Ted’s
hitting streak came to an end two days after his average reached
its high-water mark of .438. It ended on a warm Sunday afternoon
in Chicago, when he was shut down, in both ends of a Sunday doubleheader,
by Ted Lyons and Thornton Lee. Lyons walked him three times, once
with the bases loaded. Lee walked him once, and that walk became
the only run in a 1-0 game. The end of the streak meant little to
Ted, if indeed he had even been aware of it. The first game had
settled into a pitching duel between those two crafty veterans Lefty
Grove and Ted Lyons, and Williams spent the better part of his post-game
interviews talking about what a pleasure it had been to watch those
two old masters at work.
Immediately, he was off on another streak, in which he went 9 for
18. Factor in the 0 for 5 in Chicago, and you have a streak of 44
for 88 over twenty-four games. His average was up to .427. The next
day he went 2 for 5, including a game-winning homer, in a double-header
against Detroit. He also had four walks. In other words, he hit
.400 for the day, reached base six times in nine turns at bat, and
dropped a point to .426.
On the same day, DiMaggio was hitless against Johnny Rigney in his
first three times at bat. His streak was kept alive in the ninth
when a routine grounder to short took a bad bounce and ricocheted
off Luke Appling’s shoulder. The streak was at thirty now, and beginning
to attract attention in both the sports world and the non-sports
world, partly because he was a New York player, but mostly because
he was Joe DiMaggio, the best ballplayer in the game. Bobby Doerr
remembers the sudden surge of publicity well. “We were in New York
when he broke Keeler’s record. Of course, you were conscious Joe
had this streak going. Today, I think it would be in the headlines
every day. Then, as I remember, we didn’t become conscious of it
until it had reached, you know, his twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth
game.” DiMaggio had tied Keeler’s record of 44 in the second game
of a three-game series against the Red Sox, and he broke it the
following day, with a line drive that went over Ted’s head like
a cannon shot and into the left-field stands.
Ted did not exactly challenge DiMaggio for the spotlight in that
series. On the contrary, he managed only one meaningless single
in each of the three games and dropped to .402, his lowest average
since he had first reached the .400 level in that same park five
weeks earlier. Still, he had batted .412 over the forty-five games
to Wee Willie Keeler’s record against DiMaggio’s .375.
Five days later Ted had it all. As the best players in both leagues
gathered in Detroit for the All-Star Game, both streaks were still
alive. Joe’s at forty-eight games. Ted’s average was up to .405.
Ted had taken the train to Detroit, along with Bobby Doerr, Jimmy
Foxx, Joe Cronin, and Dom DiMaggio. Doerr, like Williams, had been
selected for the starting lineup: “Ted was all excited about going.
In fact, he had a movie camera, an eight-millimeter movie camera,
that he let me use and I took a lot of movies; mostly of National
and American Leaguers taking batting practice.” Many of the pictures
shot by Doerr that day were used in the much-praised HBO documentary
“When It Was a Game,” first shown in 1991.
Ted was keyed up on the field, too, as he always was for big games,
and he was up and down all day screaming across the diamond. “In
those day,” Doerr says with a smile, “you expressed yourself more
to the other team.”
In his first All-Star Game, in 1940, Ted had gone 0 for 2 before
being replaced in left field by Hank Greenberg. Early in the 1941
game he had his first All-Star hit, a double, to drive in a run.
But in the eighth inning, in what figured to be his final turn at
bat, he was struck out by the Chicago Cubs right-hander, Claude
Passeau.
As the last of the ninth got under way, the American League was
trailing 5-3. A few minutes later the bases were loaded, with one
out, Joe DiMaggio was at bat, and Ted Williams was kneeling in the
batter’s circle. DiMaggio’s opportunity to be the hero and Ted’s
chance to come to bat again seemed to disappear together as DiMaggio
ripped what looked to be a perfect double-play ground ball to Eddie
Miller at shortstop. Miller slipped the ball nicely to Billy Herman,
but Herman’s throw to first base pulled Frank McCormick off the
base. One run was in. There were men on first and third, and Ted
Williams was coming to bat.
Exactly when the story began to circulate that it was DiMaggio who
had given Ted his chance by out legging the throw to first is impossible
to pin down. Suffice it to say that the reports of the game at the
time gave not the slightest indication that anything of the sort
had occurred.
If the double play had been made the inning and game would have
been over. If Frank McCormick hadn’t kept the ball from going into
the dugout, the tying run would have scored, and – more to the point
– the go-ahead run would have been at second base, with first base
open. What do you do with first base open and the world’s only .400
hitter at bat? Of course. You walk him. Or, at the very least, you
bring in a left-handed pitcher. Forget all that. It isn’t possible
to conceive of the Golden Age of baseball without Ted Williams’s
home run in the 1941 All-Star Game in Detroit.
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