Feeding the Monster Read online

  Yawkey, meanwhile, was growing estranged from his wife, Elise, and slowly succumbing to the drinking that would mark much of his life. He has been described during this time as an isolated, pathetic figure. Still, desperate to prove his mettle on the playing fields, he’d pay the team’s batboys to throw him batting practice so he could try to smack a ball over Fenway’s left field wall. (He never did.) During games he’d sit sullenly in his private suite next to Fenway’s press box, drinking alone or with Eddie Collins; afterward, he’d retire to his room at the Ritz, where he took his meals by himself. By the mid-1930s he’d met Jean Hiller, a young divorcée who sometimes modeled clothes for Elise Yawkey at exclusive New York stores. By 1944, both Tom and Elise were having affairs. The couple divorced, and Yawkey married the 35-year-old Jean Hiller on Christmas Day.

  If Tom Yawkey is the man who has had the single biggest impact on the Boston Red Sox, Ted Williams is the player with whom the team will likely always be most intimately connected. To this day, a red 9, signifying the number Williams wore throughout his career, is all that’s needed to identify the Splendid Splinter in much of New England.

  The lithe, left-handed hitting Williams joined the team in 1939, when he was 20 years old. An indifferent fielder possessing a cantankerous personality, Williams would, for the next two decades, prove himself to be one of the best hitters the game has ever known. In his first season in the bigs, Williams hit .327 and led the league with 145 runs batted in; the next year, at age 21, he hit .344. Forty-five years later, while attending the Red Sox’s spring training, he told The New Yorker’s Roger Angell the reason for his success. “I didn’t get laid for the first time until the All-Star Game break of my second year in the majors,” Williams said. “I was thinking about hitting.”* Whether or not he was having sex, Williams continued to put up eye-popping numbers. In 1942, at age 23, he hit .356 with 36 home runs; by that point, he’d already hit 127 home runs. Williams lost the next three years to World War II, during which he served as a pilot in the Navy Air Corps. When he returned to the Red Sox in 1946, he picked up right where he had left off, hitting .342 with 38 home runs. Williams also lost much of the 1952 and 1953 seasons to the Korean War, where, as a Marine fighter pilot, he flew some of his missions as a wingman to John Glenn.† He is the only person in the last 75 years to hit above .400—he hit .406 in 1941—and, at .482, he has the highest career on base percentage in history.‡

  It is one of the tragedies of Ted Williams’s tenure with the Red Sox that he was rarely surrounded with the talent needed to make his team a winner. For most of his career, the Sox languished somewhere in the middle of the American League. During the Red Sox’s best four-year run of Williams’s career, from 1946 to 1949, lousy managing did in the team.

  Take 1946, Williams’s first year back after the war. He was typically dominant, with an on base percentage of almost .500 and a slugging percentage of .667.* The Sox cut a swath through the league, and won the pennant handily. Despite being the heavy favorite in that year’s World Series, they were defeated in seven games by the St. Louis Cardinals. In typical Red Sox fashion, shortstop Johnny Pesky was later blamed for the loss; he is said to have hesitated for a split-second before throwing a relay to home plate in the deciding game of the series. Historical accounts of the game differ; many observers felt Pesky wouldn’t have been able to nail the Cardinals’ Enos Slaughter even if he’d come up throwing and had a rifle for a right arm. What’s unquestionable is that a staggering number of bone-headed moves by manager Joe Cronin preceded that throw. Cronin didn’t take advantage of favorable pitching matchups, didn’t sacrifice hitters in order to move runners into scoring positions, and left crucial role players on the bench. Pesky’s throw should have been unnecessary because the Red Sox should have already won the championship.

  Nineteen forty-eight and 1949 offered more heartbreaking defeats. In ’48, the Sox lost a one-game playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and in ’49, Boston blew the final two games of the season against the Yankees, handing their rivals the pennant. (The Yankees went on to win their first of five straight World Series that year.) For the last decade of Williams’s career, while the Yankees were busy winning eight pennants and five World Series titles, the Red Sox never finished better than third.

  In 1959, at age 40, Williams played most of the year with a pinched nerve in his neck. It was the only year in his career during which he hit below .300. After insisting on a pay cut from $125,000 to $90,000, he came back to play one more season in Boston, and at age 41, batted .316 with 29 home runs. For his last game, fewer than 11,000 fans showed up at Fenway. Williams, who wanted to keep his retirement low-key, nevertheless agreed to say a few words before the game. He began by complaining about the city’s sportswriters, who had increasingly turned their attention from the Sox’s moribund record to Williams himself, often in the form of printed taunts and heckles. “Despite the fact of the disagreeable things that have been said about me,” he said, pointing to Fenway’s press box, “by the Knights of the Keyboard out there, baseball has been the most wonderful thing in my life. If I were starting over again and someone asked me where is the one place I would like to play, I would want it to be Boston, with the greatest owner in baseball and the greatest fans in America. Thank you.”

  In the last at-bat of his career, Williams hit a home run. The few fans that did show up screamed and stomped for a curtain call, a tip of the cap, some acknowledgment from the man who embodied baseball for Boston. John Updike famously chronicled the scene for The New Yorker in his article, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” “Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved,” Updike wrote. “But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”

  When Ted Williams called Tom Yawkey “the greatest owner in baseball,” it was partially the hyperbolic musings of an employee acknowledging his boss, but it was also a sincere tribute. For Williams, Yawkey was, for the most part, a positive force. Yawkey always paid his stars well, and frequently treated them more like members of his family than a workforce.

  By 1961, however, it was clear to any impartial observer that, far from being a great owner, Tom Yawkey often exhibited a destructive force on both the Red Sox and on baseball. He larded his organization with sycophants and drinking buddies and blowhard ex-players like Eddie Collins and Joe Cronin, who together would make virtually every baseball-related decision affecting the team from 1933 through the late 1950s.

  Over the years, the bigotry of many of the team’s employees—including, some historians and baseball scholars have argued, that of Yawkey himself—meant the Red Sox lost out on some of baseball’s brightest talents. In the mid-1940s, though Boston was still a de facto segregated city, a city councilman, Isadore Muchnick, threatened to revoke the Red Sox’s permit to play baseball on Sunday unless they auditioned black ballplayers. And so, on April 14, 1945, an ally of Muchnick’s brought three Negro League stars, Jackie Robinson, Marv Williams, and Sam Jethroe, for a tryout at Fenway. For two days, the three players weren’t allowed entrance to the field; the delay, ostensibly, was because of Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 12. Finally, on April 16, they were permitted to take part in a brief workout. It was the first time Robinson would perform for a major league club.

  The Red Sox, however, would not take advantage of their opportunity. While the Negro League stars were going through their paces, a voice from Fenway’s stands shouted, “Get those niggers off the field.” At least one newspaper reporter who attended the tryout thought it was Tom Yawkey who shouted the racial epithet, although nothing has been established conclusively. Whatever the case, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Robinson later that year. The Sox also had the first chance to sign another future Hall of Famer, the transcendent outfielder Willie Mays. In 1948, the 17-year-old Mays joi
ned the Negro League’s Black Barons, a team that shared an Alabama field with the Birmingham Barons, a minor league Red Sox affiliate. Because of the playing field arrangement, the Sox got first crack at Birmingham players, but the team passed on Mays. More than half a century later, Mays still sounded surprised he didn’t end up patrolling the Fenway Park outfield with Ted Williams. “There’s no telling what I would have been able to do in Boston. To be honest, I really thought I was going [there],” Mays told Howard Bryant for Shut Out, his 2002 book about the intersection of race and baseball in Boston. “But for that Yawkey. Everyone knew he was racist. He didn’t want me.”

  By 1959, 12 years after Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, the Red Sox were the only team in baseball to remain segregated. When a reporter asked general manager Pinky Higgins why none of the Red Sox’s black minor leaguers were being given a chance to make it with the club, Higgins responded by calling the writer a “nigger lover.” But even the Red Sox had to succumb to the inevitable, and a few months later, the Sox brought up infielder Elijah “Pumpsie” Green and pitcher Earl Wilson. (Ted Williams, in his second-to-last season, made it a point to warm up with Green before every game as a signal to his teammates and Red Sox fans alike to accept the new player.) The Red Sox would have many black superstars in the decades to come, from Luis Tiant to Jim Rice to Ellis Burks to Mo Vaughn, but it would take almost 40 years for the team to finally shed its reputation as an organization in which it was difficult for minorities to thrive. As recently as 2004, Barry Bonds said he would never consider playing for the Red Sox. “Boston is too racist for me,” Bonds, who is Willie Mays’s grandson, said. “That’s been going on ever since my dad [Bobby Bonds] was playing baseball [in the 1960s and 1970s]…. It ain’t changing.”*

  *In those nine seasons, the Red Sox compiled a .350 winning percentage over 1380 games. From 1998 to 2005, in the hapless Tampa Bay Devil Rays’ first eight years in baseball, the team amassed a record of 518-775, for a .401 winning percentage over its first 1293 games.

  *One of Yawkey’s other main business interests during the years he owned the Red Sox was the Sunset Lodge, a South Carolina whorehouse he ran until authorities closed it down in 1969. A one-time patron recently described the Sunset as “the Wal-Mart of fast, fast relief.”

  *Williams similarly ascribed the problems today’s young players have to too much sex. “They’re fucking their brains out,” he told Angell. “They’re just kids but they’re all married, and the ones that aren’t have got somebody living in with them, so it’s like they’re married. They’re just thinking of that one thing.”

  †Williams averaged 32 home runs during his first 12 complete seasons of play, spanning 1939 to 1955, and he finished his career with 521 home runs. If you assume he would have at least reached that average during the years he lost to his military service—and, since those were what should have been Williams’s peak years as a hitter, he likely would have been even more prolific—Williams would have hit 667 home runs in his career, placing him fourth on today’s all-time list behind Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Barry Bonds. As it is, he’s tied for 15th.

  ‡Batting average is computed by dividing a player’s number of hits by his number of at-bats. (Walks, instances where a batter was hit by a pitch, and times when a batter sacrifices himself in order to move a base runner up a base, do not count as at-bats.) On base percentage is obtained by adding up a batter’s hits with his walks and the times he was hit by a pitch and dividing that by his at-bats plus his walks, the times he was hit by a pitch, and his sacrifices. So, for instance, a batter who comes up to plate ten times and gets two hits, is walked twice, and has one sacrifice would have a batting average of .285 (two hits divided by seven at-bats) and an on base percentage, or OBP, of .400 (two hits plus two walks, for a total of four, divided by seven at-bats plus two walks and one sacrifice, for a total of ten).

  *Slugging percentage is the average number of bases per at-bat, and is derived by adding the number of singles with two times the number of doubles (because each double is worth two bases), three times the number of triples, and four times the number of home runs. That number is then divided by the total number of at-bats. A .667 slugging percentage means that a player averages about two-thirds of a base every time he comes to bat and reaches base due to a hit, as opposed to a walk, an error, or being hit by a pitch. In 2005, the American League’s highest slugging percentage belonged to Alex Rodriguez, at .610; Derek Lee led the National League at .662. At .634, Williams has the second-highest career slugging percentage in history, behind Babe Ruth’s .690.

  *Bonds has a reputation for inflammatory racial rhetoric. In Game of Shadows, a 2006 book that offers extensive documentation of Bonds’s steroid use, Bonds is quoted as saying in 1998 that Major League Baseball officials were not investigating Mark McGwire’s increased muscle mass “because he’s a white boy.”

  Chapter 3

  The Impossible Dream

  and the Sixth Game

  BY THE 1960s, Tom Yawkey had become largely uninterested in the Red Sox and periodically considered selling the team. Many players still liked to play for the Sox—besides paying well, Yawkey, unlike Yankees management, didn’t expect much in return. The city was more divorced from the Red Sox than it had been since the team’s lowly days in the 1920s, before Yawkey came on board. Young left fielder Carl Yastrzemski—who soon came to be known by the nickname “Yaz”—was an exciting player to watch, and Fenway’s sparse crowds certainly cheered for the new left-handed slugger who seemed destined to take Williams’s spot as the team leader. Still, the Red Sox, the once-proud franchise that helped inaugurate the American League, were not only bad, they were boring.

  Only Yawkey’s complete disengagement from the team allowed this to change. In 1965, Dick O’Connell replaced Pinky Higgins as the team’s general manager. He was, perhaps, the first man to actually deserve the job. At the end of the 1966 season, O’Connell hired minor league manager Dick Williams to run the club. The baseball establishment wasn’t impressed, and the Sox opened the 1967 season as 100–1 longshots to win the pennant. On Opening Day, only 8,324 fans showed up at Fenway.

  That was arguably the last boring day of the season. By the end of April, the Sox were flirting with first place, with right fielder Tony Conigliaro and hurler Jim Lonborg complementing Yaz. On June 15, Conigliaro—known now by the heartthrob nickname Tony C.*—won a game with an 11th-inning, two-run blast over Fenway’s left field wall. The next day, a Boston Globe headline, referring to a song from the hit musical Man of La Mancha, wrote of the Sox’s “Impossible Dream” of winning the American League pennant.

  For the next three-and-a-half months, Dick Williams’s Red Sox made baseball relevant in Boston once again. The team was full of young, charming, good-looking players, and the Sox appealed to the city’s college students and old-time fans alike. After a 10-game winning streak in July, almost twice as many fans as had come to Opening Day were waiting for the team when they returned to Boston’s Logan Airport. Yawkey, suddenly interested in the team again,† started showing up at Fenway. After treading water for the first two weeks of September, the Red Sox surged in the last half of the month, powered by the clutch hitting of Yastrzemski, who batted .523 during the season’s final two weeks, with five home runs and 16 runs batted in. Entering the season’s final weekend, the Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox, and Red Sox were all within two games of each other. The Red Sox and the Twins had a two-game series at Fenway, and the Twins, at 91-69, were a game ahead of the 90-70 Sox. A single Twins win would end the year for Boston. On the last day of the season, backed by a 4-for-4 effort by Yaz, Lonborg capped his 22-9, 246-strikeout, Cy Young–winning season with a win over the Twins, putting the Red Sox into first place. A couple of hours later, when the Tigers fell to the California Angels, it was official: the Red Sox had won the pennant.

  In the Series, the Red Sox once again faced the St. Louis Cardinals, who, with Lou Brock and Bob Gibson, were the
overwhelming favorites. After Boston lost Game 1, Lonborg, pitching four days after he helped clinch the pennant, threw a complete-game, one-hit shutout as the Sox evened the Series. Lonborg came back on three days’ rest for Game 5, with the Sox now trailing three games to one. He was masterful once again, throwing another complete game, and the Sox won 3–1. Boston evened the Series after winning Game 6, 8–4, and Williams decided to send Lonborg to the hill once again, this time on only two days’ rest, to face Gibson, the Cardinals ace, for the Series’ deciding game. It was the fourth time Lonborg had been asked to save the Red Sox’s season in less than two weeks. He gutted it out through six innings, but left with the Sox on the losing end of a 7–1 score. Tears streamed down Lonborg’s face as he came off the mound.