HITTER, by Ed Linn, Harcourt, Brace & Co., $12.95.

Ted Williams was not my boyhood hero — an uncomfortable confession for a Maine boy. But I just happened to fall in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1949 season and spent many a summer evening fine-tuning my radio to hear the Dodger games on New York’s WMGM. My hero worship went, instead, to Duke Snider, the immaculate center fielder of the Dodgers who could break your heart as easily as he could break a close game wide open with a home run.

Duke is still one of my lifelong “heroes,” along with Roy Rogers and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But today I have a sense of intimacy with the Kid: Ted Williams, also known as the “Splendid Splinter” or “Teddy Ballgame.”

The reason for this newfound bond with Ted is a superb book by Ed Linn titled “Hitter.” I bought it at a local bookstore a couple of weeks ago and devoured it in a week of evenings.

Ed Linn writes the way he would talk to you. Lots of interesting parenthetical comments and observations.

Linn has collected and collated an enormous quantity of anecdotes, firsthand recollections and myths about the Ted Williams career which I’m certain will expand the trivia troves of even the most fanatical Williams worshipers.

For example, how many of you have wondered whether pitcher Jack Fisher who threw the pitch that Williams hit for a home run in his final time at bat may have “grooved” it so that Williams could make the ultimate dramatic exit? No way. But there was another pitcher, Eddie Lopat, who once offered to throw Wiliams any kind of pitch he wanted just to see how far the Kid could hit it. It was one of those meaningless late-season games and the Red Sox were leading comfortably in the late innings, so Lopat served up a fat one. Williams popped it up for an easy out!

Linn traces Williams’ troubled childhood as the son of a fanatically religious mother and a mostly absent father in the city of San Diego.

To escape from the depressing home life, the young Theodore Samuel Williams would read the baseball stories in the newspapers and sports magazines and became fascinated by the idea of hitting .400 for a season. Bill Terry had been the most recent one to do it, in 1930.

From the moment he read about Terry’s accomplishment, Williams began to spend endless hours in his tiny back yard, often after dark, swinging a broom handle, a stick or a bat, hundreds of times a day. It was a discipline he never abandoned, often to the consternation of his later team managers who would look into the outfield where Williams was supposed to be playing defense, only to see him taking practice swings with his rolled-up glove.

Fielding never interested Williams very much. “I’m paid to hit,” he would say. And it was his hitting that enabled him to get away with token effort in the outfield. It also could be said that the hitting gave Williams a special indulgence of his frequent outbursts of temper and periods of sulking by both the Red Sox front office and field managers. Linn doesn’t gloss over these aspects of Williams’ personality, but suggests that they were the product of his constant need to excel and his perception that the fans and the press were fickle toward him. “The same fans who cheer me when I hit a home run are the ones who razz me when I make an error,” he often would complain.

Another criticism that stung Williams was that he was not a “team player”; that he was interested only in his personal goals. Linn destroys this premise with irrefutable statistics: In his total career, Williams had the highest “on-base percentage” of any player in baseball, leading Babe Ruth by .483 to .474. His “runs batted in” per game percentage was .80, to rank him seventh in the top 10. He ranked second only to Babe Ruth in total walks and second only to Ruth in a vital statistic called “production,” the combined total of on-base percentage and slugging average. If a hitter’s value to his team is getting on base and scoring runs, it can hardly be said that Ted Williams didn’t contribute to his team.

The book is no apologia for Williams’ less than heroic exploits (spitting at the press box, throwing his bat into the stands, sitting down in the outfield when he got bored, etc., etc.), but Linn puts all of these into perspective with Williams’ crowning achievements: two MVP awards; two Triple Crowns; winning the batting championship at age 39 with a .388 average, the .406 average in 1941, and, off the field, his unstinting support for the Jimmy Fund.

“Hitter’ is a book about a ball player and a man, the one larger than life, the other a reflection of it.

I have always wondered what Williams’ career would have produced had he not missed five seasons due to service in the Marines. Linn does a projection based on the Williams statistics for each of his active years, including the injury-ridden seasons, yielding some awesome figures: 686 home runs (compared to his actual output of 521, placing him third on the all-time list); 2,301 runs (over 1,798 actual); 2,301 hits (1,798 actual); 2,242 RBI (an increase from 1,839) moving him from 11th places to second place, and 3,017 games played rather than 2,292, ranking him sixth among all players in the game.

Whether you’re a Williams fan or not, Ed Linn’s book will provide fascinating and often thrilling reading about a game that may not be what it used to be but has been the most significant sport in the history of these United States.

Hal Wheeler lives in Bangor.