Baseball’s Last .400 Hitter Dies

Ted Williams, the hall-of-fame baseball player whose primary motivation in life was to be recognized as “the greatest hitter who ever lived,” died Friday of heart failure at a hospital in Inverness, Fla. He was 83.

The former Boston Red Sox star outfielder and San Diego native had suffered two strokes in the early 1990s that severely impaired the keen vision that helped Williams hit .406 in 1941, the last time a major leaguer broke the .400 barrier.

Williams had a pacemaker inserted in November 2000, then underwent open-heart surgery in New York in January 2001.

“With the passing of Ted Williams, America has lost a baseball legend,” said President Bush, who once owned the Texas Rangers in the American League.

“He inspired young ballplayers across the nation for decades and we will always remember his persistence on the field and his courage off the field. Ted gave baseball some of its best seasons--and he gave his own best seasons to his country. He will be greatly missed.”

Nicknamed “The Kid,” “The Splendid Splinter” and “Teddy Ballgame,” Williams had a .344 career batting average with 521 home runs in 19 seasons from 1939-60. He would have been a 700-homer threat had he not missed almost five seasons serving as a Marine pilot during World War II and the Korean War.

Babe Ruth had more power and Ty Cobb the highest lifetime average, but perhaps no other player hit for power and average as well as the smooth-swinging, left-handed-hitting Williams. His book “The Science of Hitting” is considered the bible of the craft and a must-read for any aspiring ballplayer.

Born in San Diego a month before the Red Sox last won a World Series in 1918, Williams rose from a gangly player at Herbert Hoover High to a big-leaguer of such acclaim that many still consider him the best hitter in baseball history.

“He was the best hitter I ever pitched to,” said hall-of-fame pitcher Bob Feller, who played for the Cleveland Indians from 1936-56. “If it hadn’t been for World War II and Korea, no one would have more records than Ted Williams.”

Hall-of-famer Stan Musial, a seven-time National League batting champion with the St. Louis Cardinals, said: “He was the greatest hitter of our era. He led the [American] league six times and a couple of other times he was close. He served our country for five years or else he would have won more batting titles.”

Added Bobby Doerr, another hall-of-famer who played with Williams for 10 seasons, “I think he was the best hitter that baseball has had.”

Frank Howard, a former major-league slugger, said, “He is the premier measuring stick for all hitters.”

In Boston on Friday, the Jumbotron television screen at Fenway Park carried only a giant 9, Williams’ retired number. While members of Williams’ former team took batting practice, former Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky stood near home plate and talked about his friend of more than 60 years.

“Williams, he could do anything at bat,” said Pesky, gazing out at a seat deep in the stands that has been painted red--the others are green--to commemorate Williams’ longest home run, hit to that very spot. “Ted was our guru. He was such a bright guy, and everything came so simply for him.”

Even in retirement, Williams’ personality so dominated Boston baseball, Pesky said, that, “You could bring Moses down from heaven, and he wouldn’t have that impact.... He was like a movie star. He always thought he was the John Wayne of baseball. Which he was.”

Present-day Red Sox star Nomar Garciaparra said, “I didn’t look at him as the greatest hitter ever. I looked at him as a friend. The impact that he had here in Boston, you see his number up there, retired in right field, and you see the [red] seat. It’s all his accomplishments.”

An average defensive player with below-average speed, Williams made his greatest impact at the plate. He won Triple Crowns in 1942 and ‘47, leading the American League in batting average, home runs and runs batted in. He hit .388 at 39 and won a batting title when he was 40.

Williams had almost three times as many walks, 2,019, as strikeouts, 709, and retired with a .483 on-base percentage, baseball’s highest. That might be the sport’s most meaningful statistic--Williams reached base nearly every other time he came to bat for 19 years. Ruth’s .474 is next-highest.

“He was better than Joe DiMaggio,” Feller said. “No contest.”

Williams and DiMaggio will be forever linked in baseball lore because they were the best players of the 1940s, they starred for archrivals, the Red Sox and New York Yankees, and they were the lead characters in one of baseball’s most dramatic seasons, 1941.

That was the year DiMaggio set what many consider an unbreakable record, getting at least one hit in 56 consecutive games, and Williams, with a finishing flourish, posted his .406 average, which hasn’t been approached since.

Williams was batting .39955 going into the final day of the season, and Manager Joe Cronin offered to sit him down to protect a mark that would have rounded off to .400.

“To hell with that,” snapped Williams. “I don’t want it that way.”

The self-confident, cantankerous Williams, whose battles with the Boston media were as legendary as his love-hate relationship with Red Sox fans, did it his way: He had six hits in eight at-bats in a doubleheader, finishing at .406.

DiMaggio, however, edged Williams for the league’s most-valuable-player award that year.

“I’m not sure if Joe rated MVP or not that time, but he got it,” a teammate of Williams said.

The teammate? Dom DiMaggio, Joe’s brother.

Decades later, speaking at a 1994 dedication of the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame in Citrus Hills, Fla., Joe DiMaggio may have ended the debate of who was the better hitter.

“The game had some great hitters that I did not see,” said DiMaggio, who died in 1999. “But from 1936 to the present day, I can truthfully say I have never seen a better hitter than Ted Williams.”

Williams followed DiMaggio to the lectern and said, “I would have to agree with 100% of what [DiMaggio] said.”

Then he grew serious, and more humble.

“Let me tell you a little secret,” Williams continued. “As I go to many of the places I go, and people start talking about the greatest hitter that ever lived, I get a little lower in my seat. I try to hide, but I can’t.

“I can’t believe it myself. I feel there’s something wrong about trying to single one guy out, but to put me in the same company with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio ... that suits me to a T.”

Like DiMaggio, a San Francisco native of humble origins, Williams grew up in California, in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego. He was the older of two sons born to Sam and May Williams, a seemingly mismatched couple with little interest in parenthood.

His father had served in the Cavalry and made a modest living as a commercial photographer. He named his son Teddy--that name is on Williams’ birth certificate--after Teddy Roosevelt and liked to tell people that he had ridden with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, which was never confirmed.

Williams’ mother, a devout member of the Salvation Army, was a dominant but emotionally distant figure, spending most of her time trying to save the souls of the down-and-out of San Diego and Tijuana, earning the nicknames of “Salvation May” and the “Angel of Tijuana.”

“I was embarrassed about my home, embarrassed that I never had quite as good clothes as some of the kids, embarrassed that my mother was out in the middle of the damn street all the time,” Williams wrote in his autobiography, “My Turn At Bat.” “My dad and I were never close.”

Williams’ outlet was baseball. In only two years, he went from high school in San Diego to the Pacific Coast League, then to Boston, arriving at the Back Bay train station in April 1939.

He was a 6-foot-4, 172-pounder who was confident to the point of cockiness.

The previous year, at Red Sox spring training, second baseman Doerr had said to Williams, “Ted, wait till you see [future hall-of-famer] Jimmie Foxx hit.”

Williams replied, “Wait till Foxx sees me hit.”

As a rookie in 1939, Williams uttered the words foreshadowing a devotion to his craft so complete that he had his bats weighed at the post office and picked the brains of anyone--players, writers, broadcasters--about opposing pitchers:

“All I want out of life is that, when I walk down the street, folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ ”

Williams quickly began fueling those hopes, hitting .327 as a rookie and earning the nickname “The Splendid Splinter” because of his lankiness and sweet swing.

He hit .344 in his second year, had his signature season in 1941, and as he matured physically, began hitting with more power, winning the Triple Crown in his fourth year by leading the league with a .356 average, 36 homers and 137 RBIs.

In November 1942, Williams, then 24 and in his prime, joined the Navy as an aviation cadet and eventually earned his officer’s commission in the Marines. He was scheduled for combat duty in the South Pacific, but the war ended before Williams was called and he returned to the Red Sox for the 1946 season.

“I lost four years to the war, Ted lost 4 1/2 years [in his two service stints]--no one ever complained,” Feller said. “The heroes didn’t come home, the survivors did. We were from a different generation. We didn’t go on the disabled list when the war broke out. There was no DL. You fought or you lost.”

Williams came home, and it was as if he never left. He hit .342 with 38 homers and 123 RBIs, won American League MVP honors and led Boston to the pennant in 1946.

In June that year, Williams hit the longest home run in Fenway Park history, a shot that landed in the 33rd row of the right-field bleachers, more than 500 feet from home plate. That’s where today the seat is painted red.

In July, Williams went 4-for-4 with two homers and five RBIs in the All-Star game at Fenway Park. This was also the year “the Williams shift” was born.

On July 14, Williams, a pull hitter who laced almost all of his hits to right field, smashed three homers and drove in eight runs in the first game of a doubleheader against Cleveland, then doubled home three more runs in his first at-bat of the nightcap.

Indians Manager Lou Boudreau decided to move everyone except his left fielder to the right side of the field, and Williams grounded out and walked twice to finish the game.

St. Louis did not employ the shift in the World Series that October, but Williams was not a factor in his first and only Series, batting .200 as the Cardinals won, four games to three.

Two years later, Boston lost a one-game playoff to Cleveland for the American League pennant, and in 1949, the Yankees edged the Red Sox on the last day of the season to win the pennant.

Williams, whose pitching-poor teams were annually drubbed by the powerful Yankees, never again got close to postseason play. Though he was still one of baseball’s best players in the 1950s--a decade interrupted by a two-year stint in Korea, where he flew 39 missions and twice landed his fighter plane after having been hit by antiaircraft fire--he never played another meaningful game in October.

He retired in 1960, and though he might have lost some bat speed toward the end of his career, his pride remained fully intact. For that 1960 season, having slumped to a .254 average in 1959, Williams demanded a 30% pay cut, from $125,000 to $90,000.

For all his success, the failures ate at Williams.

“It was a thrill to get up there and make it and find out I was as good as anybody--those things were very gratifying to me,” Williams once said. “But there was a lot of disappointment too.”

In a January 2000 interview with the New York Times, Williams said, “I still can’t sleep at night, thinking about the failures.”

Some of those extended to his personal life, as well. Williams had three broken marriages--to Doris Soule (1944-55), Lee Howard (1961-66) and Dolores Wettach (1967-72)--and longtime companion Louise Kaufman died in 1993.

Looking to cash in on the late 1980s sports memorabilia craze, Williams got mixed up in a partnership with a scam artist that cost him close to $3 million. John Henry Williams, Ted’s son--there also were two daughters, Bobbie Jo and Claudia--spent several years on a crusade to rid the business of items with forged Ted Williams autographs.

Controversy was a constant companion during his playing days too. For two decades, Williams was usually the biggest story in Boston, a town with nine daily newspapers.

Fighting for circulation and exclusives with the abandon of the London tabloids covering the royal family, they found as many things wrong as right with the dominant hitter of his time.

Williams missed one MVP award in 1942 when the powerful New York press campaigned against him. Yankee second baseman Joe Gordon, who led the league in errors and strikeouts, won the MVP, even though Williams won the Triple Crown. Gordon hit .322 with 18 homers and 103 RBIs.

In 1947, his second Triple Crown season, Williams had a better average, .343 to .317; more homers, 32 to 20, and more RBIs, 114 to 97, than Joe DiMaggio, but DiMaggio won the MVP by one vote because Dave Egan, a Boston baseball writer, left Williams off his ballot.

“They started writing things about me, like I wasn’t driving in enough runs, even though I was driving in 100,” Williams said in a 1991 interview. “That I wasn’t getting the big hits. Then they started writing personal things. I suppose I shouldn’t have taken it so seriously, but I did.”

He campaigned successfully to have writers banned from the clubhouse before games. And to spite the local writers, Williams would occasionally grant lengthy interviews to writers from small papers outside of Boston while ignoring the local reporters.

As introverted as DiMaggio but, in the estimate of his pals, warmer-hearted, Williams was thin-skinned and often belligerent when crossed.

“The guys that played with him really loved him, but he had his problems with the print media and some radio and TV guys,” said Ernie Harwell, the longtime voice of the Detroit Tigers who has been a baseball broadcaster since 1941. “Early in his career, a couple of Boston writers got on his case and were unrelenting. Ted was outspoken, and he made some public relations mistakes. He was burned early, and that was partially his fault, but he had hard feelings toward [the media] and those never went away.”

Years later, during his four unsuccessful seasons as a manager of the Washington Senators, who became the Texas Rangers--his teams won 273 games and lost 364 from 1969 through 1972--Williams referred to sportswriters as “the manager’s pallbearers.”

Fans weren’t always high on his list either. Disgusted by a home crowd that jeered and cheered him in the same inning of a game against the Yankees in 1956, Williams ran back to the dugout spitting toward the left-field and right-field stands. Then, to hammer his point home, he stepped back out of the dugout and spat again.

His wars with the Boston fans and media so scarred Williams that he refused to tip his cap after hitting a home run in his final big-league at-bat, in Boston in 1960.

John Updike, in his famous magazine piece about Williams’ last game, titled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” wrote:

“He always ran out home runs hurriedly, unsmiling, head down [and] didn’t tip his cap. He hid in the dugout. Gods do not answer letters.”

Unless they were from sick kids. Williams had a crusty exterior and, in public, could hardly be described as cuddly--in some circles, he was known as “Terrible Ted”--but he had a soft spot for kids facing serious illnesses.

Williams was a tireless foot soldier in the battle against children’s cancer. He would go anywhere and do anything in the name of the Jimmy Fund, the Boston charity that fights children’s cancer, as long as there were no cameras to record his deeds.

The deeper Williams went into retirement, during which he went fishing or played golf or tennis almost daily for more than 30 years until his first stroke in 1991, the more mellow Williams became toward the Boston fans and media.

At a 1991 “Ted Williams Day” ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his .406 season, Williams told a Fenway Park crowd:

“I realized about 42 years ago ... I realized far back I was playing for super-great fans. I had a love affair with them, but I never showed it. When I finally consented to do this, I started to think, ‘What am I gonna say?’ Then I thought it might be nice to tip my hat.”

Over the last 100 years, Boston was graced by the extraordinary skills of a young Babe Ruth, basketball stars Larry Bird and Bill Russell, and hockey star Bobby Orr, but it was Williams who was named New England sports figure of the century by the Boston Globe in 1999. The city also named a tunnel after him.

Williams didn’t return to Fenway again until 1999, when he threw out the first pitch of the All-Star game in an emotional ceremony.

With every All-Star player along the baselines and members of “the All-Century team” ringed around the infield, Williams rode to the pitcher’s mound in a golf cart and was flocked by all of the players on the field.

One by one, modern-day stars--Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Tony Gwynn, Garciaparra and others--shook Williams’ hand and chatted with him.

Wrote Karen Guregian of the Boston Herald, “It was the grandfather of baseball, mobbed by all of his grandchildren; the greatest hitter who ever lived, hailed by all of his underlings.”

Said former home run champion McGwire, “A lot of guys out there kind of teared up. When you see Ted Williams with tears in his eyes, it’s an emotional time. What a man.”

“It was amazing,” Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez said. “I don’t think there will be any other man that will replace him.”

Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

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Times staff writers Tony Perry in San Diego and Elizabeth Mehren in Boston, and special correspondent Bob Oates, contributed to this report.