Womans Murder Club 2 - Second Chance Page 22
With the passage of time and the clouding of memory, Ted has wondered why Cronin didn't use his diplomatic skills more often in the early years (“I was just a young kid”) to smooth the relationship between Ted and the sportswriters. “But maybe I don't know how protective he was of me. And maybe I didn't always listen to him. I'm not making excuses for myself. I just want to say he was so great with me. I loved him.”
The trade talks are of interest for the light they shed on the relationship between Ted and Tom Yawkey. In the spring of 1946, Larry MacPhail, having pulled off the baseball deal of the century in taking over the ownership of the Yankees, along with Dan Topping and Del Webb, proposed to Yawkey that they get the brave new postwar world off to a glorious flag-waving start by pulling off the dream trade that would put Joe DiMaggio in Fenway Park and Ted Williams in Yankee Stadium. In later years, MacPhail would maintain that the deal was all set until Ed Barrow, with malice aforethought, pulled the rug out from under it.
The way the story goes, Ed Barrow was a guest of Yawkey at his sland estate in South Carolina, and although Barrow was still nominally the Yankees general manager, MacPhail, who was a little crazy in a genius kind of a way, had stripped him of all his authority. Hating MacPhail as he did, Barrow--who just might have invited himself down to the island for that purpose--told Yawkey he'd have to be crazy to trade the twenty-seven-year-old Williams for the thirty-year old, ulcer-ridden DiMaggio.
In the winter of 1948, Yawkey and Dan Topping shook hands on a Williams-for-DiMaggio trade during a drinking session in New York. The next morning, Yawkey was supposed to have told him, “I think I ought to get another player. If you throw in that little left-fielder of yours, it's a deal.” The little left-fielder was Yogi Berra.
“I'm sure that story was true,” Ted says. “No question about it. The way I heard the story, it was a matter of these guys getting together one night, half looped. Players were like prize possessions to them, I guess, and they made this deal, and supposedly they agreed on it, and the next day Yawkey called Topping and told him, 'You know I'm a man of my word, but I just can't go through with it.' ” Ted has heard the Yogi Berra version, too, and he doesn't completely discount it. “DiMaggio wasn't at the height of his career and I was. But of course the great DiMaggio was such a great player. He would have hit better at Fenway Park, and I might have hit better at Yankee Stadium.”
Ted is also sure--no question whatsoever about this--that he came very close to signing with the Yankees a few days after he played his final game for the Red Sox. When Ted left the ballpark that day, he
was unemployed, not terribly solvent, and in view of all the responsibilities he had taken on, terribly worried. Because if the truth be known, he had retired only because Tom Yawkey had been after him to retire for at least two years.
The season had ended for Ted on a Wednesday. Thursday was an off day. “I didn't go to New York with the team, and Saturday morning I got a telegram from George Struthers, the merchandising vice president of Sears, telling me they had something they wanted to talk to me about. I knew exactly what it was going to be.” They wanted Ted to come in and upgrade their entire sporting goods line. “Everything involved with sporting goods. Hunting, fishing, camping, skiing.” They were offering him far more money than he had ever made in baseball. And they were offering him a ten-year contract.
The American League season ended on Sunday, and on Monday the Yankees asked Ted--through his manager, Fred Corcoran--for permission to talk to the Red Sox about signing him for one year, exclusively as a pinch hitter, at the same salary he had been getting with the Red Sox.
Ted has little doubt that if the talks with Sears hadn't been progressing so rapidly he would have given it very serious consideration. “It had got to the point, though, where I was just tired of what had been going on. And I thought, Hell, I'm going to do this with Sears. So I told Fred Corcoran I wasn't interested. And that was the end of it.”
The tantalizing question is whether Yawkey would have given his permission for Ted Williams to end his career in Yankee pinstripes or whether he would have heaved up a sigh and told Ted that if he really wanted to stick around for another year he would match the Yankees' offer.
What does Ted think?
“Yawkey's relations with me were always to do what I wanted to do, more or less. I think that--” Suddenly, his voice took on a tone of certainty. “I don't know how he would have reacted. I think he was pretty sure, like ] was, that I didn't want to play anymore.”
Like everybody else in Boston, Ted Williams genuflected toward
Tom Yawkey in public. There was nothing Yawkey could ask of him, for as long as Yawkey was alive, that Ted wouldn't do. There was also a kind of pretense to a closer relationship than actually existed. Yawkey's island in South Carolina was a hunting preserve, and everybody assumed that Ted spent a great deal of time down there with him. Everybody was wrong. Ted went down to the hunting preserve in South Carolina exactly once.
“It was not a father-and-son relationship,” Ted says flatly. “I felt Yawkey liked me, but I never pursued trying to get extra close to him.” Then, so there would be no misunderstanding: “He was there. He was a simple man. He knew how lucky he had been in his life and he tried to do everything he could to be a good guy. He had an open heart for charity, an open heart for a sad story. He was just a nice easy man, really and truly.”
But, when you think about it, why should Ted have wanted to get close to him? Yawkey wasn't really bright. There was nothing Ted could learn from him. Yawkey did two things: he drank and he played bridge. Ted did not drink, and he did not play cards.
True enough, they were involved in the Jimmy Fund together, but that association was also more apparent than real. As important as Yawkey was in placing the imprimatur of the Red Sox on the Jimmy Fund, Tom Yawkey was a figurehead and Ted Williams was the blood of its heart.
Ted's relationship with Yawkey was not nearly as crucial to Ted's career as was Yawkey's personality and character as the owner of the ballclub.
Yawkey was a frustrated ballplayer who loved all his players and positively worshiped Ted. As a result, the Red Sox became a soft and pampered ball club. The general managers were Yawkey's drinking buddies. The managers were without authority. The discipline was fake discipline, the fines were fake fines.
Yawkey was a rich man's son who had been around baseball all his life. On the death of his father he was adopted by his uncle, William
H. Yawkey, a lumber and mining magnate, who had helped Ban Johnson launch the American League and had maintained a financial interest in the Detroit Tigers all his life. Tom led such a privileged childhood that ballplayers from Ty Cobb on down were invited to the Yawkey estate to play catch with him. He was twelve years old when Bill Yawkey was killed in an automobile accident. As the sole heir of his foster father--and the prospective heir of his even wealthier mother-- young Tom was written up in Sunday feature articles as “the richest boy in the world,” a characterization that owed as much to the richness of the journalists' imagination as to Tom's true place in the hierarchy of wealth. On the other hand, if you're rich enough to be looked on as a contender for the title, what difference does it make?
Yawkey was thirty years old when he bought the Red Sox, a hopelessly bankrupt team that had won only forty-three games the previous season and averaged only 2,365 paying customers. The ball club became his toy. Because he loved his players, he spoiled them rotten. And because he spoiled them rotten, they praised him to the skies. Yet there was always the sense that the praise was so unreserved (“the greatest owner in baseball” was practically engraved on his forehead) that it was being overdone. There was always the whiff of something obligatory about it.
Joe Cronin had little power to discipline his big-name players. As if being a playing manager wasn't tough enough on him, Cronin knew that his biggest stars could always walk the back stairs and cry on Tom's shoulder. When Yawkey purchased Robert Moses (Lefty) Grove,
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p; panion. Mose was a cranky old geezer. He would scream at Cronin for making an error behind him, and there was nothing much that Cronin could do about it. Not when Old Mose could rip him apart to the boss a couple of hours later over the drinks.
Unlike Grove, Jimmy Foxx was a man of enormous good nature and generosity. So convivial a fellow, in fact, that he took a rather
cavalier attitude toward curfews.
his first superstar, Grove was thirty-five years old and Yawkey thirty one. To Yawkey, Grove became Mose, his idol and his dinner corapanion. M, for mak in
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Johnny Pesky: “Cronin sat in the lobby until two in the morning waiting to grab him. Sure enough, the door of the hotel opened, and Foxx comes in, half stiff. Cronin gets up ready to blast him. Then the door opened again, and in comes Yawkey. They had been out together. What do you say when the owner of the team is taking your players out?”
That was the team that Ted Williams joined in Boston.
There is a well-publicized exchange in which Bobby Doerr asks Tommy Henrich why the Red Sox weren't able to beat the Yankees in big games. “Weren't we good enough?” Doerr asks. It wasn't that they weren't good enough, Henrich answers. “Your owner was too good to you. The Red Sox didn't have to get into the World Series to drive Cadillacs. The Yankees did.”
Oversimplified, to be sure. But essentially true. And that's where the soft, permissive environment established by Yawkey did hurt Ted. ]'he accusation that has always haunted him is that he was a great hitter but not a winning player. A more generous assessment might be that he was a great hitter on a team that was too undisciplined to become a winner.
Worse yet, it was an amateur operation--not so much a business as a hobby--pitted against the toughest, most professional operation of all time.
Bobby Doerr's answer to Henrich is to point out that immediately after winning the pennant in 1946, the Red Sox lost their three top starting pitchers to injuries. “Does anybody doubt that if Hughson, Ferriss, and Harris had remained healthy we wouldn't have won two or three more pennants?” But that's just the point. When the history of the Yawkey Era is written it could be titled “Always One Pitcher Short.” The Red Sox could always put a powerful, highly salaried starting lineup on the field. The Yankees had a powerful, not-so-well paid twenty-five-man squad.
Ted always was paid more than Joe DiMaggio, you know. Not because Ted wanted it that way, but because Tom Yawkey did. In 1948, immediately after the Yankees had made DiMaggio the first $100,000
player, a pack of writers caught Yawkey on the way up to his office. He had just sent Williams his contract, Yawkey told them, and it was going to be for more than DiMaggio's. “It may be only $1,000 more,” he said, in answer to their prodding. “But Ted Williams will always get more money than anybody else.” It was $115,000, and a year later it was $125,000.
Yawkey had a blind spot toward the value of the supporting cast, however. During the 1949 season, the thirty-six-year-old Johnny Mize was offered to Yawkey by his good friend Horace Stoneham, the owner of the New York Giants. In the previous two seasons, Mize--a lifetime ,320 hitter--had hit forty and fifty-one home runs. “What would we do with him.'?” Yawkey asked. The Red Sox already had a first baseman in Billy Goodman, didn't they? The Yankees jumped at the chance, and Mize became one of eight first basemen Casey Stengel used that year. He also won game after game as a pinch hitter. The Red Sox number-one pinch hitter, Billy Hitchcock, did not get a base hit all year.
It wasn't simply that the Red Sox regulars were overpaid and the Red Sox bench understaffed. There was no firm hand in the front of rice, no guiding philosophy, because the front office, in a perfect reflection of their employer, was always awash in booze.
To put this within its proper context, drinking was so much the occupational disease of baseball in that era that it wasn't even recognized as a disease. Or even as a vice. It proved that you were a real man, or, at least, one of the guys. The Red Sox weren't the only team that did a lot of drinking; they may not even have been the worst. But no other team offered quite the same combination of paternalism and permissiveness, because no other team was being operated as a rich man's hobby. Yawkey not only drank with the troops; he would send the heavy drinkers a bottle of his favorite brand of scotch, Old Forester, as a reward for an especially good performance.
And--just in case--the traveling secretary was always given a wad of money at the beginning of a road trip to bail out anybody who might get into trouble.
In 19z18 Joe McCarthy had been hired to bring some order and disciplineto say nothing of a team concept--to the Red Sox. Tom yawkey, making his final attempt to buy a pennant, gave him what ,as easily the strongest ball club the Red Sox ever had. The new players were Vern (Junior) Stephens, a hard-hitting shortstop, two right handed pitchers, Jack Kramer and Ellis Kinder, and a great rookie, Billy Goodman.
As soon as McCarthy was hired, the Boston papers tried to whip up a controversy over whether he would be able to get along with Ted Williams, with particular emphasis on whether he would try to impose his rigid dress code on Ted. McCarthy's answer was to show up at Sarasota wearing a Hawaiian sports shirt open at the neck. “If I can't get along with a.400 hitter,” he said, “then there's something wrong th me.” Ted liked McCarthy as a manager. “He was all business. His coaches were all business. Just coming into the clubhouse was tmsiness.” But then Ted adds, without exactly saying that Joe Me.,atthy was not the manager he had once been, “I don't know what would have happened if he had been the same man the Yankees play m talked about.”
When it came to managing a ball club, McCarthy was impressive. When it came to managing himself, he was a disaster. Always solitary and aloof, he would sit at the far end of the bench. Ted was the only player who would sit near him. The usual explanation was that Ted was the only member of the team who wasn't a little afraid of him. A perhaps more persuasive explanation might be that he was the only player who could stand his breath.
Joe McCarthy was an alcoholic. Not just someone who drank a lot, ut an alcoholic in the truest sense of the word. Even in his great days with the Yankees, he would disappear for days on end and be found in some seedy hotel lying in his own bodily wastes. To explain his bsence, the Yankees would announce that he had gone to his farm near Buffalo to recover from an attack of bursitis.
He drank when he was under stress, and Boston was the stress capital of the baseball world. Instead of running away with the pennant as they should have in 1948 the Red Sox lost their play-off game to the
Cleveland Indians when McCarthy locked himself in his hotel room with a bottle and received a message from God telling him to pitch Denny Galehouse (8-7) instead of Mel Parnell (15-8).
His wife, Babe, took care of him when the Red Sox were playing at home. Tom Dowd, the traveling secretary, took care of him on the road. During the game, Eddie Froelich, the trainer he had brought over from New York, would keep an eye on him, and Del Baker, who had been hired for precisely this purpose, would take charge when it became apparent that McCarthy was out of it.
Two stories, both classics, tell it all. The datelines read: St, Louis, September 17, 1948, and Boston, June 5, 1950. The first story involves Sam Mele, the second Ellis Kinder.
McCarthy hated Sam Mele, for reasons directly connected with Ted Williams. Ted and Mele were good friends, and Ted, ever the fight fan, had a habit of throwing light feints at his friends, almost as a gesture of affection. In this particular incident, they met in the aisle of a train, coming from opposite directions, and as they squeezed past each other Ted threw a feint and proceeded on his way. When Ted woke up the next morning he couldn't breathe. He had separated a cartilage from the ribs and was out for three weeks. Sam Mele, who had been Rookie of the Year the previous season, immediately became a part-time player.
In what turned out to be a roller coaster of a season, the Red Sox came b
ack from an eleven-and-a-half-game deficit to go four and a half games ahead in mid-September--and then began to dribble their lead away. After losing the opening game of what had been expected to be an easy series in St. Louis, the lead was down to one game, with fifteen games to go. By the next morning, McCarthy was so drunk that when it came time to take the team bus to the ballpark, Tom Dowd locked him in his room. The bus arrived at the park, the players filed into the clubhouse, and there was McCarthy sitting on a stool. (“How he beat us to the park,” Dowd would say, “I will never know.”)
Del Baker wrote Mele's name into the lineup, and in the first inning he came up with the bases loaded and two out and cleared the bases
with a double. Two batters later, he was thrown out at third base on an attempted double steal and lay there writhing in agony with a twisted anlde. Eddie Froelich went running out to treat him. Del Baker followed. McCarthy, left unattended, staggered out of the dugout and went wandering up the first-base line and into right field. It was one of those sweltering summer afternoons in St. Louis, with 1,500 fans scattered around the stands. In that sparsely inhabited, hollow arena, the voice of one leather-lunged fan came ringing forth: “When are you going to switch to wine, Joe?”
When McCarthy finally found his bearings and joined the crowd at third base, he bent over the fallen Mele and screamed, “Get up, you fucken dago!” Then he turned to Baker and demanded to know why he had called for a double steal. “You called for it,” said Baker.
Ellis Kinder was one of those drinkers who usually pitched better after a long night on the town. Cronin once offered him fifty dollars to go to bed early the night before he pitched, but after Kinder was knocked out of the box three straight times Cronin handed him a hundred and told him to go out and get drunk. He didn't always pitch better, though. McCarthy's downfall came when Joe got so drunk that he couldn't see how drunk Kinder was. The love affair between Yawkey and McCarthy was over by then, anyway. Yawkey's pets were climbing the stairs to complain about how cruelly their manager was treating them, and Yawkey was ordering McCarthy to lay off.