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THE LAST GAME
Out with a bang
On a farewell day that was typically understated,
By Bob Duffy, Globe Staff, 07/05/02
It should have come as no surprise to the
Fenway fans when Ted Williams homered
in his last at-bat on Sept. 28, 1960. You
see, he had actually accomplished the feat
six years earlier – sort of.
In the spring of 1954, writing an article for
the Saturday Evening Post, Williams declared,
‘‘This is my last year,’’ and though few believed
him, Williams insisted he was serious.
On Sept.26, playing in Fenway against
Washington in what appeared to be his last
game, Williams strode to the plate leading
off the seventh, the Red Sox up, 4-2. Suddenly realizing that this may be it, the fans gave
The Kid a huge ovation.
And Williams delivered. On the first pitch
from Gus Keriazakos. A drive into the right
field stands. No.366.
As pointed out by Dick Johnson and
Glenn Stout in their book,‘‘Ted Williams: A
Portrait in Words and Pictures,’’ that very
well could have been Williams’s final at-bat.
But Washington’s pitching staff was
touched up for four more runs in the inning,
allowing Williams to bat once again, in the
eighth, when he popped out.
As for his threat to retire, Williams stayed
true to his word through spring training of
’55. He was still nowhere to be found as the
season started in April. But on May 13,
Williams reconsidered and signed a new con-
tract, playing in his first game May 28. He
would go on to bat .356 that season with 28
homers and 83 RBIs in 98 games. And he’d
stick around for five more years.
-- Ken Fratus
He had always occupied the
stage grudgingly, regarding as voyeurs the public
— and especially the dastardly press — whom he
considered intruders in his private crusade to
achieve hitting supremacy. After 21 years, he
wasn't about to compromise his notorious obstinacy with sentiment.
So his finale at Fenway Park — Sept. 28, 1960
— began almost as just another meaningless
late-season game for the also-ran Red Sox, and
the gray, chilly day formed an appropriately drab
backdrop. Though his retirement had been a
subject of hints and speculation throughout the
season, Williams would have no part of auld
lang syne.
The year had been a campaign of atonement,
Williams wanting to prove that his dismal .254
average in 1959 — after which he demanded
that the Red Sox cut his salary an unprecedented
28 percent, from $125,000 to $90,000 — had
been an aberration. He had achieved that as he
prepared to put the finishing touches on a statistical marvel — he would end with a .316 average
and 29 home runs — that defied his age, 42.
He had focused on his hard-edged quest,and
he didn’t have time for such nonsense as sunset
tours, no stomach for the bestowing of finishing
rods and rocking chairs and golf clubs and platitudes he'd have to endure if he made a prolonged public spectacle of quitting. Thus, it hadn't been announced until three days before the
game that Williams would not return for another season.
Not wanting to taint any semblance of competition, he deferred the announcement, conveyed via club publicist Jack Malaney in a statement from owner Tom Yawkey, until after the
pennant race had been decided and the Yankees
had clinched yet another American League flag
with a 4-3 victory at Fenway Sept. 25. Only then
did Williams reveal, with characteristic lack of
elaboration, that this would be it, that after
three games against Baltimore at Fenway and
three more in New York the following weekend,
he would be gone, and please hold the maudlin
testimonials.
Wanting to do something, the team had
slapped together a patchwork ceremony that in
truth was almost an afterthought. Williams went
through his pregame ritual — shooing away pesky
writers as he took the field for a brief warmup 35
minutes before the first pitch — and then a microphone stand was hastily hauled out near home
plate. Legendary Sox announcer Curt Gowdy offered a salute; Boston Mayor John Collins presented a check for several thousand dollars as a
donation to Williams's beloved Jimmy Fund; and
then, in a variation on the theme Fenway spectator John Updike indelibly captured in the pages of The New Yorker, the Kid bid Hub fans adieu.
Williams spoke for all of three
sentences — the third being ‘‘Thank
you ’’ — a model of brevity in which he
managed to express his affection for
Yawkey as the best owner in baseball,
his appreciation of the Boston fans as
America's finest, and his contempt for
the media, whom he had scornfully
dubbed the Knights of the Keyboard.
That was the extent of the goodbye,
as witnessed by a dreary crowd of
10,454 on a Wednesday afternoon.
But, as always, Williams saved his
real passion and elan for what transpired on the diamond. He wouldn't tolerate pomp and circumstance except as
it applied to the record book. And
though it was unknown at the time, he
had a special reason for wanting to hit ca-
reer home run No. 521 — third at the time
on the career list behind Red Sox forebears Babe
Ruth and Jimmie Foxx — on this day.
There were no flourishes in the first inning as
Orioles lefthander Steve Barber — born in 1939,
Williams's rookie season in the majors — issued
him a four-pitch walk, and the old man eventually slid home on a sacrifice fly, the last time he
would hit the dirt at Fenway.
In short order, Barber gave way to another
21-year-old, Jack Fisher, who was launching an
11-year career he would end with an 86-139
record. Facing the 6-foot-2-inch, 215-pound
righthander in the third inning, Williams got a
little too much under a pitch and lofted a fly that
Jackie Brandt easily tracked down in center.
Moments later, Malaney issued an announcement in the press box: After the game,
Williams's No. 9 would be retired. That meant
Williams would retire along with it; that he
wouldn't accompany the team to Yankee Stadium; that this wasn't merely his last Fenway
game, it was his last game, period. The belated,
understated notification was Williams's final attempt to sabotage the schmaltz.
His remaining at-bats took on greater historical importance. In the fifth, Williams just missed
supplying the crowning touch, driving right
fielder Al Pilarcik to the bullpen wall, where he
stabbed the line shot.
That left one more try. It came in the eighth,
just after Willie Tasby had led off with a
grounder to shortstop.
Acknowledging that this was it, the crowd
gave Williams a two-minute ovation as he stepped
into the lefthanded batter's box. Expressionless,
he faced Fisher, who was trying to preserve
a 4-2 lead for the second-place Orioles.
Williams watched the first pitch for a
ball. Then came a high fastball at which
Williams took a ferocious swing.He
missed, but there was no doubt about his
intentions.
On the 1-and-1 pitch,Williams produced. He launched a 440-foot bomb
that caromed off the canopy atop the
bench in the Red Sox bullpen. Brandt
and Pilarcik drifted helplessly to the
wall and watched home run No. 521
disappear. The crowd watched, too,
coming to delirious life when the ball
landed. The Sox were wrapping up a
65-89 season in which they would finish seventh in the eight-team AL, 32
games behind the Yankees, but for
10,454 full-throated patrons, this
was the only moment that mattered.
They stood and delivered a ringing
tribute to Williams, who, true to his
custom, was oblivious to it, taking a
businesslike home run trot with his head down.
As he crossed the plate, an ecstatic Jim
Pagliaroni greeted him. The rookie catcher had
idolized Williams — whose presence in Boston
was the reason he'd signed with the Red Sox at
age 17 — and been tutored by him after some
spring training struggles.
When the home run landed, Pagliaroni had
dropped his bat in the on-deck circle and started
weeping. By the time Williams toured the bases,
Pagliaroni had recovered — to an extent. He
shook hands with Williams, which Pagliaroni
would rate as the third-biggest thrill of his career, right behind catching Bill Monbouquette’s
no-hitter and Catfish Hunter's perfect game.
Williams was decidedly more matter-of-fact
about it. Head down, he briskly shook Pagliaroni's hand, then made a beeline to the dugout,
where he remained as the crowd implored him
for a full four minutes:‘‘We want Ted!’’
The fans, players in both dugouts and
bullpens, even Mrs. Jean Yawkey up in the owner ’s box, stood in salute. Williams remained impervious. His teammates beseeched him to take
a curtain call. Williams remained stolid. Two
decades earlier, disgusted that the customers
were booing him for a perceived lack of home
runs into the right-field bullpens known as
‘‘Williamsburg,’’ he had vowed,‘‘To hell with
them. They can boo me or cheer me, but I ’m not
going to tip my cap.’’
Now, as they roared his name in hailing the
most dramatic farewell imaginable, the cap remained on Williams ’s head. The home run, he had
decided, was enough for them; judge him only as a
hitter, for that's what he was, pure and simple.
The rest was anticlimax. Williams glowered
when Mike Higgins ordered him to return to left
field for the ninth, but he had underestimated
the manager's theatrical flair. Even as he took
his position, receiving a two-minute ovation,
Carroll Hardy, his replacement, was on his heels.
When Williams noticed this, he put his head
down and ran purposefully back to the dugout,
cheers accompanying his every step but no acknowledgement in return. As he left the field,
first baseman Don Gile, whose path he crossed,
told him,‘‘You ’ll do anything for attention.’’
Quite the contrary. Williams never yielded. The
home run became a hallowed piece of baseball
lore, Updike’s account became a hallowed piece of
baseball literature, but Williams was unmoved.
‘‘I never hit a ball better ’’ than the fifth-inning near miss, he told the accursed press after
the game.‘‘I thought that was gone. When it didn ’t go out, I was disappointed. So I had to try
again. I was happy to do it. Baseball has given
me everything I wanted.’’
And to the end, Williams gave baseball everything he wanted. Nothing more. But as 10,454
witnesses would attest, that was sufficient.
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is farewell might be epic; who
could foretell? But it absolutely
wouldn’t be emotional; Ted
Williams was making sure of that.