Creators Podcast
Ted Williams
Episode #19
04.01.25
Ted Williams, The Intensity, The Legend
Learning about Ted Williams and the baseball legends, there’s two things I’m really having fun with. And I didn’t expect this when I started out on this journey. But what I’m really discovering is there’s a lot of common themes in the stories I’ve been talking about.
And then there’s also totally unique traits. So you’re going to start to see some common themes that the baseball legends start to line up as we dig into the story of Ted Williams. And if you listen to my other episodes, the themes start to jump right out at you.
But it’s not just the common themes I’m having so much fun discovering. It’s also finding their unique traits. And I’ll have to say, over and above all other traits, Ted Williams has his own style of intensity that sets him apart from anyone else.
The Intensity of Ted Williams
We talked about Ty Cobb and he was also intense. There’s no question about it. But the legend of Ted Williams was created with his own special blend of intensity.
I think you’re going really enjoy this story of an American hero doing it his own way. Now I began each episode with the moment. And that’s a certain event that changes everything. I love to read an old book about a baseball legend and wait for that moment to jump out at me. It’s always so obvious to me once I close the book, I know it immediately. That moment when a great ballplayer enters into legendary status.
And so I flip open this great book that I’m going to tell you all about in just a minute. And I found the moment.
“It came to the last day of the season. And by now I was down to 399.55, which according to the way they do it, rounds out to an even 400. We had a doubleheader left at Philadelphia. I’d slumped as the weather got cooler from a high of 436 in June, down to 4.02 in late August, then up again to 4.13 in September. In the last 10 days of the season my average dropped almost a point a day. Now it was barely 400. The night before the game Cronin offered to take me out of the lineup to preserve the 400. I told Cronin I didn’t want that. If I couldn’t hit 400 all the way I didn’t deserve it. It sure as hell meant something to me then.” -Ted Williams on his .400 season
He continues on, “And Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse boy, always a guy who was there when I needed him, must have walked 10 miles with me the night before, talking it over.”
So that was an excerpt from an amazing book, ‘My Turn at Bat, The Story of My Life,’ published in 1969. The book is in the words of Ted Williams and written by a sports writer friend of his, John Underwood.
Ted Williams and His .400 Season of 1941
So we’ll talk about this book in a minute, but first I need you to understand what I just read. Ted Williams is down to the last two games in the 1941 season and his batting average is sitting right at 400. It’s been dropping over the last few weeks and now his average is down to 399.55, which rounded up would be exactly 400. Now hitting 400 in professional baseball has always been a really big deal.
It’s an almost impossible feat to go an entire season and get a hit 4 out of every 10 times to the plate. It’s only been done by a handful of players dating back to the late 1800s. Ty Cobb hit 400 three different seasons. Of course Ty Cobb does it three times. But after that, there’s only a few other players who’ve done it.
Now I read the passage from the book because to me, after reading the book twice in the last few days, this is the moment that Ted Williams becomes a legend back in 1941 when he just turns 23 years old.
We talk a lot about legends here. One of my favorite things to do is to learn the story of how the big jump was made. And that’s the jump from just a great ball player to rising up to a whole new level, to legendary status.
Ted Williams the Legend
And here’s why it’s so much fun. Because of the story, you have to know the entire story to understand an old baseball legend. Once you hear the full story, it’s totally obvious. When you hear the Ted Williams story, there’s only one single response to it. Only one thing you can say – legend.
So we’re still on that opening quote that I read. A 23 year old Ted Williams has two games to play.
He’s hitting exactly 400, rounded up from 399.55. And his coach walks up to him and asks him if he wants to sit out to save his 400 season and lock it in. All he has to do is say, sure, I’m out. Sit me on the bench. I’ll take the next two games off. And that’s a 400 season done deal. But that’s not what Ted Williams says. And when you read the book that we’re going to talk about, you’ll understand.
Not in a million years would Ted Williams ever say that he’s not playing the last two games of the season just so he can say he hit 400. There’s no way that’s going to happen. So Ted Williams plays in both games.
First at bat, single. Second at bat, home run. Then two more singles. And you get the idea. He ends up going six for eight in the double header and ends the season with a 4-0-6 batting average.
That’s what legends do, even at the age of 23.
So that’s why love the opening quote I read. And it says a lot about Ted Williams and that refusal to take the easy way out. He never took the easy way out. And what I learned over the last week is that he was a much more complicated person than I ever imagined. The book he wrote, along with sports writer John Underwood, it’s a great read. And together they walk through Ted’s entire life.
The Ups and Downs of Ted Williams
The ups and the downs. And there’s a lot to Ted Williams. He’s a very deep and thoughtful, emotional and sensitive guy. And some would say way too sensitive. And in one word, intense. As intense as anyone who’s ever played baseball.
Back to the opening quote I read quick. He didn’t just turn down the offer from his coach to sit out the doubleheader that would guarantee his 400 season.
He was going to play, no question. But then what did he say in his quote? The night before he must have walked 10 miles with Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse guy. He walked 10 miles the night before thinking about what he needed to do in that doubleheader the next day. That’s how focused and intense he was at becoming the best.
And here’s something else I kept thinking about while I was reading the book, because it’s a thought I had when I did the Ty Cobb episode, but Ted Williams just did not suffer any fools. Just like Cobb. I love that phrase, but it fits perfect here with Cobb and Ted Williams. They did not take any grief from anyone.
The Struggle to Be Great
And so the book is just packed full story after story. And I found out just like all the other episodes I’ve done on the old baseball legends is that it’s so much about the struggle. Not something you’d expect to see when you read old books about baseball Hall of Fame legends.
You’d think it’s fame and fortune and living it up, living the life, but it’s really not. It’s a lot of struggle, not just to make it to the top, but to stay on top and then to deal with everything that comes with being the best. I said it before, it’s not for the faint of heart.
And that might sound strange, but it’s a lot of work when you’re the best ball player out there. You have to answer to people night after night. “Why did you strike out? Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that?”
“You said this or that.” It’s just constant. And Ted Williams, just like Ty Cobb, he didn’t have the patience for all the craziness that came along with the fame. Just tons of struggle in trying to be understood and then feeling misunderstood and misquoted and even reading straight out lies in the paper just day after day.
Things you know are just completely made up just to get you all worked up about something. So there’s a lot of struggle with Ted Williams and when you don’t suffer fools like I said, you’re gonna have non-stop conflict. And this book is just full of it.
It’s the intensity of becoming the best there ever was. Which was fascinating to hear it laid out in his own words. And that’s why I love doing this. Reading the books from their own words, or mostly their own words, with a little help from a writer. That’s just the typical way these guys would write their autobiographies. But it’s about as close as you can get to understanding who Ted Williams really was and why we’re here 50 or 60 years later we’re still talking about him.
Just like Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, the other episodes I’ve done so far, Ted Williams found his life’s work and he left his mark.
Ted Williams, My Turn at Bat
One thing I really loved about the book was that it wasn’t just plain old chronological order year after year, like born in San Diego on this date, then when I was two this happened, then the next year this happened. It wasn’t just one year after the next like most biographies. This book jumped around which was refreshing.
They mixed it up a bit and you had to piece a few things together to get a good feel for the order of all the events. He jumped around so I really like how they did that. And so I’m not gonna do it with this episode either. The chronological order. What happened one year to the next? I try to mix it up and put a different spin on these episodes too.
And really, honestly, I couldn’t even do this chronological even if I wanted to. There’s so much to the life of Ted Williams, it would take me 10 hours to lay it all out.
Common Themes and Traits of the Greats
But there’s a few themes I wanted to talk about. A few of them are common themes that we’ve seen with the other baseball legends that I’ve done episodes on.
So it’s common themes and unique traits. Here’s one example. I had a blast doing the episode on Honus Wagner and all the events that led him to not allowing a tobacco company to use his portrait on baseball cards and they were going to insert those into packs of cigarettes.
I had so much fun learning the full story of Honus Wagner because he was completely original, totally unique. And I said it in that episode, I said he was a gentle giant, like a folk hero. And he definitely marched to the beat of his own drummer. But almost everybody loved Honus Wagner, players, fans, coaches, sports writers. He was just this larger than life character that everyone respected.
Ted Williams Marched to His Own Drummer
And so in his own unique way, Ted Williams also marched to his own drummer. Totally original. Hated to conform. Didn’t like to act one way if he didn’t feel it. He was great on the field, but then totally original and unique off the field. And totally unforgettable. That’s the legend story that I’m finding out, episode after episode.
There’s these common themes, but then each legend is completely unique and one of a kind, and they just don’t bend very easily. So the book starts off with a bang and it sets the tone from the first paragraph. So it gets your attention right away. This is a book coming straight from the heart is how it reads. Let me give you an example. Page one, first sentence. Ted Williams in his own words, he says,
“I’m glad it’s over.”
“Before anything else, understand that I am glad it’s over. I’m so grateful for baseball and so grateful I’m the hell out of it as a player.”
There’s the first three sentences from Ted Williams in his book. He continues on, he says this next,
“I certainly do not have a youth wish. I mean, I wouldn’t go back to being 18 or 19 years old, knowing what was in store, the sourness and the bitterness, knowing how I thought the weight of the damn world was always on my neck, grinding on me. I wouldn’t go back to that for anything. I wouldn’t want to go back. I’ve got problems now. I’ve always been a problem guy. I’ll always have problems, but I’m grateful that part of my life is over.”
And those are the opening sentences of his book, ‘My Turn at Bat.’
So I flip open the book for the first time and I read that first page and I was glued to the pages from that point on. I finished the book in two days, the first time through, then I read it again just to get some of the order of how things played out to just get it all straight in my mind. But Ted Williams sets the tone right away. He follows his opening paragraph and he says, I wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived.
“A man has to have goals for a day, for a lifetime, and that was mine. To have people say, there goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived. Certainly nobody ever worked harder at it. It was the center of my heart hitting a baseball. Eddie Collins used to say I lived for my next turn at bat, and that’s the way it was. If there was ever a man born to be a hitter, it was me.”
He goes on,
“As a kid, I wished it on every falling star. Please let me be the hitter I want to be.”
And so that’s from page one of the book from Ted Williams. So I talked about the themes that pop up over and over again, learning about the legends, and you can look at any field, any profession, and you’ll have the best of the best who rise up to the top.
Ted Williams, the Study of the Greats
I’ve chosen to do this with old time baseball legends because it intersects so many of my interests. I played baseball when I was a kid, I watched baseball growing up, but I also inherited baseball from my grandfather who loved the game and it was something fun that we always talked about. Then there’s the baseball cards and collecting all my favorite players growing up and the market for sports cards was a big interest of mine.
So it’s a common theme and all these different crossroads coming together that make baseball a special thing for a lot of us and it’s really personal too. All these childhood memories can be so much fun to remember and people connect these memories with all these baseball legends.
So anyway, the greats rise to the top and there’s common threads as you learn more and more about them. One theme that pops up with Ted Williams, maybe more than any other, it’s his intensity. He was so intense about being a great hitter, about the craft of hitting.
Ted Williams, The Science of Hitting
He wrote almost a scientific textbook on hitting a baseball. With the same author who helped him write this book we’re talking about, he wrote another book with author John Underwood called The Science of Hitting. He wrote it two years after he published this book right here, but it was a guide to hitting and how to become a great hitter. He was sharing all of his ideas.
Not many people are going to write that book, or could even fill up two pages about how to be a great hitter. Ted Williams wrote an almost 100 page book about the science of hitting. He was dead serious on the craft of hitting.
When I say intense, it’s a perfect word for him.
Ted Williams and His Perfect Eyesight
There’s this great story in his book about his eyesight. And I didn’t realize this until I read it a few days ago.
But he said how everyone always made a big deal about his so-called superhuman eyesight. And they said he could read a license plate from a car two blocks away or whatever because he had such a good eye at the plate. And I always assume this to be fact too that he just had straight up better eyesight than anyone.
But in the book he corrects that myth. And he does that a lot in the book. He’s correcting and setting the record straight. But he corrects this myth on his perfect eyesight.
And he tells the story. He actually starts when he was a kid. Him and his younger brother are messing around in the backyard with these nuts or these seeds. And I think his brother throws one of them and it hits Ted right square in the eyeball.
So he says this did some damage and he always had trouble seeing with that one eye as he was growing up. And he says he had trouble reading with that one eye if he’s getting tired as he got older. And then he drops this line. And I have to read this because it’s amazing.
Here’s his explanation. says, quote,
“Sure, I think I had good eyesight, maybe exceptional eyesight, but not superhuman eyesight. A lot of people have 2010 vision. The reason I saw things was that I was so intense. I saw ducks coming in because I was intent on seeing them. I was looking all the time. I was alert for them. And I trained myself from a sandlotter to know that strike zone, so I wouldn’t be swinging at bad pitches. If as a batter I made a good umpire, it was discipline, not super eyesight.” -Ted Williams
I love that excerpt from the book because that’s Ted Williams right there. Dozens of stories like that. He’s setting the record straight. He was a great hitter because that’s what he focused on. He worked at it. That was his life’s work. It didn’t just happen. He thought about a day and night since he was a kid.
People would complain that he walked too much, that he wouldn’t swing at pitches that were close, and he’d take the walk rather than swing away and try to get a hit. Well, in his mind, he couldn’t swing at a bad pitch because that’s not how you become great. If it’s four balls and the pitcher’s not gonna throw you anything good to hit, then he’s going to first, even if they’re close.
So in another part of the book, he also catches a writer saying that he was a natural hitter.
And the word natural sounds like a compliment. Who doesn’t want to be a natural at something they love, like hitting a baseball? Well, there’s one person who doesn’t want to be called a natural, and that’s Ted freaking Williams!
He says he was a great hitter because he worked like hell to be great. No hits in the big leagues just naturally happen. It was tough. It wasn’t easy. And it took all his concentration and focus to figure out a pitcher. So I just love this theme, just so intense.
The Intensity of Ted Williams
An intense competitor during the games and intense after games when people would say things he didn’t agree with. It’s not perfect eyesight. It’s not natural ability. I work at this day and night, damn it. You see story after story in the book with the same idea. And this story about refusing to let someone call you a natural. That sounded familiar to me the first time I read it and then it hit me.
Ty Cobb said the exact same thing 30 years before Williams said it. I searched my Ty Cobb episode and here’s what Cobb said in the awesome book that I read by Charles Liersen. The book is called A Terrible Beauty. Cobb said this, he said quote, I had the gift of being able to appraise myself even at the age of 12. It has been the greatest asset of life.
So Cobb was explaining how he was able to adjust as a hitter and change his approach to hitting even as a kid to figure out a way to just make it happen at the plate. Then the book says this quote, all his life in articles and after dinner introductions, people would describe Cobb as a natural thinking they were paying the supreme compliment and he would respond that he was anything but. So that’s incredible right there.
Ty Cobb, Ted Williams. These legends correcting people when they call them naturals. So think about that classic baseball movie with Robert Redford. The title is actually The Natural. The most popular baseball movie maybe of all time. That movie was made in 1984. So everybody growing up in the 80s and 90s, they all wanted to be the natural. “To be the greatest hitter who ever lived,” I think that’s the quote from the movie. That was the ultimate compliment.
And then now we find out that 40 or 50 years before that movie was made, Ty Cobb and Ted Williams were cursing out reporters and sports writers after getting called a natural! It’s amazing. This was how intense they were. Intensity is a great word to describe Ted Williams.
The Regret, The Mistakes of Ted Williams
But here’s the amazing thing. That’s what made him great. And at the same time, that’s what tore him up inside.
There’s a lot of regret in the book about a lot of stuff, lots of mistakes and regret. It was the intensity to getting things right that caused a lot of problems. And he’s not shy about talking about all his regrets in the book.
When the book was written in 1969, he’s only a decade or so out from when he was a player. So he had about 10 years to think about all the things he went through during his career. And you can see there was a lot of regret for how serious he took his craft of hitting back when he played and how serious and sensitive he was about how the media talked to him and treated him and wrote about him. It really tore him up because he was so hyper focused and intense.
He says in the book he could hear one single boo in an entire crowd of hundreds of people and that one boo would get to him. He admits right at the beginning of the book that he was more than intense at times. He talks about how his temperament got him into trouble when his what he calls his quote, emotional and explosive nature.
‘Explosive Nature’
When he was still in the minor leagues playing in Minneapolis, he said one time he got so mad after popping up, that he punched a water cooler in the dugout and almost cut his hand right off. I’m pretty sure they had glass water coolers back then. I don’t think they had the plastic jugs yet, but he punched right through it and sliced his hand wide open. He says his career almost ended before it even got started.
So a very close call there in Minneapolis, but I mean, I can relate. There’s nothing worse than popping straight up to the catcher. But he says he got lucky on that little incident.
So he explains it pretty well in the book. Here’s how he describes his temperament. He says,
“I have never been regarded, especially as a man with great patience. Certainly as a young player, I had none at all with myself. I was impetuous. I was temptuous. I blew up. Not acting, but reacting. I’d get so damn mad, throw bats, kick the columns in the dugout so that sparks flew, tear out the plumbing, knock out the lights, damn near kill myself, scream, I’d scream out of my own frustration.”
And I’m just laughing thinking about the book. There’s some other amazing stories and I can’t get into all of them. But one thing he says right in the opening of the book is that he should have had more fun in baseball than anyone who ever played because it was such a great era for baseball.
Would he have become the player he was if he had fun every night at the ballpark? Who knows? Maybe not. Probably not. That’s one of the things you can see he was wrestling with when he put this book together. And then he had 10 years to think about things a little bit more. But he does make a comment at one point. He says he felt the criticism helped his hitting. Because one year, one of the most brutal years where he didn’t talk to the press at all because they were so harsh.
He says that he spent the entire season mad at the world and then he hit 388 for the season. So in his mind, it was fuel for the fire. And I’m not going to argue with him on that. I believe him on that one.
So intense and focused. He was different than Ty Cobb in a few ways that he said what was on his mind and feuded with the media his entire career. But Cobb would get physical and would just start throwing hands.
Cobb was above and beyond intense, but Ted Williams was much more subtle I guess you could say and he would jab back and he would snap back at the press and once you did that in Boston, where they had 11 different newspapers covering the Red Sox back then, I mean, they smelled blood in the water and they noticed how they could get under his skin and the sports writers just had a feeding frenzy just poking at him constantly.
So in the book, he talks a lot about this obviously because it meant so much to him, but he really wished the Red Sox management would have stuck up for him more and helped shield him a little bit from these reporters. He felt like they didn’t step in when he needed help dealing with things. And he really felt alone in his battle with these reporters, which is a feeling I think a lot of us have that feeling where nobody has your back.
And then what’s left to do except lash out, right? I mean, for certain people, that’s what you do when you get that feeling that you’ve been abandoned by the people that you thought might be able to step in and help you out. So it’s a very natural feeling there that you can see in the book.
Misunderstanding, Frustration
Anyway, there’s a ton of stories in the book about this dynamic that he struggled with. Becoming a famous ball player, feeling misunderstood, and then letting it be known that he’s not gonna put up with any wise ass reporters, who don’t know anything about anything. Again, it’s a feeling a lot of us can identify with even if we’re not famous big league hitters.
So I already talked about not going through the entire life of Ted Williams in chronological order. There’s just enough of those stories out there already. And because I just can’t get to it all anyway, but what really helps to understand someone like Ted Williams, you have to look at where they came from. And Ted Williams came from absolutely nothing.
Early Years of Ted Williams
He grew up in San Diego, which was a small town back in the day. That’s how he describes it. But he lived in a, in a $4,000 house that a wealthy family just gave to his mother. His mom worked for the Salvation Army and he, was super dedicated to her faith and helping people. But she spent all her time and effort on that. And they had almost nothing growing up. It was him and his younger brother and Ted’s dad was not the great supportive father that you’d wish for.
His parents eventually divorced, which was really hard on him. And when he got to the big leagues and started making a little money, he would try to help out his mom, but then would find out that his mom was just giving everything to his brother, who would then go off and sell whatever his mom gave him.
And so Ted would mostly just try to stay away from San Diego as he became a pro ball player. And there’s some painful memories that he talks about in the book dealing with his family. So it was not a house full of love and support that some kids might have growing up, but not much different from some of the other legends I’ve done episodes on.
Babe Ruth was one. He grew up in a boy’s home in Baltimore that his parents would just drop him off at. Like several different times they just dropped him off at this home in Baltimore, and that’s where he grew up. Lou Gehrig had immigrant parents just scraping to get by in New York City. Mickey Mantle’s dad worked in the mines in Oklahoma. And Mickey worked with his dad in the mines when he would come home in the winter from the minor leagues. So Mickey Mantle’s family didn’t have anything growing up either.
One thing I thought was really cool though, Ted Williams writes about the two greatest gifts he ever got when he was a kid. It was a Winchester shotgun and a Bill Doak baseball glove, which right when I read that I thought of Mickey Mantle instantly.
So I went back to my Mickey Mantle episode and that’s the exact same glove that Mickey Mantle had when he was a kid. It was the Bill Doke model. Except in the Mickey Mantle book I read, Mickey describes it in the right way. He says, he says it was the Bill Doke model, the Cardinals pitcher that they called spittin’ Bill. That’s how Mickey Mantle remembers his glove.
And then Ted Williams says he got the Bill Doke model glove and he says, I think it was named for some old third baseman or something. Classic Ted Williams. He doesn’t care about what name was on his damn glove when he was a kid. That’s just how he was.
Ted Williams Was Out There Doing It!
I think that’s great because in another part of the book, he talks about how he never read the sports page when he was a kid. He didn’t have heroes. He didn’t follow pro baseball or he didn’t and he didn’t listen to any games on the radio. And then he says basically he didn’t have time for it.
He was out there every day practicing. He was doing it. That’s right from the book. That’s classic. I love it. So anyways, I’m getting into that because it was not an all-American childhood for Ted Williams. Think about this. It was the depression years of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He’s a teenager all through the Great Depression in San Diego with almost nothing, just a ball glove. And he’s at the park, day and night hitting baseballs until his hands bleed.
So here’s one more great passage from the book about all that and it really says it all. Here’s what he says,
“I never drank, I never smoked. I was embarrassed about my home. Embarrassed that I never had quite as good clothes as some of the kids. Embarrassed that my mother was out in the middle of the damn street all the time. Until the day she died she did that and it always embarrassed me, and God knows I respected her and loved her.” -Ted Williams
And so that was Ted Williams talking about just his, his childhood and growing up in San Diego. And then right after that, he says, here’s a key phrase and he says it right here. He says, “I suppose the first strong influence I had to continue in baseball to make it my life’s work was my coach at Herbert Hoover High in San Diego, a wonderful man named Woos Codwell.”
So I just love that back in 1969, Ted Williams is writing about making baseball his life’s work when he was a kid. Lots of people now talk about their life’s work or whatever, but Ted Williams had it dialed in all the way back from when he was a kid. This is what I’m going to do period. And then he went out and did it.
One of his first memories of making it to the big leagues was sitting in the dugout at Yankee Stadium and just watching the Yankees take batting practice, and that was the first and only time he ever saw Lou Gehrig play. He said that’s when Gehrig was sick, but nobody knew it yet. And he remembers seeing Gehrig looking really wore out after the game, going up the steps in the dugout.
So I say that because I really love when these stories intersect. If you haven’t noticed already, but now that I’ve had to have a handful of these baseball episodes, they start to tie together and weave into each other these different eras of baseball.
So Ted Williams, a rookie, first time in Yankee stadium, watching Lou Gehrig take batting practice just before he finds out how sick he really is. And then of course, it wouldn’t be long after that Lou Gehrig would retire. So you have to check out my episode on Lou Gehrig, because I get into all that and I had a really great time making that episode, but I just love how these stories start to intersect.
Baseball History Intersecting
But then what’s amazing is just about a decade later, Ted Williams is out there playing against Mickey Mantle during Mantle’s rookie year in 1951. And I did an entire episode on Mantle’s rookie year. And there’s lots of Mickey Mantle stories in this book. So I just love how all these books start to weave together. Just to see all these stories retold from different perspectives. It’s really cool.
So now Ted Williams is a big leaguer and we’ve come full circle. Something that I like to do here, we come all the way around to the opening quote that I started the episode with. It’s 1941 and the young 23 year old phenom Ted Williams is asked by his coach if he wants to sit out and for the double header on the last day of the season so he can officially hit 400.
And the young Ted Williams says, of course, there’s only one thing Ted Williams is going to say. We all know it by now. He says, hell no. I’m not sitting out any damn game. I’m going to go hit. And we all know what he did.
Doing Things Only Legends Can Do
He goes six for eight as only a legend can do. Now, maybe I was in a good mood or something when I read this book, but there were some things in here that just made me smile. Here’s a few things that I really like about Ted Williams.
Sort of a new feature here that I haven’t done in any of my episodes, but things about Ted Williams that I liked. Straight up, here’s the first one. He didn’t like to go out with the boys every night, or hardly ever. He said nobody had more TV dinners in hotel rooms than Ted Williams. And that’s awesome. So here’s one of his reasons. He didn’t like to eat late. Because he didn’t sleep well when he ate a big meal late at night.
Then he’d wake up the next day and he didn’t feel good. So back in the day, back in the 1940s and 50s, sleep hacking, don’t think is a big thing back then. Nobody’s talking about your 8 Sleep score or your Oura Ring. And the team was going out every night and they would end up eating at like nine or 10 at night. And Ted Williams was not having it. Here’s what he said. This is a quote from him talking about not staying out late and eating late.
He goes, “Eating is a real sore spot with me. I don’t want to hear let’s wait a while because all of a sudden it’s nine o’clock and when I eat late, I can’t sleep well and I don’t feel well the next day.” He says this at the same time. He goes, “I’ve always criticized myself for the time I’ve let other guys dictate what happened to me, like going someplace I didn’t want to go or eating late.”
So that line will hit home with some people like it did with me. He wasn’t going to let other guys dictate what happened to him like going out. So that’s respect right there in my book.
And it’s so hard for some people to fight that pressure and that temptation, especially when you’re young. And of course, one of the biggest things in sports, one of the biggest things in baseball and Ted Williams had it locked down. He’s just staying in and he’s going to get his rest.
Ted Williams Did Not Play Politics
I love that part. so another thing he said that made me smile, he didn’t play games. He didn’t put on an act and he didn’t play politics because he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. Some people can relate to that too. And some people have no idea what I’m talking about. For me, that hit home again. If you’ve ever worked at a big company with a lot of office politics, you know exactly what Ted Williams is talking about right here.
There’s some people in an office environment, they’ll just spend all day playing games. And they’ll go around and just be really nice and fake to people in charge. And they’ll just be gossiping and just going through an entire day like an actor, trying to climb that ladder up for the next promotion, or even better yet, trying to knock other people down around them a few notches by just trying to start trouble. And so…
If you’ve been through that charade in your own life, you know exactly what Ted Williams is talking about right here. And I smiled when I read about this because he brings it up several times. It’s one of the things that really got on his nerves, but he says that that’s just not him.
He looks at people patting others on the back with big fake smiles and then, and then see him trashing them up behind their backs. Five minutes later, he just looks at the whole thing and he just says to hell with that. I’m not doing it. That ain’t me.
Some of us can relate to that with that feeling all too well maybe. But here’s what he says in his book. He says,
“I couldn’t politic like some of them could. I’d see a manager or somebody with his arm around a guy I knew he hated and I’d cringe. But that’s the accepted way to handle press relations. The smart way. I was never that smart. I used to kid Joe Cronin. Gee Joe, you’re the greatest politician I ever saw. The way he’d handled those guys, smooth. Rogers Hornsby could never do that. Neither could Ty Cobb. And this could be their fault, too, because they should have been in baseball longer than they were. They were deadly honest, no-compromise guys, and they wouldn’t take anything off anybody. Since I was of that same cut, the front office should have at least kept the writers away from me, or me from them.”
That’s awesome right there. He knew he couldn’t play the games, the political games. It just wasn’t his style and he wouldn’t do it. There’s so many great stories in this book. I would have to strongly recommend you try to find a copy of this book somewhere.
One thing that was really cool in my copy that I found when I flipped open the front cover, there’s a note from somebody who was gifting the book to somebody else and the little handwritten note is signed and dated 1969, the year the book was published. So I buy a lot of used books and I’m always looking for that earliest edition that I can find. And I have one here that was fresh off the shelf as soon as it was published. And then it was given to as a Christmas present to a Ted Williams fan back in ’69.
Just the Beginning of the Ted Williams Story
So this is only the very beginning of this amazing and epic story of the baseball legend, Ted Williams, and not just a baseball legend, but a real American hero.
Don’t forget, he was a Navy pilot in two different wars. I heard a guy say this on some interview I watched about Ted Williams, and he said, Ted Williams was the character that John Wayne played in the movies in real life. Something like that. He was an amazing guy, and he was full of flaws, but he’d be the first to admit it if you read this book.
And then at the same time, he’s still not backing down on a lot of his opinions that he had. So as you can imagine, I had a great time reading this book. All week, I was just pumped to learn more about Ted Williams and a big reason I love the book.
And I know I say this on a lot of these episodes, but I thought I knew the story of Ted Williams, but I definitely did not. That’s becoming one of my famous lines here, but it’s true.
My opinion of Ted Williams after reading this book has grown a ton. I’m just really glad I was able to learn more about the legend. Now we’ve only touched on a few things here. There’s at least another two or three episodes I could make about Ted Williams and I’m planning to do more, but there’s all the stories about his service in the military during World War II and then the Korean War.
Service in Two Wars
He lost almost five years right in the middle of his baseball career, serving as a pilot in the Navy and flying missions and then getting shot down and just barely crash landing his plane on the runway in Korea. And then climbing out of the cockpit, rolling onto the ground after landing, cursing and yelling because he was so mad. Then in the book he says about his crash landing after getting shot down, he says,
“Geez, I was mad. I always get mad when I’m scared and I was praying and yelling at the same time.” – Ted Williams
That’s amazing. So I call him a hero, a baseball legend. There’s no doubt. Some people thought he was arrogant or kind of a jerk or too sensitive or whatever. I could care less about any of that. It’s an amazing story. He was truly an original, his own style. Hannes Wagner had his own style.
Mickey Mantle had his very own style. Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb definitely had his own unique style. But I love the Ted Williams story because he did it his way and he honed his craft to become one of the greatest hitters to ever walk the earth. Still to this day his numbers hold up. Just like the other few hitting legends, nobody’s hit over 400 since he did it in 1941.
Ted Williams, The Last At-Bat
One more thing I can’t forget to mention, and another example who Ted Williams was, we all hear the word legend over and over, but one of my definitions of a legend?
It’s just somebody who does something completely awesome and incredible even when you’re already expecting greatness out of them. So of course, Ted Williams steps to the plate in his very last game, his last at bat in the 8th inning. Everybody knows he’s retiring after the season.
It’s an overcast, dreary, windy day at Fenway Park. Knowing this is it, the last time he’ll ever hit as a professional ball player, he steps to the plate and he swings and misses at the first strike, right down the middle.
He can’t believe he missed the ball. It was right down the middle and he missed it. So now he’s thinking, I bet this pitcher thinks he can overpower me and throw another one right past me. I better get ready for this one.
Sure as hell the pitcher tries to gas another one past Ted Williams, but he’s ready for it. And he smashes it into the stands for a home run on his very last at bat. Just a legend doing legendary things. That was Ted Williams. So have a great rest of your day wherever you may be and do me a favor and share this episode with somebody who might like to hear a story about an old baseball legend.
My goal is to make you smile when you hear these stories, even just a little bit. Marveling at somebody who found their life’s work and then went out and battled their way through it. Totally unique and completely juiced with intensity.