His average
had gone back to .400, on the fourth game of the home stand, as
he was contributing a home run, a single, and two walks to Lefty
Grove’s 300th victory. Ted always murdered the ball when Grove was
pitching. (He had gone over .400 three months earlier, remember,
when Grove won his 296th game.) It was not a game that he remembers
with any pleasure, however, because he is nowhere to be seen in
the post game picture of Grove celebrating his 300th win.
The home run had come in the fifth inning, with one man on base,
to give Grove a two-run lead, but Ted quickly gave both runs back
by messing up a ball in the outfield. Up again in the eighth, with
two men on and a chance to redeem himself, he fouled out weakly
behind third base. It was left to Jimmy Foxx, fittingly enough,
to win the game for his old Philadelphia A’s teammate with a long
triple off the centerfield wall.
Ted was still wounded by the accusation that he was so upset at
not having delivered the winning hit for Lefty – or so jealous of
Foxx – that he was sulking in the trainer’s room while the pictures
were being shot. That wasn’t it at all, say Ted. “I drove in two
and let in three that day, and that’s why I was so mad at myself.
And I’m mad now that I’m not in the picture with my arm around Lefty
Grove. That’s a picture I really wish I had.”
While Ted had been recovering from his injury, DiMaggio’s bat had
been smoking. From the time he broke Keeler’s record, he had gone
24 for 44, raising his average over the fifty-six game streak to
.408. He was leading the league in RBIs with 76 and was tied for
the homerun lead with 20. And as he told the New York sportswriters,
in an unaccustomed burst of candor, he had far from given up on
catching Ted for the batting title. Why should he? He had brought
his average up to .375 (the highest it was going to be all season),
and Ted was then sitting there at .395.
Better he hadn’t been so talkative. The next day the streak came
to an end on the soggy turf of Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. Although
he was off immediately on another 16-game streak, Ted Williams was
pulling away. From that point on, it was Joe DiMaggio who receded
into the background and Ted Williams who had his eyes set on the
Triple Crown.
On August 3, the day Joe’s skein of hitting in seventy-two out of
seventy-three games unraveled, Ted was extending his own hitting
streak to twelve games and was batting .410. (To make the season
even more spectacular for him, he had gone fishing on an off day
two days earlier and had caught a record-breaking 374-pound tuna.)
The streak ended when the Philadelphia A’s walked him three times,
twice intentionally. One of the intentional walks came with runners
on first and third.
Joe’s season began to dribble away on August 19, when he went out
for three weeks – with a sprained ankle.
Over the next two days, Ted hit five home runs (and three singles)
in a pair of doubleheaders in St. Louis, to bring his home-run total
for the year to twenty-eight, moving him ahead of DiMaggio and leaving
him only two behind the league leader, Charlie Keller.
By the time DiMaggio came back, Ted had rapped out eleven homers
and knocked in twenty-six runs to take over the home-run lead from
Keller and leap onto the leader board in RBIs for the first time
all year. Keller, whose own great season was getting wiped out in
the media furor over DiMaggio, was leading with 117, DiMaggio had
107, and Williams had 93.
On Labor Day, just before the team was to leave for New York, Ted
hit three titanic home runs in a doubleheader against Washington,
to give him thirty-four and take over the major-league lead. He
also walked four times. One of the home runs came off Bill Zuber,
the pitcher who had beaned him back in the American Association.
In the opinion of the Boston writers, it was the longest home run
he had hit at Fenway Park all year. In the second game, he hit a
foul ball that completely cleared the roof in right field, the first
time that had ever been done. The next pitch he hit over the bullpen
and into the right-field bleachers, for the second time that day.
The Red Sox had six games with the Yankees over the last twenty-one
games of the season. Two games in Boston, followed immediately by
a two-game series in New York, and then back to Boston during the
last week of the season for the final two home games. As the series
in New York began, it was Keller with 119 RBIs, DiMaggio with 112,
and Williams with 106. Ted’s batting average was .410.
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