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Baseball great Ted Williams was born in 1918. His mother, May
Venzer, was a Salvation Army worker. She was part Mexican and part
French. His father, Samuel Stuart Williams, was a soldier, U.S.
marshal, and photographer. He was part Welsh and part Irish.
Their son, Ted, came to have several nicknames, including “Teddy
Ballgame,” “The Splendid Splinter,” and “The Kid.”
Ted Williams with John Underwood
MY TURN AT BAT
Ted recalls his childhood:Wilber Wiley was my first real
boyhood
pal. Wilber had a job delivering the Evening Tribute, and when
he’d get through about an hour before dark, we’d go to the
playground, just the two of us, and hit, hit, hit, and throw,
throw, throw.
The Story of My Life
Ask questions, clear up anything you don’t understand, and look
for facts and details. Support your answers with details from the
text.
Explain the difference in point of view between a biography and
autobiography.
The playground director was a man named Rodney Luscomb, and Rod
Luscomb was my first real hero. I know when I walked up to the
rostrum in Cooperstown the day they inducted me into the Hall of
Fame Rod Luscomb was one of the people on my mind, one of the
people I felt made it possible. That should tell you something
about how much a coach can mean to a kid.
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 Wos Caldwell.
I’ll never forget one day I hit a ball they say went 450 feet,
between the right and center fielders. I fell down rounding third—a
big skinny kid, all arms and legs—and I got thrown out at home
plate.
San Diego was a ballplayer’s town, year-round, and by the time I
was a pitcher at Herbert Hoover High I was hooked. As a
pitcher-outfielder, I batted .583 and .406 my last years in high
school, .430 for three years.
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Ted recalls his baseball career:I signed my first professional
contract with
the San Diego Padres at age 17 and discovered the joys of
paychecks and train rides. I never had so much fun.
In 1937, the Padres sold Ted to the Boston Red Sox. In 1938, at
the Red Sox’s farm club in Minneapolis, Williams led the league in
hitting. He moved up to the Red Sox team the next year.
That spring I was a nuisance to everybody, asking questions
about hitting … I quizzed every player on the team, and they all
had something to say, and the weight of the evidence pretty much
proved out. I can’t imagine anyone having a better, happier first
year in the big leagues. I used to send Rod Luscomb diagrams
showing how the parks were laid out and where I had hit my home
runs, telling him how happy I was. I hit a home run in every park,
completing the list in Yankee Stadium on the last day.
BASEBALL HISTORY TIME LINESept. 28, 1941 - Williams goes
6-for-8 in a doubleheader and finishes with a .406 average.
1947 - Williams wins the Triple Crown by batting .343 with 32
homers and 114 RBIs.
1948 - Williams wins the American League batting title with a
.369 average.
1949 - Williams drives in a career-high 159 runs. He leads the
league with career-high 150 walks and wins the American League MVP
award.
1951 - Williams hits .318 with 30 homers and 126 RBIs. He scores
109 runs for the season.
July 23, 1955 - Williams hits a 450-foot home run onto the
right-field roof at Comiskey Park.
July 29, 1958 - Williams hits the 17th and final grand slam of
his career in an 11–8 win over Detroit.
Sept. 28, 1960 - The final game of Ted Williams’ baseball career
as a player.
July 25, 1966 - Williams is inducted into the Hall of Fame.
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In 1941, only his third season in the majors, Williams chased a
.400 batting average.
Rod Luscomb used to say that in seven years on the playground I
never broke a bat hitting a ball incorrectly, that all my bats had
the bruises in the same spot, like they were hammered there by a
careful carpenter, right on the thick of the hitting surface. That
might be an exaggeration, but I believe it is true that when you
put in as much time as I did you get results.
A hitter can’t just go up there and swing. He’s got to think.
Listen, when I played I knew the parks, the mounds, the batters’
boxes, the backgrounds. I studied the pitchers. I knew what was
going on at that plate. It used to kill me to strike out, but when
I struck out I knew what it was that got me and what I was going to
try to do about it.
Baseball Hall of Fame
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.”
Ted Williams
LF 1939-1942, 1946-1960
Class of 1966
Theodore Samuel Williams
Born: August 30, 1918, San Diego, CA
Died: July 5, 2002, Crystal River, FL
Bats: Left Throws: Right
Played for: Boston Red Sox
(1939-1942, 1946-1960)
Elected to Hall of Fame by Baseball Writers: 1966
282 votes of 302 ballots cast (93.38%)
Hitting StatsAVG G AB R H HR RBI SB S
LG
.344 2292 7706 1798 2654 521 1839 24 .634
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