And then, his voice turning to scorn, “One lousy home run in the last 120 times at bat. “Have you seen the batting figures since the All-Star break?” he asked mildly. “Looks like I’m not going to be playing tonight, eh, Skip?” he inquired, somewhat petulantly. “Not the way we write, Ted,” a reporter sang out.īrant Alyea, a power-hitter with a penchant for striking out, sidled up to the batting cage. ![]() The whole league will know what we’re doing.” Listen, I hate to give you guy too much fucking dope. In this sport, when in doubt throw a slider. You look at the guys who won for us they did it by learning the breaking stuff. The slider is the most important pitch in baseball. Two out of 22! Christ, that’s a disgrace. “Listen, when I got down to spring training I told Sid Hudson to mark down the pitchers with the breaking stuff. I’ll tell you, they’ve been after me to write my life story for a long time, and years ago I told the publishers, ‘Look here, you get this Updike kid to help me write it, you got a deal.’ Well, I guess they got ahold of Updike, but he said he’d never written a sports book like that before. I asked Williams if he had read the piece John Updike had written for the New Yorker on Williams’ last turn at bat, immortalizing that last career home run. “Atta a way to chatter,” Williams grinned. “Let’s get a hit here,” Allen said, clapping his hands. “Christ, Allen, you can do better than that. Let’s hear a little chatter down there, Allen.” Like a man nudged by a cattle prod, Allen jerked forward on the bench. ![]() “Come on, we need another run, let’s have a little life down here. Jesus Christ, that’s a nothing pitch this guy has got. C’mom Cazzie, you can do it, you can hit that bum.” “Come on, gang, we need some runs here, for chrissake. “Okay, Brant, let him pitch to you a couple of times and when it gets big as a balloon, rip that soneofabitch.” It was impossible to resist the infectiousness of his enthusiasm, the nervous energy he generated for each player’s turn at bat. Williams moved up and down the bench, chattering encouragement all the time, prowling the length of the dugout, clapping, yelling, beating his hands against the dugout roof, imploring a hit from each player. When it gets to be more than fifty percent horseshit, I’ll quit.” “Well,” he said, nudging me on the arm, “a lot of it is fun. Either Williams had changed, mellowed perhaps, or his character and temperament had been distorted in the press. The season was half over and he was still at the job, content at it according to the papers. We walked down the tunnel to the dugout, and I asked how he found managing. He still had the look of remoteness, of total concentration on some inner issue that had always marked his face as a ballplayer. Williams was a surprisingly big man and walked with a half saunter, half swagger, his shoulders in rhythm with his stride. ![]() “The Uncensored Ted Williams”-here are some excepts from Tom Dowling’s story. Sadly, he then was diagnosed with colon cancer and died in 1970. Coming to Washington in 1969, Lombardi broke a string of 14 losing Redskin seasons by going 7-5-2. How interesting was the DC sports scene back then? In 1969, Dowling also wrote a big Washingtonian story on new Redskins coach Vince Lombardi, who had won six NFL championships coaching the Green Bay Packers. In that first Williams season of 1969, Washingtonian writer Tom Dowling hung around the Senators to put together a cover story for the magazine’s March 1970 issue. But that was the high point-the Senators won 70 games in 1970 and 63 games in 1971, with the only excitement toward the end Frank Howard’s towering home runs and the hall-of-fame aura of Williams. In 1969, his first year in Washington, the Senators won 86 games, a big step up from the team’s 65 wins in 1968. Williams is so identified with the Red Sox, and his later life was so colorful, that people sometimes forget he managed the Washington Senators for three years, from 1969 to 1971, before the team left Washington to become the Texas Rangers. In his 19-year major league career, all in Boston, Williams finished with a. Williams played for the Boston Red Sox from 1939 to 1942 and again from 1946 to 1960 during the 1943-45 war years, he was a Marine Corps fighter pilot. ![]() worked as a reporter and editor for 25 years, says the 784-page book “is packed with great moments” and “For every high point, there’s a spectacular low.” The book, written by the son of former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, has “strikingly precise and colorful reporting,” according to the New York Times, and “provides documentary evidence on every page to bolster the book’s presumption that Williams was, to use the cliche, larger than life.” The Boston Globe, where Bradlee Jr. One of December’s big books is The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams, by Ben Bradlee Jr.
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