Splendid Splinter: Tidbits

[Toy Cannon]

Or Tedbits:D Figured Teddy Ballgame would appreciate a thread like this and will no doubt contribute a few. Strange, interesting or amusing notes from Ted's career. I'll start with this one:

7-19-1946 CHA @ BOS - Joe Haynes threw an inside fast ball to Ted Williams in the third inning which forced The Kid to hit the dirt. Umpire Red Jones cautioned Haynes which brought a chorus of yammering from the White Sox dugout. Jones ejected four players from the bench: Ralph Hodgin, Dario Lodigiani, Ed Smith and Bing Miller. To leave the field, the players had to cross over past home plate. Miller offered his glasses to Jones on the way by. Williams brushed himself off and hit a line-drive single. When the heckling persisted in the next inning, ten more players were ejected leaving only the manager, one coach and the trainer in addition to the players in the game on the bench.

[Teddy Ballgame]

- TC - OK, I'll trade "Tedbits" with you and there are an amazing number of them from which to choose. Here's one that is a little different concerning Ted and his relationship with the most highly educated and some say the most brilliant man ever to play the game of baseball, catcher Moe Berg.

- When Moe Berg played for the Red Sox, he and young Ted Williams used to talk both baseball and politics sometimes non-stop and many Sox alumni of the time have said that Berg and Williams were the two most intelligent players they ever met. This is a documented story from "I Remember Ted Williams" about the two of them:

- In the spring of 1939, a group of Red Sox was quizzing Moe Berg about the prospects of war in Europe. As an alumnus of three universities, a linguist, a mathematician and a lawyer, Berg's views on the darkening clouds in Europe were eagerly sought by the other players.

- Ted Williams, twenty year old San Diego high school graduate, burst into the conversation and blurted, "Germany and Russia will go in together if there's any fighting".

- Berg quietly and patiently assured young Ted that he was dead wrong and completely misinformed.

- Five months later, the Germans and Russians joined together by their secret pact "went in together" attacking Eastern Europe and started World War II started.

- Berg by then knew Williams was a baseball prodigy and after that also gave his views on political issues the most serious consideration.

[Toy Cannon]

Thought it would be interesting to compare at Joe D's and Teds stats during the Clippers famous 56 game hitting streak:

.............HR's....RBI.......2B's......3B....... BA........OBP.......SLG
.
Joe.........15......55........16........4........4 08.......463.......717
.
Ted........12......50........15........2........41 2.......540.......684

Quite similar stats with Ted actually hitting for a higher average :eek: Joe out-slugged him but Ted walked 50 times compared to 21 for Joe D.

Think we'll ever see another pair like those two?

[Teddy Ballgame]

- TC - Yes, Teddy Ballgame outhit DiMaggio by a significant margin in 1941 (and in his career) and even, as you have pointed out here, in most batting categories during Joltin Joe's 56 game streak. Ted missed the Triple Crown that year by only 5 RBIs and should have won the MVP award because he was easily the dominant offensive player in baseball that year and the Yankees had a far superior team to the Red Sox and needed DiMag far less than the Bosox needed The Thumper. This, plus his being robbed of the MVP award again in the late forties, was the work of the Boston baseball press which turned aggressively against Ted during the 1940 season and never let up on him. Since the baseball writers selected the MVP, Ted was generally screwed and should have had a minimum of four - not two - MVP awards during the absolute prime of his career. This absolute prime - the six seasons from 1941 through 1949 less his three WWII years and before he broke his elbow in the 1950 All Star Game - saw Ted win four of the six batting titles, finishing second the other two years and losing in that 1949 year by ONE BASE HIT, and two MVP awards (should have won also in '41 and '48), and leading in HRs four of those six years, and in runs scored five of the six, and in slugging percentage ALL SIX YEARS, in RBIs three years, in doubles twice, walks all six seasons, HR % four years, OBP all six years, and production all six years - AND ALL IN THE TOUGHEST PARK IN THE AL THEN FOR HIM TO HIT HR.

- Will we ever see another pair like those two with their personal and team rivalries so intense and at such a high level for ten full seasons? Probably not. First of all, Williams really was a one off, the greatest all around hitter to ever pick up and study and use with malicious intent a baseball bat. Secondly, DiMaggio and Willie Mays were probably the best all around five tool players and certainly centerfielders of all time and there won't soon be another like DiMaggio unless the player in question is juiced up totally on steroids, using lazer vision and otherwise is artificially enhanced. Thirdly, there isn't quite the same intensity and consistency in team rivalries that there used to be when there were fewer teams and everyone knew the players on each team and players at the all star level tended to stay with the same team for their entire careers. So - my long winded two cents worth (hey, TC, you get what you pay for) is NO.

[Toy Cannon]

This story is a couple of years old, but it's a good read.

We're not directly accusing anyone of corking bats, we are merely reiterating that you're never really sure who is and who isn't, that the same was true 50 years ago and probably 100 years ago, and further, that the greatest and the lamest of hitters were equally susceptible to the temptation.

"They didn't cork it to hit the ball farther," former Pirates pitcher and broadcaster Nellie King said the other day, "they corked it to make the bat faster. If you read Ted Williams, his whole thing was to wait longer. He felt that by using a lighter bat, you could wait longer [on the pitch]. [Roberto] Clemente felt that by using a heavy bat, it would force you to wait longer. It was the opposite approach for the same purpose."

In the judgment of physical science, cork can be proven to do only one thing, and that's make the bat lighter. Though in theory the resultant increase in bat speed should drive the ball farther, the decreased mass (cork instead of wood) makes it pretty much a wash. Were he not hanging upside down in an Arizona cryogenics dungeon, Williams could illuminate this further, it turns out.

King showed me a transcript this week of a recorded conversation made in 1969 by former teammate Bill Virdon. Virdon, beginning his first season as the Pirates hitting instructor, was picking the singular brain of Teddy Ballgame, then still the manager of the Washington Senators. King, then a Pirates broadcaster, loaned Virdon his tape recorder for the occasion.

"In 1938 I was playing [minor-league ball in] Minneapolis," Williams lectures. "I was only 19 years old and I was having a hell of a year ... you know, on base and running the bases all the time. I wasn't really very strong. I was 6-4 and weighed only 150 pounds, and I was getting worn out. So this was in the middle of August, hotter than hell and we were playing in Columbus, Ohio. I was starting to feel a little bit dragging physically, so I went over to the bat rack this day, and Stan Spence was there. I don't know where he got this bat, it was as light as a toothpick. It had lousy wood in it with indentations all over it. But I picked it up and it felt so light to me. I said to Stan, 'Let me use this bat tonight,' and he agreed.

"We were playing against a little left-hander that night. I forget his name, but anyway, I got up in the first inning with the bases loaded and the guy gets two strikes on me, and I'm thinking, 'I hope he doesn't strike me out.' So I choke up about an inch on the bat and I run the count to 3 and 2. I'm now just trying to protect the plate and here comes the pitch. It was a little bit out over the plate, and I just swung real quick and I must have hit it smack on the bat, because it went right over the center-field fence. So you can imagine this made a helluva impression on me. It stirred me up, 'Why use a heavy bat?'"

The transcript, a fascinating document that runs to about 12 single-spaced pages, eventually finds Virdon gently arguing for more weight in the bat. Williams disagrees vehemently.

"I would rather hit a ball square with 'pumpkin wood' than to hit a ball hot on the center with an iron [bat]," Williams said. "Because of the very fact I told you about that night in Columbus. That's why I always used a light bat. Jimmy Foxx was on our club then, and all of a sudden he began having problems. Then he started to weigh his bats. He was swinging 35- and 36-ounce bats and then he went down to a 33.

"We had so many heavy bats around we started drilling holes in the end of the bats to make them lighter. Then we began putting cork in the holes at the end of the bats we drilled. One day Johnny Pesky had a bat split right in the middle at home plate. I'll tell you, he got it out of there as fast as he could!"

Now that, of course, doesn't say Ted Williams used a corked bat. He likely experimented, but did he inhale? Would it have made a difference? Scoff scoff.

[Teddy Ballgame]

Toy Cannon ... Now that, of course, doesn't say Ted Williams used a corked bat. He likely experimented, but did he inhale? Would it have made a difference? Scoff scoff.

- TC - Interesting read. In "I Remember Ted Williams", his HOF team mate and close friend Bobby Doerr remembers how much Ted preferred the lighter bats and how exacting he was to get precisely the weight he wanted. He recalls 23 year old Ted stepping up to the founder of the Hillerich Bat Company and asking him for some 32 ounze bats. Hillerich said, "Ted, you can't get good wood on 32 ounze bats" to which Williams replied, "What good is wood if you can't handle it?"

- Basically, Ted figured it was much more effective to hit the ball on the fat part of a 32 ounze bat than to hit it on the trademark of a 34 or 35 ounze bat. And Doerr notes how Williams could determine if a new bat sent to him was even half an ounze too heavy and would send it back as he did once with an entire order of bats that were just half an ounze too heavy because the handles were a fraction larger than they should have been.

- Doerr recalls, "On the prime part of the bat, he had a white spot of about four or five inches. He hit every ball in that area. You could pick up a batting practice bat or a game bat of his, and very, very seldom would you see a white spot anywhere but in that fat part of the bat."

- Did Teddy Ballgame use corked bats? Well, he was the most brilliant student of hitting ever. He came up with the idea of using golf gloves while batting to prevent blistering and thereby enable hitters to take many more hard swings in BP after he returned from Korea and found his hands would start to bleed after really hard and sustained BP. And Doerr observed, "He was always coming up with little things. We had rosin, but it always seemed that our hands were clammy. You didn't get a good grip on the bat. Ted came up with the idea of using olive oil and rosin, which made a sticky substance, which gave you a much firmer grip on the bat."

- So sure, TC, Ted must have tried it in BP and if it was legal at some point, perhaps in games. After all, he was a scientist of batsmanship and he tried everything experimentally. But he would not cheat through illegal substances or materials or other unfair advantages in real game conditions. Partly, he always assumed he was the greatest hitter ever made and that he needed no unfair advantages in order to perform better at the plate than any one else living or dead or still to come. In addition to his ego, he also had a strong sense of ethics and morality inherited from his very religious mother and he simply believed in doing the right thing even when it cost him money or pain or other aggravations and he could have easily avoided it. His whole life speaks to that as, for example, in demanding and insisting on a 30% pay cut for his final year because he felt his previous year had been unworthy of his league leading salary.

- So, no, I just don't see Williams as one of those moral lepers like Bonds who simply thumbs his nose at quaintly old fashioned but eternal concepts such as playing by the rules and accepting responsibility for - and speaking the truth about - one's actions.

- Even if Ted ever did cheat in a game by using a corked bat, I submit that the two or three ounzes he saved in bat weight were no match for the 35 to 50 pounds of extra chemically caused muscle that Bonds gained in his formerly lean physique when he went on a heavy duty steroids' regime.

- I can also tell you that when Williams whalloped the ball over the Legion roof in Chatham - 469 feet from the plate and a feat never before done at the ball field in Chatham - he was using a regular UNCORKED 32 ounze bat that we supplied to The Thumper from our team's stock of ordinary wooden bats. This was in 1967 when the 48 year old and still Splendid but no longer Splinter Williams finally agreed to play in one game with us for charity (and in return for a flight in the Voodoo F-101 from our base). Ted had fished salmon near the base for years in scrupulous anonymity but we got to him that summer and even got him out to the Officers' Mess for a wonderful evening. Anyway, after playing an ordinary first base for us, walking once, striking out once, and hitting a long double to centerfield that would have been a home run for a younger, fleeter athlete, Ted came up in the seventh and won the game with his mighty whallop high over the second floor roof of the Legion, something never seen before or - last time I checked - since in Chatham (now called Marimichi).

- As the 1300 people (about 1200 more than for a usual industrial league game there) went nuts, the paunchy but deeply tanned and still handsome Williams did his home run trot around the bases with his cap held high in the air (just like he did his first year and a half in Boston) and he stopped a couple of times to smile and laugh with the crowd.

- Almost forty years ago but I'll never forget that great scene with the great Ted Williams. Corked bats - nah, not him.

[Toy Cannon]

- So sure, TC, Ted must have tried it in BP and if it was legal at some point, perhaps in games. After all, he was a scientist of batsmanship and he tried everything experimentally. But he would not cheat through illegal substances or materials or other unfair advantages in real game conditions.

Corked bats - nah, not him.

I hope you didn't mis-understand and think that I was proposing that Ted used cork. Nothing could be further from the truth. The angle I was pushing for was the weight of the bat angle. Another innovation from one of if not the greatest hitter of all time.

[Teddy Ballgame]

- TC - YES, I understood your point and didn't take umbridge at a suggestion you didn't even make, friend.

- Here's another Tedbit that may amuse you. Williams was notoriously thin skinned and also notoriously talented in controlling his bat and this was a time when he was able to combine these two aspects of his notoriety. It seems that a particularly loud and leather lunged Williams' hater had a seat near first base from which his constant, often obscene and usually unfair berating of The Splinter could be heard by people all over Fenway Park and most particularly by Ted's tender ears and psyche when he was at the plate.

- Finally, Williams vowed that enough was enough and he would get back at this troublesome fan. A reporter noted that in one at bat early in the game Williams pulled the ball foul 11 times in just 13 or 14 pitches. He also observed that 10 of these 11 foul balls went screaming to within a foot and sometimes inches of this corpulent, loud mouthed creep who'd been giving Ted grief, causing him to duck, jump, put up his hands in self defence and take a couple of these foul balls right in his ample breadbasket. Then the fan in question got up and went to the washroom for a long, long time. By the time he returned, he had miraculously become mute.

HOW'S THIS FOR BAT CONTROL?