The essential Ted Williams story, as recounted by Jim Bouton in "Ball Four," happened in a batting cage before the Red Sox were to play Detroit.
With each startling echo of each line drive, Williams talked himself into fury:
"I'm Ted $& Williams."
Whack!
"Jesus H. Christ himself couldn't get me out."
Whack!
"Here comes Jim Bunning. Jim &$%(ASTERISK) Bunning and that little &(ASTERISK)$ slider of his."
Whack!
"He doesn't really think he's gonna get me out with that &$&."
Whack!
"I'm Ted %&$% Williams."
He still is, to most of us. His goal was to make people say, "There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived," and most days he got there.
He won two Triple Crowns. No one has won one since 1967. He missed most of five seasons, thanks to World War II and Korea, and still hit 521 home runs.
He superseded the numbers, but they enhance him, too. He was on base 48.2 percent of the time and had an OPS of 1.116
for his CAREER. And today's hitters can only gawk at Williams' 2,021 walks, set against 709 strikeouts.
In 1941 he walked 147 times and struck out 27 times, and hit .406. In 1994, a season truncated by lockout, Tony Gwynn hit .393, and in 1980 George Brett hit .390. Among the top 50 single-season BA's of all time, those are the only two that have happened since '41, and the .400 mark might become as inviolate as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game streak.
It's the equivalent of going 2 for 5 every game, in the hardest endeavor of any of our major team sports. A 2 for 20 slump, and you're pretty much cooked. It also requires health, luck, a certain amount of speed and an immunity to the public clamor in late September. If steroids really did contaminate baseball in the past 15 years or so, how come nobody hit .400?
"It will take a guy who will take his walks, because he can't give away many at-bats," Mike Scioscia said the other day, "and a guy with a solid swing without much maintenance. Everybody's looking for pitching now, but the difference is, everybody's got a guy in the long bullpen who can come in and throw in the mid-90s. I don't think that happened in Ted's era. Now the specialized relieving makes it tougher, because you see different guys in a game."
Williams insisted on playing in a goodbye doubleheader, on the final day of the '41 season, even though his average could have rounded off to .400 had he sat. That familiar tale is part of "Ted Williams," the HBO documentary.
Tuesday's All-Star Game was the 10th anniversary of Williams' dramatic appearance at the Fenway Park midsummer classic, in which players who were born after he retired gathered around him like autograph hounds. Nolan Ryan is perhaps the only player, in the eyes of his peers, who can be called a walking monument, like Williams.
This show is factually detached, showing Williams' dismissal of family life and his misanthropic side, but sentimentally powerful. It also boasts star power, with President George H.W. Bush and Robert Redford commenting, and Redford reading John Updike's "Hub Kid Bids Fans Adieu" upon fadeout.
Updike was at Fenway in 1960 when Williams homered in his final at-bat and refused to tip his cap or wave from the dugout, then skipped out on the writers. "Gods do not answer letters," Updike observed.
(Mary Carillo, the most literary and intellectual of all TV sports analysts, was the lead interviewer and, with typical grace and propriety, stayed off-air.)
Williams' psychic pull was no less forceful even though Redford, for one, did not see him on TV. That is a lesson in itself. It's hard to be bigger than life when you're familiar. That was his problem in Boston, where he arrived with brittle emotions at 20 and never forgave fans and writers for piling on.
He was only 22 when he hit .406. Boston basically watched him fail to grow up for all those years, but teammates loved him. He was John Wayne, as biographer Leigh Montville said. And maybe with a dash of Bobby Knight.
The ugly conclusion is also examined, with daughter Claudia's steely insistence that everything happened as Ted would have wanted. Son John Henry pushed his dad to sign memorabilia nonstop, but also was there for him in a way that hadn't been reciprocated.
Ted Williams was relentlessly natural and anti-corporate, never a brand. In HBO's typically comprehensive fashion, we find ourselves learning about a man we thought we knew. And that might be the definition of journalism.
We also learn that Williams, who died in 2002, lived long enough to see .400 hold up. He also died knowing that everyone else knew who the greatest hitter was.
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