hitting was his passion. He thought that playing in the field was just something he had to do between at-bats, and he didn't care who knew it. He discovered soon enough, though, that if he was going to win respect as a complete ballplayer, he had to be good at all phases of the game -- defense as well as offense. So, he worked hard on his fielding, studying angles, and learning the idiosyncrasies of Fenway Park's old left field wall. He even used to take lessons from Dom DiMaggio on how to charge ground balls to the outfield, fielding them on the run to prevent runners from taking an extra base (a technique Ted never mastered). He made himself into a good, if not great, outfielder. But, first impressions being what they were then and are now, he fought the image of being barely competent on defense for his whole career.

That's how he was thought of 70 years ago, on July 11, 1950, at the major league all-star game, played at Comiskey Park on the southside of Chicago. In the top of the first, Ralph Kiner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the second batter of the game, slammed a long drive to deep left field. Williams raced back toward the wall, reached up and grabbed it on the run a millisecond before crashing into the wall, his left elbow bearing the brunt of the impact -- but he managed to hold onto the ball for the out.

It would turn out to be the defensive play of the game. In the dugout, Casey Stengel, the manager of the American League all-stars, noticed that Ted was rubbing his elbow between pitches to the next hitter. When Williams came into the dugout after the third out, Stengel asked if he was all right. Ted's answer was, "Yes," adorned, we can imagine, with a colorful adjective or two.

1950 was the first year that the All-Star Game was nationally televised and, sore elbow or not, Williams was not about to lose out on the opportunity to hit in front of a nationwide TV audience. Batting third in the bottom of the first, he lashed a low line drive that was ticketed for right field, but Dodgers' second baseman Jackie Robinson, playing in short right as part of the "Williams shift," reached out and snagged it on one hop and threw to Stan Musial of the Cardinals at first base for the out. (There were some pretty good players in that game, huh?)

Williams remained in the game even as his elbow continued to throb and began to swell. In the third inning, he launched a long fly to left, but Kiner, returning Ted's favor, made a leaping catch to rob him of a double.

Stengel kept asking if he was all right and Ted kept insisting that he was fine, though in obvious pain. In the fifth, Ted lashed a single to right field, scoring Larry Doby of the Indians with the go-ahead run in what was then a 3-2 ballgame. (The National League came back to win in the 14th inning on a homer by Red Schoendienst.)

Still in the game in the eighth inning, Williams was called out on strikes by National League umpire Babe Pinelli. One wonders if that would have been his fate with an American League arbiter behind the plate; respect for his knowledge of the strike zone among junior league umps was such that, if Ted let a two-strike pitch go by, they assumed it was a ball. Finally, in the ninth, he was replaced in the field by his teammate, Dom DiMagggio.

On the flight back to Boston after the game, Ted confided to his seatmate, Walt Dropo, who had started at first base, that he thought his elbow might be broken. At a change of flight stopover in New York, Williams, who seldom drank in those days, headed straight to the cocktail lounge and ordered a "double scotch, bourbon -- whatever," anything to deaden the pain.

When they arrived at Boston's Logan Airport, the Boston contingent of all-stars (Williams, Dropo, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Vern Stephens) went their separate ways. The next morning, Dropo was amazed to read in the paper that Williams had, in fact, broken his elbow and was due to undergo surgery that morning. Ted had gone directly from the airport to the hospital and confirmed the worst. He'd be out for two months.

Had the injury happened to a player known for his fielding skills, Joe DiMaggio, for example, the fact that he'd been hurt while making a great catch, then showed the grit to remain in the game for eight innings, would have been an important part of his legend. That storyline did not fit into the narrative of Williams' career, though, and the all-star game injury became, unfairly or not, just a footnote in his baseball story.

In fact, the broken elbow opened him up to more criticism from his detractors. When he returned to full time duty on September 15, the Red Sox were red hot and only a game and a half out of first place. He had a home run and three singles in a Sox win on his first day back, but it only offered false hope. His timing was off and he wasn't in game shape. He had only two hits in the last two weeks of the season as the Red Sox went into a tailspin and fell out of contention. Billy Goodman, who had filled in for him in left, had a career year, hitting .354 and winning the batting title. Ted finished the year at just .317 and the Williams bashers, of whom there were more than a few, blamed him for the team's poor finish.

And it was all because he'd made such a lousy first impression in the field when he was new to the major leagues. It's too bad he didn't know your mother when he was growing up.

- Dick Flavin is a New York Times bestselling author; the Boston Red Sox "Poet Laureate" and The Pilot's recently minted Sports' columnist.