:smack: . . . 'added mouthbreather’s.
Cajun Man - SDMB Moderator
RIP Ted Williams.
Sports icon, war hero… America lost a legend today.
Williams’ experience as a manager is one of the ones people cite when they say legendary players rarely make good managers/coaches.
Because of their otherworldly abilities, they have difficulty understanding that lesser players can’t do what they did, and often have difficulty explaining things that came effortlessly to them.
This reminds me of a story Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood told of Stan Musial. Flood asked Musial how he was able to bat .300 every year. Musial replied, “When I get a strike, I knock the heck out of it.” Flood said it was just that simple for Stan and he couldn’t explain it any better than that.
I read about Ted Williams when I was a kid, and one story about him always stuck with me.
He and a friend taught themselves how to hit when they were kids. They would tell each other what kind of pitch they were going to throw, and in this way became proficient at hitting various pitches.
Williams said one of the biggest days of his life came when he told his friend to just throw different pitches WITHOUT telling him what kind was coming.
This to me was an interesting lesson in learning progressions. It was not by accident that he was that good. He worked at it, and took orderly steps toward greatness, and had a huge committment to his craft.
Did you know that the owners of the Yankees and Red Sox seriously considered trading Williams and Joe Dimmagio? The logic was that Williams, a lefty batter, would have a field day with the short right field porch at Yankee Stadium as his home field. Same for Dimmagio, a righty, with Fenway’s tall and close-in Green Monster.
As I recall, the trade was more or less worked out. But then Tom Yawkey woke up the next morning and thought, “What am I thinking?! I can’t trade Ted Williams!”
Ted Williams used to say (I think it was Ted, but please correct me if it was someone else) that he was so comfortable and familiar with watching pitches come at him that you could write something on the ball, throw it at him at 100 mph, and he’d be able to read it as it flew.
Baseball is less for his passing. I haven’t felt this way since Willie Stargell left us. (I was lucky enough to see Willie hit a homer at Three Rivers back in about 81.)
First, samclem: you were wrong about the number of years Williams spent in the service, but I was wrong, too! I said he was in the Army Air Corps. He was, in fact, a Marine! I apologize for the error.
Second, Gassendi, I’ve heard the legend too, that Yankee owner Dan Topping had agreed to trade Joe Dimaggio to the Red Sox for Williams, but that both sides thought better of it after they’d sobered up.
Years later, sportswriter Dick Young asked Dimaggio about that, and asked how many more homers he’d have hit at Fenway Park. Surprisingly (to many people, not to fans who know the layouts of the stadiums), Dimaggio shrugged and said he didn’t think he’d have hit many more homers at Fenway Park. He considered Fenway an ideal hitter’s park, but NOT a great park (necessarily) for right-handed home run hitters. Dimaggio said he’d have hit loads more doubles in Fenway, but not a lot more homers.
Conversely, he said, Fenway is a much better park than people think it is for left-handed power hitters. So, while a dead-pull lefty like Williams certainly would have hit SOMEWHAT more homers in Yankee Stadium (which then had a 296 right field wall), Dimaggio thought Williams was ALREADY playing in an a great park for home runs.
So, Young followed up, where WOULD Dimaggio have hit a lot more homers, if not in Fenway Park? At that, Dimaggio chuckled and said he’d have hit 50 homers a year easily if he played for the Dodgers at Ebbetts Field.