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.
Ted fouled away the first pitch and then took two balls. Passeau
fired again, Ted swung, and the ball sailed high and deep along
the foul line in right. There was no doubt at all that the ball
had the distance; the only question was whether it was going to
remain fair.
Ted took a couple of steps away from the plate and then stopped
to watch. When the ball landed fair, high on the top deck, he leaped
into the air clapping his hands and went jumping around the bases
in sheer juvenile joy. (“That first pitch,
I was a little late on, but only because it was bearing in on me.
Passeau called it a slider, and I hadn’t heard too much about sliders
then, and I thought, I’ve got to quicken up here. And he threw another
one, the very same place, and I was just that much ahead of it,
and I hit the home run which was so far and away the greatest thrill
I ever had in baseball up to that time. Nothing ever hit me quite
as hard emotionally. I was twenty-two years old, remember, and these
were all great, great players.”)
As he crossed home plate, he was mobbed. “There was as much excitement
in the All-Star Game as there was in the World Series back then,”
Doerr recalls. “It was just turmoil in the clubhouse. It was wild.”
Del Baker, the American League manager, came over and kissed Ted
on the side of the head and hugged him.
Bill McKechnie, the opposing manager, came in just long enough to
shake his head and say, “Ted, you’re just not human.” So Ted went
out and proved he was human.
The Red Sox were staying on in Detroit for a scheduled four-game
series, and before Ted left that oh-so-hospitable ballpark his average
had dipped below .400 and his season had almost turned to disaster
on its rain-soaked infield.
The first game was rained out. When the teams were finally able
to play Ted got collared by Buck Newsom in four times at bat. As
if to show how difficult it is to hit .400, those four at-bats dropped
his average from .405 to .398. The next day, in the first game of
a doubleheader, Ted walked on his first three times at bat. It was
after the second walk he twisted his ankle while scrambling back
to first base on an attempted pick-off. When he popped out on his
last time at bat, his average dipped to .397.
Between games, it became clear that he had aggravated his springtime
injury. He spent the next nine days on the bench, recovering. During
those nine days he pinch-hit four times: sacrifice fly, pop out,
walk, three-run homer.
The sacrifice fly is worth lingering over because of a change in
the scoring rules a year earlier. Under the new rule, a hitter was
still credited with an RBI but was also charged with a time at bat.
So when Ted limped to the plate eighth inning of a scoreless game
and sent a long fly to center field to bring in the winning run,
all it got him on his batting average was another two-point drop,
to .395. The pop fly two days later dropped him to .393.
By the time the Sox headed back to Boston, the three-run homer had
put him back up to .396. He was returning well rested and — let
us not forget – with that history of coming back to the lineup with
a bang after an injury. An argument could even be made that the
enforced rest, coming when it did, was the best thing that could
have happened to him.
Nor did it hurt that he would be going back into the lineup against
John Rigney. Sure enough, he stepped up on his first time at bat
and hit a monster shot into the right-center bleachers, to start
a twelve-game hitting streak (19 hits in 35 times at bat) that lifted
his average to .412. Five of those hits were home runs, including
one grand slam.
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