And yet the injury
just might have helped him. His teammate, Bobby Doerr, thinks it
did. “I remember him going into the trainer’s room every day to
get his ankle taped up. In batting practice you could see him kind
of favoring it. I kind of wondered then, and I kind of got to thinking
as the season went on, that it was sensitive enough to make him
stay back for as long as possible to keep the pressure off his front
foot.” Ted knows all about Doerr’s theory, of course, he is willing
to concede that he was indeed able to hold back a little longer
in 1941. “But I never thought it was because of my ankle. I never
thought that. From 1941 on, I was getting stronger and stronger
and stronger. I was late to mature, and I think I was strongest
between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two. As a result, I was
able to hold back and hold back, getting quicker and stronger than
at any other time.”
Ted’s season began for him to all practical purposes, in his favorite
hunting grounds at good old Briggs Stadium in Detroit. He didn’t
hit two record-breaking home runs this time – he would be saving
that for Chicago. The best he was able to do in Detroit was a 440-foot
home run and – if you want to talk about hanging back – a long double
to deep left field.
In Chicago, he single-handedly wrecked John Rigney, a fast-balling
right-hander who liked to challenge hitters up around the letters.
(That made him the toughest of pitchers for DiMaggio and the easiest
for Williams. The book on Joe was that you could sometimes get him
on high fastballs, preferably inside. The book on Ted was that he
murdered the high fastball.) Against Rigney, Ted hit two gigantic
home runs. The first one was a 500-foot wallop – “one of the longest
home runs ever hit in Comiskey Park” – that went into the upper
right-filed stands. The second came in the eleventh inning, when
Rigney tried to cross him up by throwing a slow curve. Ted read
what was coming while Rigney was still in his windup, and he hit
it over the roof of the second tier in the deepest part of right
center. If the first one was 500 feet, that game-winning drive had
to be close to 600 feet.
It was, Ted has always said, the longest drive he ever hit. (“You
get those long home runs when the conditions are exactly right.
When the wind was blowing in, Comiskey Park was a tough, tough park
to hit in. When the conditions were right and the wind was blowing
out, the ball would just seem to carry and carry.” The hardest ball
he ever hit was his last base hit in the 1941 season.
When the DiMaggio hitting streak began, on May 15, Ted was hitting
.339 against Joe’s .304. From there they ran off parallel twenty-three
game streaks, which nobody paid much attention to. In those pre-TV,
prestatistician days, streaks weren’t looked on as anything to alert
the populace about.
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