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AN APPRECIATION
Gone
In baseball and beyond, Williams was a true American hero
By Gordon Edes, Globe Staff, 07/06/02
Williams, 83, who had suffered a series of strokes and congestive heart failure in recent years, died at 8:49 on July 5 at Citrus County Memorial Hospital in Inverness, Fla. He never fully recovered from a nine-hour heart surgery in New York in January 2001 and was particularly frail when he made his last public appearance at his Hitters Hall of
Fame Museum induction in February 2002. He served his country in two wars and was the single greatest fund-raiser for the Jimmy Fund, New England's favorite charity since
1948. The last major league baseball player to hit .400 (.406 in 1941), Williams debuted for the Red Sox as a 20-year-old rookie in 1939, and at the age of 42 on Sept. 28, 1960, he hit
a home run at Fenway Park in his final at-bat in the major leagues. In a career that touched four decades and was interrupted twice for military service, the San Diego native, who was given his lasting nickname of "The Kid’’ by Red Sox clubhouse man Johnny Orlando upon Williams’s arrival at his first spring training in Sarasota, Fla., in 1938, arguably made good on the ambition he articulated in his autobiography. "A man has to have goals -- for a day, for a lifetime -- and that was mine, to have people say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived,’’’ Williams wrote in "My Turn At Bat,’’ written with author John Underwood. Williams was a passionate student of hitting who took his bats to be weighed at the post office to be sure they had precisely the heft he desired. Williams, whose theories on his craft were published as "The Science of Hitting,’’ won six American League batting titles, including consecutive crowns at the age of 39, when he hit .388, and at 40 (.328),
making him the oldest batting champion in history. A lefthanded hitter who led the league in home runs four times, Williams is the Red Sox’ career leader in homers (521), and at the time of his retirement he ranked third in major league history, trailing only Ruth (714) and Jimmie Foxx (534), who was a teammate for a short period. Blessed with superb vision (20-10), Williams twice won the triple crown, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in during the same season. Eight times he led the league in slugging percentage, eight times in walks, and he holds the record for career on-base percentage (.483). Williams’s lifetime batting average of .344 is the highest by any major leaguer since Tris Speaker, another former Red Sox outfielder inducted into the Hall of Fame, who finished with a .345 average in 1928. Williams, dubbed The Splendid Splinter, won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award in 1946 and 1949, and in 1969, as part of baseball’s centennial celebration, he was named Hitter of the Century. He was a first-ballot inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1966. "I feel in my heart that nobody in this game ever devoted more concentration in the batter’s box than Theodore Samuel Williams,’’ he once said, referring to himself in the
third person. "A guy who practiced until the blisters bled, loved batting anyway, and always delighted in examining the art of hitting the ball.’’
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he death of Ted Williams signals the loss of the man who rivals Babe Ruth as the greatest hitter in baseball history and stands alone as the dominant sports figure of 20th-century New England — Hall of Famer, decorated Marine fighter pilot, champion of charity, oversized personality.