The Splinter remembered

BOSTON – The day began with a private, early morning breakfast in a hotel suite. The Splinter had two of his kids, John Henry and daughter Claudia, with him and this was the day baseball fans chose to remember Ted Williams and 1941, the year he batted .406 for the Boston Red Sox.

It was a day when flash bulbs popped. The cameras whirred. The binoculars zeroed in. The big man was back at Fenway Park.

For 2 1/2 hours, all eyes stayed on him. It’s been that way for a half-century now and as usual, he paid little heed to all the attention showered on him as he smiled and roamed with the same old restlessness.

The Splinter still looks splendid as ever to his Red Sox fans. Theodore Samuel Williams, age 72, bore not the slightest resemblance to the controversial outfielder who wore out American League pitchers for 19 seasons while slugging his way to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

To those who knew him before 1960, when he tossed aside his bat for good, this was the mellowed Ted Williams as a jammed Fenway Park roared to the man who refuses to grow old without a fight.

The lanky Williams, fans remembered on this day, burst on the scene in 1939, as brash as he was talented. The lefthanded, pull-hitting Splinter – a nickname derived from his lean, 6-foot-3 frame – led the American League with 145 runs batted in and hit 31 home runs as a rookie, and demonstrated his great eye at the plate, walking 107 times.

In 1941, he showed up at spring training in an upbeat mood – his salary had been doubled to $20,000 – and quickly injured his ankle sliding in an exhibition game. That, he said, turned out to be a blessing on his way to batting .400. Williams was a notoriously slow starter who didn’t enjoy hitting in cold weather. He opened the 1941 season on the bench, taking practice and pinch-hitting.

“When I finally got back in the lineup, the weather had turned warm, and I mean I got off to a flying start,” he recalls.

His averaged crested at .436 in June, and there was talk of his challenging the season record of .438 set in 1894 by Hugh Duffy, who was, coincidentally, the Red Sox batting coach.

By the All-Star break, July 1, Williams was batting .405, and he didn’t slow down in the All-Star competition held at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium. With the bases loaded, Williams came to bat against the National League’s Claude Passeau. He’d doubled in a run earlier. Now he worked the count to 2 and 1, then swung hard at a fastball.

“I was afraid I hadn’t got enough of the bat on the ball but, gee, it kept going, up, up, into the right field stands,” he recalled.

Williams’ grand slam blast gave the American League a 7-5 victory, as he saw it clear the fence, he began hopping and skipping around the bases. When he reached home plate, such contemporaries as Joe DiMaggio and Bob Feller carried him off on their shoulders.

“It remains the most thrilling hit of my life.”

Williams was hitting .402 in late August and increased his average to .413 in mid-September before going into one of his few slumps. In the last two weeks of the season, Williams lost almost a point a day and was just a tad under .400 before the final weekend series against the Athletics in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. Saturday’s game was rained out, and Williams was at .39955 going into Sunday’s doubleheader.

The night before, Manager Joe Cronin had given Ted the option of sitting out the game – the average would be rounded off to .400 – but Williams refused.

Before the game Sunday, the A’s catcher, Frankie Hayes, delivered a message from Manager Connie Mack: “Ted, Mr. Mack told us if we let up on you, he’ll run us out of baseball. I wish you all the luck in the world, but we’re not giving you a damn thing.”

They didn’t have to. He went 6 for 8 that day.

Williams says, “Naw, I don’t remember celebrating that night, but I probably went out and had a chocolate milkshake.”

He’d raised his average to a final .406.

In the intervening 50 years, only he, Rod Carew, and George Brett have come close again. In 1957, a heavyset 39-year-old Williams batted .388, a mark matched by Carew in 1977. Brett hit .390 in 1980. Williams finished with an astounding walk-to-strikeout ratio of 145-27, recording an all-time on-base average of .551. He led the American League with 37 home runs, drove in 120 runs, and had a Ruthian slugging average of .735.

“I’ve always felt that one may have been my best season. Also, I always felt the same about hitting .400. It has only been the last two or three years that the .406 business came into play and that was because it approached 50 years. I’ve never felt it was that important.”

Ted is appalled these days that you can go into a library and find a thousand books about how to hit a golf ball or casting a trout and salmon fly – but not one about how to hit a baseball, which is generally accepted to be the toughest thing to do in sports.

Baseball season 1941, when Williams hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio put together his 56-game streak, was an incomparable one, and this last Sunday, it was remembered when the no-longer Splendid Splinter was making one of his rare public appearances at Boston’s old and historic ballyard.