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Ted Williams in Excelsus
July 10, 2002
LOS ANGELES — “Rose says you’re OK.” The mildly gruff voice on the
other end of the telephone was as disarming as it was unexpected.
“Rose says you’re OK,” the gruff voice repeated when it got no
immediate answer. “This Castro?”
I mumbled yes and nervously tried to clear my throat.
“You wanted to talk about Mantle?” I quickly realized the voice
wasn’t so much gruff as it was tired and maybe hoarse. “That’s what
Pete said. Said he was a friend of yours.”
Ted Williams was on the other end of the line, calling to talk to me
about Mickey Mantle a few months after I had asked Pete Rose to
intervene on my behalf.
I was researching a book I was writing about Mickey Mantle, and I
had been unable to contact Williams or get a response to several
letters I’d written him. Rose had just interviewed Williams for a
nationally syndicated radio show, and I knew Pete through our kids
who played Little League together.
Quite honestly, I’d given up on interviewing Williams for the book
and I never thought Rose would seriously ask Williams, much less
give him my home telephone number for Williams to call.
It was 1997. Williams reportedly had not been in great health. He
also had a reputation of not caring a great deal about writers,
especially authors writing books about controversial baseball
players. Williams, like Mantle, had had his share of controversy.
The Boston Red Sox legendary slugger had been reluctant to cooperate
with a few writers trying to write his unauthorized biography.
I don’t know what Pete said to Williams, but an interview I had
desperately wanted for this book I was writing was suddenly on the
telephone.
The surprise of the call perhaps made it best because any gushing I
might have done about how great he had been or how much of a hero he
had been likely would have ruined the spontaneity of what Williams
had to say or what I needed to ask.
My God, Ted Williams is on the phone! I kept saying to myself.
Fortunately, I had just spent quite a bit of time researching
Mantle’s first game as a major leaguer in 1951, a game at Yankee
Stadium in which the Yankees opened Mickey’s rookie season against
the Red Sox.
I jumped right in with a question, and Williams began telling the
story as if the game had taken place the night before:
How prior to the game, he had walked over to the Yankee dugout to
talk to Joe DiMaggio and had noticed Mantle nearby looking utterly
overwhelmed by the moment. When DiMaggio made no effort to introduce
the rookie who was being hailed as his successor, Williams made the
introduction himself. Photographs were taken of the threesome, and
Williams marveled at how fast Mantle was running out his first major
league hit and rounding first base.
For the next 45 minutes or so, Williams regaled me with stories
about Mantle and not just their on-the-field heroics and
competition.
“Mantle made me want to be better — to show the kid a thing or two,”
he said, and went on to tell me about how Mantle’s 1956 banner
season, when he won the triple crown, inspired him to have a better
season in 1957.
“You know, I won two of those things (Triple Crowns). I knew I
couldn’t win another one. No way I could have matched him in home
runs. But I knew I could outhit him. I went out for .400, and if I
could have run as fast as that [SOB], I’d have hit .400 in ’57.”
Williams, known best perhaps as the last player to hit .400 when he
hit .406 in 1941, batted .388 in 1957 while Mantle batted .365, 12
points higher than he hit in his triple crown season.
But perhaps the most moving thing Williams had to tell me about
Mantle was how he had been one of the few major league ballplayers
who were veterans to defend Mickey in the early 1950s — when he was
being harshly criticized by some fans and newspaper reporters for
not serving in the military during the Korean War, which was taking
place at the time.
Mantle had been classified as 4-F, unfit for military duty, by his
draft board because of a chronic bone disease in one of his legs.
The controversy, however, forced his draft board to examine him
three other times during those years — each time finding him unfit
for service.
Williams, who served as a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea,
lost almost five baseball playing years during the prime of his
career and seemed the unlikeliest of Mantle’s defenders.
But he strongly defended Mantle, saying Mickey had been unfairly
singled out because of his early fame and celebrity — and also
complained that this had happened to him as well.
Williams had resented being called back to active duty for the
Korean War, although he was publicly gracious about doing his
patriotic duty. He felt that the only reason he and infielder Jerry
Coleman of the Yankees had been called up in 1952 was for their
publicity value.
“If the [Marines] had called back everyone in the same category as
me, I’d have no beef, but they didn’t. They picked on me because I
was well known.”
As I sat at my desk, furiously scribbling notes, I realized that I
had just had an incredible insight into the iconoclastic side of Ted
Williams that used to upset Boston sportswriters and fans as much as
his hitting had thrilled them.
His final words were simple but direct:
“Do right by Mantle.”
Ted Williams, undoubtedly the greatest hitter in baseball history,
died last Friday at the age of 83. Take care of him, God. He was OK.
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