Second Chance

Chapter 102

I OPENED MY EYES in a hospital room, feeling the constraining pull of the IV line stuck in my arm.

Claire was standing over me.

“You are a lucky girl,” she said. “I talked to the doctors. Bullet grazed your right abdomen but didn't lodge. What you've basically got is one of the nastiest floor burns you'll ever see.”

“I heard floor burns go well with powder blue, don't they?” I said softly my lips parting in a weak smile.

Claire nodded, tapping the taped bandage on her neck.

“So I'm told. Anyway, congratulations... You've earned yourself a cozy desk job for the next couple of weeks.” “I already have a desk job, Claire,” I said. I blinked a confused look around the hospital room, then I pulled myself up into a sitting position. My side ached as if it were on fire.

“You did good, girl.” Claire squeezed my arm. “Coombs is dead, and now safely ensconced in hell. There's a mob of people outside who want to talk with you. You're gonna have to get used to the accolades.”

I closed my eyes, thinking of the misplaced attention about to come my way. Then, through the haze, it hit me.

What I had discovered before I blacked out.

My fingers gripped Claire's arm. “Frank Coombs didn't have a tattoo.”

She shook her head and blinked back. “So...?”

It hurt to talk, so the words came out in a whisper. “The first murder, Claire. Estelle Chipman... She was killed by a man with a tattoo. You said it.”

“I could've been wrong.”

“You're never wrong.” I flashed my eyes.

She eased back on her stool, her brow creased. “I'm doing the autopsy on Frankie-boy Monday morning. There could be a highly pigmented section of skin, or a discoloration somewhere.”

I managed a smile. “Autopsy... ? My professional opinion is that he was shot.”

“Thanks.” Claire grinned. “But someone's got to take the bullets out of him and match them up. There'll be an inquiry.”

“Yeah.” I blew out a gust of air and dropped my head back on the pillow. The whole incident, seeing the cop coming up to me, realizing it was Coombs, the flash of his gun, all came back to me as broken fragments.

Claire stood up, brushed herts without interruption. His one fight came when Jimmy Cannon arrived.just after The Miracle of 1957

Ted had finished an extensive forty-five-minute interview with a sizable group of other out-of-town writers. Joe McKenney, the Red Sox publicity director, asked Cannon to wait until Ted came back in but Cannon insisted on going out to left field to see Ted immediately. predictably, Ted blew his stack.

Even though Ted's league-leading average fell off sixty points, the 1958 season was in certain respects a greater accomplishment than the season of 1957. Not only was he beset by injury or illness throughout the year, but his physical problems were complicated, during the first half of the season, by that unseemly truce with his old enemies in the press box. If the human race has learned anything from history, it is that peace treaties do not do a thing for either world peace or for Ted Williams's batting average.

He had reported to camp with a tender ankle, the result of an accident suffered on a fishing trip in Labrador. On the second day he pulled a muscle in his side. He didn't even get into the lineup until after the Sox broke camp, and then he went in only as a pinch hitter against minor-league opposition. In his five appearances, he was sharp enough to get two home runs, a single, and two walks.

Then, on the night before the opening-day game against Washington, he ate some tainted oysters and came down with a case of food poisoning. When he returned to the lineup, his timing was a little off, and just when it was coming back into focus, he banged his wrist against the fence while catching a long fly ball. The wrist remained sore almost all year; Ted reinjured it again and again while sliding into base. The last time came, most uncharacteristically, while he was trying to go from second to third on a short fly ball to right field. On top of all that, he ran into a terrible streak of bad luck where by actual count, outfielders reached into the distant right-field bull pen at Fenway Park to take home runs away from him seven separate times in less than two months. There was also the annual arrival of the lung ailment, which put him out of action for thirteen days in September.

The result of it all was that Ted got off to such a terrible start that for the first time since his freshman season he did not make the starting All-Star lineup. The Boston writers, having studied him for twenty

years, shook their heads and let you know that Ted was not g around with those wrists anymore. They were reluctant, howev put their opinion into print. They had eaten those words too times. And, anyway, peace had descended comfortably between t

During that early low point, Ted told me, “I know what's w The little injuries that have kept me from getting my timing dow sharp. Little things bother you in this game. It's not like hocke football, where they can strap you up and send you out almost as as new. That's not an alibi, now, it's just a way of saying that as as I know why I'm not hitting, I'm not worried. When the time cc when I'm not hitting and I don't know why I'm not hitting, that be the time to quit. When they're throwing the fastball by me, wh, find myself striking out two or three times a game, that will be time I'll know my reactions are going. And nobody will have to me. I'll know it first of all.”

He was down to.225 when a Kansas City writer finally broke curity silence and wrote that Ted was obviously washed up. The n, day, as was to be expected, Ted hit a grand-slam home run, the st teenth grand slammer of his career, to give the Sox an 8-5 victor The day after that he slashed out three hits.

It was not until July, though, that he brought his average up to.30 and it was not until a Boston writer accused him of choking in tt clutch that he really begin to move. The day after the magazine ca tying that article hit the stands, Ted hit two home runs and a singk to knock in seven runs in an 11 - 8 victory. One of the home runs wa his seventeenth grand slammer, tying him with Babe Ruth for secom place in that category, behind Lou Gehrig's twenty-third.

By that time, the uneasy peace had already been shattered. On week earlier, in point of fact, Ted had brought the newspapers down on him again by spitting at a Kansas City crowd that was booing him for not running out a ball hit back at the pitcher. “I'm really sorry I did it,” Ted said, after Cronin fined him $250. “I was so mad that I lost my temper, and afterward I was so sorry. I'm principally orr about losing the $250.”

Once the feud with both the press and the public was on again, Ted's average began to move up in the charts like a bullet. On Augus 8, he pushed into a tie with his teammate, Pete Runnels, for the batting lead. Then, with the season running out, he began to slip back. Desperate measures were called for. With a week remaining, Ted landed on the front pages again, brought the wrath of the civilized world dowr. upon him, and, needless to say, embarked immediately on a hittin streak that carried him to another batting championship,

Ted entered the game in question, on September 22, trailing Runnels by six points. He had gone hitless in seven straight times at bat. In the first inning, Runnels singled, and Ted, hitting right behind him, grounded into a double play. Two innings later, Runnels singled again, and Ted took a third strike. Completely disgusted with himself for taking the pitch, Ted turned toward the dugout and angrily flung his bat away. Unfortunately, the bat caught for a moment on the stick, substance he used on it to give himself a firmer grip. Instead of skidding across the dirt, the bat spiraled into the air, sailed into the box seats seventy-five feet away, and hit a sixty-year-old woman. The woman, Mrs. Gladys Heffernan, turned out to be Joe Cronin's housekeeper and a longtime admirer of Ted Williams. Otherwise, the Sox would have had a healthy lawsuit on their hands.

Ted, appalled, rushed to the railing, where the motherly Mrs. Hefleman paused to reassure him before being taken off to the first-aid room. Ted went back to the dugout with tears streaming down his face and emerged only after the umpire-in-chief, Bill Summers, had assuree him that everybody knew he had not meant to throw the bat. Ted took his outfield position to the familiar strains of unrestrained booing. his next turn at bat, he answered the boos by doubling home a run.

Cronin, who was almost as upset as Ted was, told the press, “I was an impetuous act, but no one is sorrier than Ted is. He feel awful. We will take no disciplinary action. It was unfortunate, but we certainly know Williams didn't do it intentionally.” Mrs. Heffernan interviewed from her hospital bed, said, "I don't see why they had to boo him. It was not the dear boy's fault. I felt awfully sorry for hirr

after it happened. I should have ducked.“ Williams said, ”I just almost died."

From the time of the bat-throwing incident to the end of the season, he had nine hits in thirteen times at bat. The Red Sox were ending their season in Washington, and with two games remaining Ted and Runnels were tied down to the ninth decimal point,.322857643. Frank Malzone was Runnels's roommate: “Pete and I were talking before the game. He said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'Just go out and get some hits. You can still win it.'” Runnels started off with a triple. Ted followed with a walk. Runnels then singled, and Ted singled behind him. On his third time at bat, Runnels hit a home run, only to have Ted hit one right behind him.

“He comes over to me,” Malzone says, “and he said, 'He's not going to let me win this thing, is he?' ”

“I said, 'Naw, I guess not, Pete.' I said, 'Got to get another one. If you get another one, he can't catch you.'”

On his fourth try, Runnels finally made out. Ted singled, to take over the batting lead for the first time that season. At the end of the day, Runnels was three for six, but Ted was three for four. On the season, Runnels was.324. Ted was.326.

In the final game, Ted clenched the batting title with a double and a seventh-inning, game-winning home run, that lifted the Red Sox into third place.

“I don't think anyone else in this league but Ted could have beaten me in a race like this,” Runnels said. “It's no disgrace to finish runner up to Williams in a batting championship.”

An equally gracious Williams was saying that Runnels had hit the ball just as hard as he had over that final week, and maybe harder. “I was lucky,” he said, “because my balls had distance and some of his were hit right at the fielders.”

At the age of forty, Ted Williams had won another American League batting title. He was going to have two more years--the dreadful, injury-ridden season of 1959 and a year of injuries and personal anguish capped off in triumph,

I realized what a great guy Tom Yawkey was, and I will always sing his praises as a terrific guy and a man. I knew he would have liked to have a stronger relationship with me, but I never did want to pursue that aspect of it.

--TED WILLIAMS

the of the standard flights of fantasy when baseball fans get toO gether centers on the stupendous feats of hitting that would have been achieved if Ted Williams had been able to play half his games in yankee Stadium and Joe DiMaggio had been able to take dead aim at the left-field wall at Fenway Park.

Ted Williams, for one, isn't so sure. “The thing of it is, when you get in them short ballparks, like DiMag in Fenway and Williams at New York, they pitch a little different to you. All you got to do is look at the statistics. Doggone it, you don't get anything to hit.”

It was Joe Cronin who first gave Ted reason to think about it, and Cronin wasn't talking so much about the ballpark as about the recognition and acclaim. “It was my first or second year in the big leagues,” Ted says, “and Joe took me to a restaurant with his wife and somebody else. He said 'You know, Ted, some day when you're looking back, you may be sorry you didn't play in New York.' I was just a young kid. I didn't have an opinion really. He said, 'No, there are two things you are going to wish you could have done in your career. First, that you didn't play in New York, and also that you weren't a faster runner.' For damn sure, he was right on that last one.”

It could have happened. There were at least two times during Ted's career when there were serious conversations between Tom Yawkey and Dan Topping, the Yankees owner, about a WilliamsforDiMaggio trade. And that's not counting a most intriguing proposition that came to Ted within a week after he retired.

A more fruitful area for speculation, however, would go like this: Forget the fences and look to the ownership. What would have happened, in other words, if Ted Williams had grown up under the hard eyed businessmen who ran the Yankees organization and Joe Di Maggio had fallen under Tom Yawkey's beneficent gaze?

With the Yankees ownership you either toed the line or you were gone. It didn't matter how much the players hated Casey Stengel. George Weiss, the general manager, had impressed on them that nobody was indispensable, and so when Stengel barked at them they jumped, For that matter, the players themselves were known to haul a fresh rookie out into the back alley and show him their knuckles. “You're fooling with our money” was the way that tune went.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the Red Sox's permissive attitude was exactly what Ted needed. Birdie Tebbetts, the old psychologist (he has a B.S. in philosophy from Providence College), seems to think so. “Joe Cronin has never got the credit he deserves in the way he treated Williams,” Tebbetts says. “He knew he had a troubled kid, and he held him under a loose rein. He disciplined him only when he had to and then went back to allowing Ted Williams to be Ted Williams.”

On that assessment, Ted agrees completely. “I know how lucky I was--I know how lucky I was--that I played for a manager like Joe Cronin. Joe Cronin came closer to treating me like a father, with good advice, friendly advice, intimate advice, than any other single man in my life. He had a beautiful family, and he was a tremendous father. Lovely kids. Lovely wife. He was a handsome Irish guy, and I envied him how he could bullshit the press. He could get a guy he didn't like and have him going out of the office thinking Joe Cronin was a helluva guy. Joe Cronin would have been as good a politician as a ballplayer.”

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,

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

the boss a

and gen erc

cavalier art

Tom Yawkey and the Country Club

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 back 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.

On the game in question, Kinder got so drunk that it slipped his mind he was supposed to be pitching until Clif Keane, who knew both his habits and his habitats, hurried down to the Kenmore Hotel, interrupted his liaison with a young lady, and broke the not necessarily welcome news to him. Then Keane helped him get dressed and lugged him to the ballpark. In those days, starling pitchers still warmed up in front of their respective dugouts. Drunk as he was, Kinder was throwing the ball all over the place, something everybody in the ballpark except Joe McCarthy could see, possibly because Joe McCarthy was kind of sleeping it off himself.

Kinder, well aware that he needed a stiffener, cut his warm-up short

and went into the clubhouse for “a cup of coffee.” Or something. Slick-haired Jack Kramer, who had the locker next to his, was always complaining that Kinder was drinking his hair tonic.

Clif Keane: “Nellie Fox was the first hitter. The first pitch went up on the backstop. The second one came in on a couple of bounces. Dave Philley was the second batter. The first pitch came bouncing up to the plate, and the second one went up against the backstop.” Birdie Tebbetts, his catcher, was yelling, “Get him out of here. He's drunk.” Eight straight pitches Kinder threw without coming anywhere near the plate, and somewhere along the way Joe McCarthy woke up enough to sense that something was amiss. “I'll never forget this scene,” says Keane. “Here comes McCarthy. Kinder sees McCarthy coming and, thinking quickly, he begins to work his left arm. He's a right-handed pitcher. McCarthy says, 'That costs you five hundred dollars.' He brings in Maurie McDermott. McDermott pitches a four-hit shutout, and McCarthy never takes the money from Kinder.”

The way the story went out over the news wires, it read: “After issuing passes to the first two batters, the right-hander left the game with a kink in his left shoulder.” A not-so-cryptic message to the rest of the baseball world.

McCarthy was indisposed again in Chicago two weeks later, at a time when the Red Sox were losing steadily. It was said that he resigned because of his health. If so, Tom Yawkey was suitably grateful.

McCarthy was replaced by Steve O'Neill, who was Joe Cronin's drinking buddy.

By the time Ted returned from Korea, the manager was Lou Boudreau, who got the job by playing pepper with Yawkey at Fenway Park every morning. The “country club,” otherwise known as the Yawkey follies, was in full flower over the rest of Ted's career.

It all came to a climax, during Ted's last two years, with the hiring and firing of Billy Jurges. Or, if you prefer, the firing and hiring of Mike Higgins.

It began in the spring of 1959 when Joe Cronin was named president of the American League. He was hired because (I) he had always

wanted the job, and (2) Yawkey had confided to his fellow owners that he wanted to get rid of him and (3) it was a job with such limited responsibilities that it didn't matter who held it. What followed with the Red Sox was not so much musical comedy as pure slapstick.

To replace Cronin as general manager, Yawkey hired Bucky Harris-the man Cronin had replaced as manager twenty-three years ear tier. A neat symmetry there. Yawkey had always felt guilty about letting Bucky go.

He was, alas, doing Bucky no favor. Bucky had a gorgeous young wife, and until Yawkey felt the need to go rummaging around in his conscience he had been living a perfectly happy life. Bucky wasn't an administrator. Bucky wasn't an executive. Bucky was a falling-down drunk. By 1959, he was so far gone that the office help had to guide his hand through his signature on official papers. Dick O'Connell, the business manager, was running the club. “Dick,” Bucky would tell him, “I don't want this job. I don't want it.”

Mike Higgins was in his fifth year as the field manager. He was another of Yawkey's drinking buddies, but he was also a very strong and solid man, with a lot of personal problems which he drowned, as he liked to say, with “cherry bombs.” To say he was a player's manager was to understate it. “I love playing for Higgins,” one of the players was quoted as saying. “He never gets mad at us when we lose.” By June of 1959, the Red Sox had fallen into last place, the anti-Higgins faction of the press was howling for his head, and Yawkey dispatched Bucky Harris to Washington with orders to fire him.

Already the geography was unfortunate. Washington was Bucky Harris's home ground, and instead of going to the team's hotel, to make the announcement to the hastily gathered press, he went roaming off to his old haunts and disappeared for two days--although “Bucky sightings” were posted periodically in the press box. From Washington, the Red Sox traveled up to Baltimore by bus. When they arrived at the Lord Baltimore Hotel they found their missing general manager sitting in the lobby.

Within thirty seconds, Harris and Higgins were headed out the door

and across the street to the Gaiety Bar. Right behind them were three members of the Boston press corps, plus Bill Crowley, then a member of the broadcasting team. Harris and Higgins were at one end of the huge oval bar, arguing. The media guys settled down at the other end. Otherwise the place was empty.

Three scenes are going to be taking place in separate venues. One at the Gaiety Bar, another in Ed Rumill's hotel room, in the hotel, and the third at the rooftop press room at Fenway Park.

Bill Crowley: “The Gaiety had this fat, ugly bar girl, Audrey, who looked like Tugboat Annie. Jake Liston of the Traveler hands her a sawbuck and says, 'Go down and wash some glasses, and come back and tell us what they're talking about.' She comes back in a couple of minutes. 'The little guy keeps telling the big guy he should resign. The big guy keeps telling the little guy to go luck himself.' ”

Off that promising beginning, Lyn Raymond of the Quincy Ledger slipped her another ten spot and sent her back to wipe around the bar. Back she came with her new report. “The little one says to the big one he's fired. The big one tells him he's a little shiI, he can't fire him. The little one says, 'I can fire you, and I have to fire you, because Yawkey wants me to fire you.'”

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor had been taking a phone call from one of his numerous ex wives. The former Mrs. Rumill had been in Duke Zeibert's restaurant in Washington the previous night and had overheard a conversation between George Preston Marshall, the owner of the Washington Redskins, and Bucky Harris in which Marshall, the football man, had been holding forth on the merits of the Senators' third-base coach, Billy Jurges. “I think you're right,” she had heard Bucky say. “He might be just the right man for us at this time.”

Okay, the Boston writers now had it all. Which was more than could be said for Tom Yawkey, back in Boston. Yawkey had called a press conference to announce the dismissal of Higgins. Unfortunately, nobody at Fenway Park had been able to locate Bucky Harris during those two days, either. With nothing to tell the press, Yawkey was at

the bar, drinking heavily. He was also doing something he almost never did, he was taking questions. Unaccustomed as he was to being cross examined, he turned hostile. “There are people here who are trying to tell me how to run a seven-million-dollar operation,” he said, “and there's not one of you who could even run a streetcar.” To show how bad things were going for him, one of the writers delivered a stiff protest. He had worked his way through college driving a streetcar, he wanted Yawkey to know. Through Harvard University yet.

Soon enough, Yawkey retreated to the position that he hadn't called the press conference to announce the name of a new manager but only to inform them that there was going to be a club meeting over the All Star break to decide what direction the Red Sox were going to take.

Right on cue, the phone rang. The call wasn't for Yawkey, though. It was for Hy Hurwitz. As soon as he put down the phone, Hurwitz

said, “You haven't decided who your new manager is going to be?” “I haven't decided whether there's going to be a new manager.”

Hurwitz said, "Down in Baltimore they're announcing that Bucky

Harris is saying that Billy Jurges is going to be the new manager.“ ”Who? Who?"

“Mr. Yawkey, the Globe is printing that you hired Billy Jurges today. Two hours ago.”

“We did?” said Thomas Austin Yawkey, the sole owner of the Boston Red Sox Baseball Club.

Billy Jurges had been a great shortstop for the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants. He had played for the Cubs, as a young buckaroo, in the Chicago of AI Capone. In the spirit of the times, he had once taken a bullet through the hand while trying to convince teammate Kiki Cuyler's gun-toting girlfriend that Kiki wasn't being unfaithful to her. Obviously he was the perfect manager for the Boston Red Sox.

Wrong. It wasn't Capone's Chicago, and Billy wasn't twenty-three years old. Billy Jurges tried to instill some discipline into the ball club, SOme rules even. A curfew, for crissake. The players hated him. They also ignored him. Let him fine away to his heart's content; they knew

nothing would ever be taken out of their paychecks. Frank Sullivan, the ringleader of the not-so-jolly band of hell-raisers, summed it up perfectly at the end of one road trip. “If a bomb had hit the hotel in Detroit at two in the morning,” he said, “we'd have still been able to put a team on the field.”

In the spring of 1960, as Ted was getting ready for his final year, the former Higgins supporters in the press corps began to print that there was dissension in the Red Sox clubhouse over the way Jurges was running the club. Ted Williams jumped to Jurges's defense and was quoted by Joe Reichler of the AP as saying, “It's all a bunch of horsefeathers. It's those damn Boston writers again. They're always starting trouble.”

But that was almost a reflex action. “I was for every manager I ever played for,” he says, “every one of them.” What he really means is that all he ever wanted from the manager was to be left alone. “My game was right there to play, to hit the best I could, and I tried to do that every time I got to the plate. The manager wasn't going to affect me. I think if I had hated a manager, I'd have hit better because I'd have been mad at him when I got to the plate. You can get too damn happy with it all, and too self-satisfied, and barn, you go down the tubes.”

In June the Red Sox were back in last place, and on their way to Minneapolis to play an exhibition game against their farm club (which had a new kid, just out of Notre Dame, named Carl Yastrzemski). A mediocre sore-armed minor-league pitcher who hadn't won a game all year pitched a no-hitter against them, and by the time they boarded the plane for Kansas City there was a story on the wire quoting an unidentified player as saying that Jurges had lost control of the team.

Everybody knew that the source was Tom Brewer, the team's best pitcher. As they arrived in the hotel lobby in Kansas City, Jurges announced that there would be a clubhouse meeting and he wanted all the players and all the newspapermen to be there.

The newspapermen at a clubhouse meeting? Already disaster was in the air. The players were sitting or standing at their lockers. The writers were scattered around the walls.

Ted Williams, still being protective of Jurges, was glowering at any writer who dared to come near him. Pumpsie Green, who had just been called up from the minors to become the Red Sox's first black player, had just sat down at the end of the table in the middle of the room and been handed an ice-cream bar when Jurges came clomping out of his office.

Bill Crowley was there again: "The great lesson I learned that day was that if you want to make a dramatic entrance do not wear shower clogs. ' '

Standing there in his shower clogs, Jurgcs demanded that the player quoted in the wire story step forward and identify himself.

Nobody moved. (Talking about it later, the Boston writers decided that if Brewer had stepped forward, Jurgcs would have had a hcan attack. And that if, God forbid, Ted Williams had stepped forward, he'd have gone into cardiac arrest.)

The identity of the culprit having gone undisclosed, the press now discovered why they were there. “We're all in this together,” Jurges iformed them, “We're all working for the city of Boston and the Boston Red Sox.”

Not one of the writers who had been hammering at him so mercilessly said a word. It was left to Roger Birtwell of the Globe, an aging and shall we say over-genteel member of the press corps, to arise from his crouch, and in his broad prissy Harvard accent deliver a lecture to Mr. Jurges on the duties and responsibilities of the press.

The ballplayers were chortling, Ted Williams was still glowering, and Pumpsie Green was so astonished at this introduction to the major leagues that he just sat there while the ice-cream bar melted and dripped down his hand. You could almost hear him thinking, "This is the big leagues... ?,,

And then it got worse. After the meeting was over, the distraught Jurges gave an exclusive interview to Larry Claflin of the American to the effect that he felt he wasn't being supported by the front office. He was so far gone that he even criticized Mr. Yawkey for not backing him properly, an all-time first in Boston. By the time the team reached Washington, the word had come back from Fenway Park so forcefully

that he called another press conference to mend his fences. Nobody came. “We don't have any story to clarify” was the message that was sent back to him. “Give it to your private correspondent, Claflin, and let him do your apologizing for you.”

With the club continuing to lose, the Red Sox sent the club physician down to give Jurges what was called a “physical examination.” The next day he was told to go to his home in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, for a rest, and not to worry, because when he was ready to come back the job would still be his.

Tom Yawkey, who never held press conferences, held his second press conference in two years. This one ended with him threatening to take the Red Sox out of Boston because the Boston press had exceeded the bounds of decency. The purpose of the press conference was to issue a statement, over the signatures of Tom Yawkey and Bucky Harris, saying that Jurges was the manager and no changes were contemplated. Ted Williams had already issued a statement reiterating his support of Jurges through his personal columnist, Joe Reichler.

While Jurges was resting in his home in Silver Spring, he received a registered letter from Yawkey and Harris granting him his unconditional release.

When the Red Sox arrived back in Boston, they found that Mike Higgins was their manager again. Yawkey had located Higgins at a convention of postmasters in New Orleans and had told him to fly to Cleveland. He had then sent Dick O'Connell to Cleveland with instructions to bring Higgins to Boston, sober.

“Rehiring Higgins raises a question,” wrote Jerry Nason, the sports editor of the Boston Globe. “Do the Red Sox know what they are doing?”

That was the Red Sox in 1960, as the career of Ted Williams was coming to an end.

Forever, and forever, farewell, Cassius? if we do meet again, why, we shall smile; if not, why then, this parting was well made,

-- SHAKESPEARE Harold Kaese's lead in

the Boston Globe, September 27, 1960

after the two change-of-life batting championships, Tom Yawkey was more anxious than ever for Williams to retire. Despite that oft-expressed desire to leave the spotlight, imposed upon him by the world of baseball, Ted could not bring himself to depart.

He had after all, committed himself from the beginning to leave his mark upon the record books. He already had 482 home runs as the 1958 season came to an end and he wanted, he said, to pass Lou Gehrig's mark of 493 before he retired--and, if possible, to become the fourth man in history to achieve a total of 500.

Ted was almost was ready to quit, though, when he learned that the Red Sox would be moving their spring-training headquarters to Scotts dale, Arizona. He had heard, in his travels, that it was almost impossible to work up a sweat in the thin Arizona air, and he was afraid he would never be able to get in shape. He discovered very quickly that his information could not have been more incorrect. He thrived so wonderfully on the dry Arizona air that after a couple of weeks he was in the best shape he had been in for years.

In mid-March, the Red Sox and the Indians were to play a three game exhibition series in San Diego, Ted's hometown. Since he had not played in San Diego since a barnstorming tour in 1941, he put aside his plans to eschew exhibition games so that he could play once more before a hometown crowd. He arrived in San Diego a day before either of the clubs did to do some advance publicity work. The city opened its arms to greet the man who had become its most famous son. Ted had a great time renewing acquaintances with old friends and schoolmates.

The first two games were played at night. The first night turned out

cool and damp, the kind of weather he should never have played in. He stayed in the game for five innings, though, to satisfy the people who had turned out to see him. The next night was even cooler and damper. This time Ted played seven innings. In the final game, played on a warm Sunday afternoon, he played through another seven innings.

With the teams returning to Arizona, Ted was given permission to remain in San Diego for a few more days. Before the Indians left, Frank Lane, their general manager, asked Ted, as a special favor, to try to make one of the upcoming games at Cleveland's own training camp, in Tucson. Ted, who was always fond of Lane, promised that he would.

Although his neck had begun to stiffen up on him, Williams, true to his promise, hopped into his car and drove 150 miles across the desert. He suited up, came to the back of the batting cage, and attempted a couple of warm-up swings. The neck hurt so badly that he didn't even try to step into the cage. “I'm going to have to back out on you, Frank,” he told Lane. “I just can't swing at all.” “I know you didn't drive 150 miles to back out of anything,” Lane told him. “I'm grateful to you for making the try.”

At first, his problem was diagnosed as a cold in the neck. It was actually a pinched nerve. Because it was widely believed that Ted had used slight or imaginary injuries to get out of exhibition games for years, the first stories about the pinched nerve were taken, it may be said, with a pinch of salt.

Ted was not alarmed at first, because he was told that the trouble would clear up in plenty of time for him to make the opening game of the season. “It was when it got worse instead of better, and I realized I was going to miss the opener again,” Ted said later, “that I began to really feel discouraged.”

Shipped up to Boston at the end of March, he was fitted with a thick collar, and told that he would indeed probably miss the opener. He missed much more than that. It was another full month before the collar was taken off, and another ten days before he was able to play.

The Kid's Last Game

It was anticipated that he would work his way into the lineup slowly-- as he always had in the past--but Ted surprised everybody by asking to be written into the starting lineup as soon as the club came back to Boston. His muscles were still sore, his hands were still blistered, and he bore little resemblance to the Ted Williams whom Boston fans had become accustomed to cheering and booing. He went twenty-one times at bat without a base hit, picked up a couple of hits, then went nothing for sixteen.

He had forgone the slower, surer route because he felt that he was in terrible condition that only the steady, hard competitive play could bring him around. A terrible mistake. The neck bothered him all year. Since he couldn't move his head, he had to stand at the plate facing the pitcher. “I didn't expect to do real good,” he said, “but I never thought I'd be that bad.”

In mid-June, he was batting. 175 (103- 18). The Red Sox, who had been in fifth place when he returned to the lineup, dropped into the cellar, and for the first time in his life Ted Williams found himself being benched for non-hitting.

He didn't start to hit until after he had failed to make the starting lineup in the All-Star Game again.

And then came a succession of small, nagging injuries to go along with the constant pain in his neck. He skinned the knuckles on his hand sliding. In mid-August, an abscessed tooth knocked him out of a series in New York. By then, Billy Jurges, who had replaced Higgins for the second half of the season, had announced that he was going to “spot” Ted here and there, a nice way of saying that he was being benched again.

In the dog days of August he had always loved in the past, he was deep in another slump. By the last week of August, Ted Williams was batting.233.

He felt old. He was always tired. And, finally, in a night game against Kansas City, he didn't even bother to run back to the Red Sox dugout between innings unless he was due to come to bat. Instead, he took his rest in the Boston bull pen along the left-field foul line.

For the season, he hit only.254. And, despite a final flickering of the flame near the end, he was able to pick up only ten home runs, one short of the number he had needed to catch Lou Gehrig.

As the season came to an end, Yawkey called him to his suite at the Ritz Carlton and told him flat-out that he wanted him to retire. “It hurt me,” Ted says, looking back. “I didn't think I was ready to retire. I thought I could still hit. We agreed that we'd see what happened in spring training.”

Hurt, yes. Surprised, no. During the season, Yawkey had sent Dick O'Connell to sound him out about becoming the manager. That's the way you do it when you're looking for deniability. You send a third party to ask the man you want to hire whether he would be interested in the job “if it were offered to you.” If he turns you down, it is never on the record that the job had been offered. “He told me that he would never give the Boston writers the chance to second-guess him,” O'Connell says. “I've never really been sure whether he understood that the job was really being offered to him.”

“I knew,” Ted laughs. And he also knew why. It was not the first time the job had been tendered. Joe Cronin had offered the job to him during the latter part of the 1954 season. “I said, I don't want to manage. I said, I can still hit. And I proved that for five years. Cronin said absolutely, 'Why don't you take it? The guys all respect you.' They all this and that. They never brought it up again in those five years, but that's the way it all started. And it would have been a terrible mistake.”

He would be facing his final year--as he had faced the previous one--with wracking trouble back in San Diego. His brother, Danny, was dying of leukemia, the disease Ted had devoted so much of his time to combating, and his mother--Salvation May of the invincible faith--had broken under the strain of her younger son's obviously losing battle against death and had suffered a complete nervous breakdown.

As the final irony, Danny had straightened himself out after the war

and had found work as a contract painter and interior decorator. He had married, he had a couple of kids, and he had reconciled with his older brother.

For at least three years Ted had been chartering planes to fly Danny to Salt Lake City for medical treatment (which puts a different light on those missed appointments in Los Angeles, doesn't it?), and he was making sure that Danny had no financial worries as far as his family was concerned. By 1959, he was also flying back to San Diego himself to tend to the care of his mother and, finally, to move her to a rest home in Santa Barbara (which puts a new light on the early arrival and late departure at that exhibition game in San Diego, doesn't it?).

Danny died in March of 1960, at the age of thirty-nine, while Ted was in training camp. May Williams died on August 27, 1961, in the Santa Barbara rest home.

“Those are just the things that happen in life,” is all Ted wants to say. “Sure, I had problems at home trying to help my mother and brother and everybody else who was involved. For sure, it bothered me. I had this responsibility, and I wasn't going to shirk from it, and I really didn't. I did the best I could, and let's let it go at that.”

Training camp was sheer torture for Ted. As if it wasn't bad enough to be grieving over his brother and worrying about his mother, he no longer had the support or comfort that had always been provided by Johnny Orlando, the good old friend who had been his confidant from

the beginning in all matters concerning his family.

Johnny Orlando had been fired.

Johnny's drinking had got out of hand. No question about it. He was showing up late at the ballpark. He was neglecting his duties. But why now? Why couldn't they have waited one more year, until Wil lianas was gone? Orlando had not only been Ted Williams's pal for twenty years. He had been Yawkey's pal even longer.

Johnny had a flair. He would go striding into a bar where baseball people were gathered and say, “I represent the wealthiest franchise in baseball. Drinks for everybody.” And sign Tom Yawkey's name. Why not? He was Yawkey's pal, and he did represent the ball club. A ball

team has to entertain people. Yawkey had his own partners buying everybody drinks.

But the Sox didn't tell Johnny he was being fired for being a drunkard. How could they? “Who the hell got him drunk?” Dick O'Connell asks. “Yawkey and Cronin. Tom Yawkey would send him bottles of Old Forester by the carton.”

What had happened was that Johnny had been sent to the opening of a baseball library, had bumped into a gathering of wealthy executives in the parlor car on the train, and when he was asked why he was going to St. Louis he had reverted to form. “I represent the richest franchise in baseba/1,” Johnny Orlando had announced. “The drinks are on me.” So Johnny was told he was being fired for that.

The writers were told that he was fired for showing up late at the ballpark and for stealing things. “Orlando was a law unto himself,” Dick O'Connell says. “There was only one John.” He'd run short of dough, get a bunch of autographed balls, and sell them, depending on how much he needed. “I'm with the Red Sox,” he'd announce. “I'm stealing baseballs.”

“Who gave a damn?” O'Connell says. “If you wanted to look at it that way, it was publicity.”

Now, there's no doubt that the Red Sox had every justification for firing Johnny Orlando. They also had every justification to fire Bucky Harris, who was still the general manager. Bucky's only saving grace was that on the rare occasions when he did come in to the office he didn't try to do anything. If Orlando wasn't there to do it, it wasn't going to get done.

But what would have been so terrible about waiting another year? Well... Ted had said he'd be making up his mind about returning for another year during spring training, and whatever other reasons Yawkey might have had for firing Johnny Orlando, he wasn't making Ted's return any more attractive for him, was he?

Ted was up in Bangor, Maine, fishing with his pal Bud Leavitt when he was told about the firing. “Ted didn't say anything,” Leavitt recalls. “He just went absolutely quiet and solemn, the way he would when he was really upset.”

Don Fitzpatrick, who replaced Orlando, had been with the Red Sox for fifteen years, mostly in the visiting clubhouse. He had shagged for Ted in those early-morning batting sessions over the years. But he was not Johnny Orlando, and he knew it.

The End