It was a big thing when Ted Williams came back to baseball to manage the Washington Senators. I went down to the Capital for the opening game April 8: Ted Is Back in the Rat Race Washington -- The rat race began officially for Ted Williams as a big-league baseball manager yesterday. For nine years Williams kept away from baseball because he had achieved all he ever thought he wanted to achieve. He established himself in almost everybody's mind as the greatest hitter of his time-maybe of all time-and what else is there for a perfectionist to prove? He went off to the good life, living off the fat of the sea. Restless men can fish for only so long, though, and Williams is a restless man, among the most restless of men. He rarely sits in one place, his mind jumps from one topic to another, his conversation touches all bases. Before yesteday's game against the Yankees he frequently scratched himself, rubbed his hands together and cupped his cheeks and jaw in his hands.
He was ripe for plucking in one business venture or another when new Washington owner Bob Short came along at the right time and place with an attractive offer. Williams was courted with just the proper amount of flattery to appeal to his not inconsiderable vanity, and he finally decided to come back to the rat race. The term, "rat race" is used because Williams used it himself yesteday, murmuring it almost in an aside, while going through the motions of being a nice guy for the assembled press and dignitaries who are a part of every opening game, particularly the Presidential openers in Washington. When he first left baseball and went off fishing in near seclusion, there was something Hemingwayish about him, in the sense that he was able to take himself away from, and be above the roar of the crowd. Nor is the Hemingway touch lost by his having returned. It just takes a different kind of twist. Now he becomes the gallant old fighter returning to the arena. This way is better for baseball and the people who sorely need the old heroes, even if he no longer can go out and swing a bat. Williams, alas, can't pick up a bat any more and go out and assault a pitcher. He can only tell them how to do it. Nobody has to tell him that it's going to be a long, not summer no matter how patient Washington fans will be. Already there is talk that Williams won't last; one sports columnist here made a $10 bet-half serious, half-joking-that Williams will hang around only for six months and take the handsome captial gains profit he can make from having signed on with the Senators as vice president and manager. Even in his most difficult days as a player, Williams could turn on the charm when he wanted to. He could be the engaging, provocative young man as long as it was on his terms. Now he is back and has been as engaging and charming as ever because it has been in his own interest to win friends for the otherwise lackluster Washington organization. While he is engaging and outgoing, there is often the sense of a man keeping a tight rein on his temper. His wife's reaction when he made the return to basball was: "Good, it's about time he learned how to get along with people." Williams' presence means there is an awful lot of talk on the subject of hitting among the Senators. Camp followers are learning more about hitting than they might possibly want to know. What will be important is how the theoretical talk of hitting affects the actual batting averages of Washington's hitters-men like Frank Howard, Mike Epstein and Ed Brinkman, whose .187 batting average last year is an affront to everything Williams holds dear. Williams had a good debut. Not because the Senators won. They didn't win; they hardly ever win. They lost, 8-4, to the Mickey Mantle Yankees. But the Sensators did get 14 hits, including a double by Epstein and a two-run homer by Howard which helped keep up spectators' interest. No less an enthusiastic fan than President Richard M. Nixon, the former scrubbini football player at Whittier College, attributed the hitting to Williams' infludence. "I can't remember a team getting so many hits and losing," Nixon told commissioner Bowie Kuhn. The new manager was encouraged by the hits, unhappy about the score. He said, "I would have liked a closer game, the kind I could be more involved in as a manager." He makes no pretense of being an instant genius. He said, "I still keep my coaches around me for all the advice I can get. When I get in a jam, I get jimble-jambled because it's all still new to me." When asked why he kept his infield half-way in at one point in the game, he responded with a hint of steel, "We are not giving anything away because you can't afford it the way they play these days." Then, in mid-sentence, his voice softened and he ended on a smiling throw-away tone. He had won another small skirmish in the matter of getting along with people. When a latecomer asked something that had been asked earlier, Williams said-again with an edge-"You weren't here earlier" and then responded. Then, on his own terms he said, "If that's all…" and walked off to a closed room, his sanctuary. Some who would have liked a little more time with him figured that the man had had a long and trying day and, at least in the beginning, was entitled to end the thing on his own terms. There will be other days in the education of Theodore Samuel Williams, working manager.
Williams managed from 1969 through 1972 with no particular success, the team moving to Texas in 1972. He eventually retired to Florida where he became involved with his All Time Hitters museum. He was a dominant figure on the Veterans Committee choosing players for the Hall of Fame who had been passed over in the voting of the Baseball Writers Association. I think he was the force in getting his old teammate Bobby Doerr into Cooperstown. He was a dominant personality. I recall playing in a celebrity tennis tournament at Cooperstown in which his son John Henry was participating. Williams sat on a grass knoll above the tennis courts and you could hear him razzing or booming out encouragement to his son. "Hustle John Henry, hustle." Between that he was talking about hitting, signing autographs. DiMaggio didn't have Williams' outgoing personality. I confess I wrote a column suggesting he be named Yankee manager at a time when the Yankees were in the doldrums. I don't include it here because, frankly, it was ridiculous. DiMaggio was the last person to imagine as a manager. He was a guarded man, overly conscious of his image, ever suspicious that people were trying to get him to talk about Marilyn Monroe. When his career ended, he had a short, very short stint, as a post-game host interviewing ball players. He was painfully inadequate. He was, like many stars, so used to being approached and catered to, he didn't know how to reach out, to relate to people in a way he could ask pertinent questions. Once he stopped appearing at Yankee Oldtimer Day celebrations for a few years because Mickey Mantle, not he, was called last in the public address introductions. There was a grace and ease to him in public that belied an unhappy life. A confidant of his told me that he got little joy from his family. His son once told him, "You did a terrible thing to me; you named me Joe DiMaggio Junior." He was not close to his son. He didn't get much pleasure from his son's two daughters. His grandaughters didn't warm up to him and he was, ever image conscious, disappointed that they married blue collar working men. Always unsure of himself, he would call baseball memorabilia collector Barry Halper, his friend and adviser, to check out which card and autograph shows he should go to, which to turn down.
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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.' |
Who Ever Heard of Williams in Ebbets Field? 
