Teddy Ballgame’s Unclaimed
Legacy: Why Ted Williams is the Greatest Home Run Hitter in Baseball History
Hank
Aaron. Babe Ruth. Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. Any baseball fan knows what these men and
others like them stand for. Home
runs. In a game where the home run is
the ultimate display of one’s hitting prowess and where a garden-variety Hall
of Famer usually has between four and five hundred
home runs, these are the men who stand apart from the crowd. These are the men
considered true masters of the long ball.
Sometimes their
nicknames give them away: ‘Hammerin’ Hank,’ ‘The Bash Brothers,’ ‘The Big
Hurt.’ Sometimes their statistics tell
the story: Hank Aaron’s 755 career homers, Barry Bond’s 73 homers in a season. And sometimes legend is all they need: Reggie
Jackson’s 3 World Series homers on 3 swings,
Kirk Gibson’s limping golf shot into the right field stands, Carlton Fisk’s
leaping game-winner over “The Green Monster.”
However they are remembered, they are remembered for one Olympian skill;
the ability to hit a small white ball very hard and very far.
Yet
there is one among their ranks who is remembered as perhaps the greatest hitter
who ever lived but who rarely gets consideration as the greatest home run hitter who ever lived. It’s time for Ted Williams, ‘The Kid,’ ‘The
Splendid Splinter,’ ‘Teddy Ballgame’ himself, to ascend Mt. Olympus and take
his rightful place at the top of the list for he is certainly the greatest of
the great.
Ted
Williams is remembered as the last man to hit .400- .406 to be precise. (Baseball
Encyclopedia, 1600-01) He is remembered for “The Williams Shift” and for
being a true American hero who served in both World War II and The Korean
War. He is perhaps best remembered for
his passion for hitting and for the success that accompanied his tireless
dedication to his craft.
Yet, although he
hit 521 career homers and ranks in the top 15 statistically all-time, he is not
remembered as a great home run hitter.
This is a tragic misreading of the career of Ted Williams. The historians and myth-makers of baseball
should recognize that Ted was indeed the greatest: he hit more dramatic home
runs in his career than any of his peers did; he missed hundreds of games due
to his service record and injury, games that cost him home runs; and he
understood the art/science of hitting better than anyone who played the game
before or since. For all of these
reasons Ted Williams deserves recognition.
During his playing
days, dramatic home runs off the bat of Ted Williams occurred so often as to
become commonplace. Even as a rookie, Ted had the ability to make the sublime
legend of the long ball simply a matter of fact. In his first series as a big leaguer, in
Atlanta, a Red Sox equipment manager pointed out the right-field wall with its
three strange parallel fences, one behind the next, and mentioned that he had
seen Babe Ruth hit one over the farthest fence.
Ted hit one to the same spot, two days later, in his third big league
game. (Cramer, 66) In his first game ever at Fenway Park, his
home for the next twenty years, Ted hit a home run to center field, where only
five home runs had been hit the entire year before. He completed his rookie season by hitting at
least one home run in each American league park. (Cramer, 67)
Perhaps this is where the
de-mythologizing of Ted Williams ‘The Home Run Hitter’ began. He simply kept doing the impossible on a
routine basis while also leading the league, year after year, in batting
average (he won the batting title 6 times).
There was a feeling that, when Ted hit a game-winning homer, it was just
another average day at the office for him. His place as the third most prolific
hitter of Grand Slams in history (ahead of Ruth. Aaron and McGwire) simply
illustrates the point that the dramatic was simply commonplace for him. (Baseball Top 10, 41)
Other hitters have
smashed legendary homers. Baseball fans
will always remember Dave Henderson in ’86, Bucky Dent in ’78, Roger Maris in
’61. They will argue about Bill Mazerowski,
Joe Carter, The Sosa and McGwire race, ‘the homer in the gloaming,’ and ‘the
shot heard ‘round the world;’ these will always be the standard for
comparison. But the sheer numbers of
critical homers Williams hit is simply staggering. There are too many examples of the dramatic
power (literally) Williams possessed to list them all. A few do stand out more than the others,
however.
In 1939, Ted was
the first batter to hit a ball completely out
of Tiger Stadium. Only eight more
players had done so by the 1971 All-Star Game held at the same stadium. (Smith, 32)
The 1946 All-Star game was held at Boston’s Fenway Park, Ted’s home
field. He proceeded to steal the show by
hitting two home runs, including the first one ever hit off Rube Sewell’s
infamous “blooper” pitch. The pitch was
so far off the plate Ted had to step toward it just to swing. He also tied the All-Star game records for
most hits (4) and most runs batted in (5). (Reichler,
11-12) In 1941, Ted’s .406 year, his
average was at .39955 on the last day of the season. Technically, that was the elusive .400 and
Ted’s manager offered to let him sit out the doubleheader. Ted declined and proceeded to play both
games, getting six hits including a homer.
He had conquered pressure with his own brand of drama once more.
A casual listing
of other big Williams’ homers includes his first game back after a three-year
stint in the Navy during World War Two; he hit one in his first at-bat. In 1950 he broke his elbow and was out
for two months. This time his first game
back included a homer and a four-for-four day.
When Ted was again discharged from the service in 1953, after the Korean
War had ended, he took ten days of batting practice after two years off. In his first game he of course hit a
pinch-hit homer in the seventh inning. (Cramer,
75-81)
Finally, let’s consider the two biggest at-bats of
his career. At the 1941 All-Star Game,
in a game that meant much, much more to the players and public than it does
now, a game played for league pride and bragging rights, Ted came to the plate
with two men on, two men out, in the bottom of the ninth with his team trailing
5-3. The result, one asks, of this
clichéd collision with the fantasies of young boys and baseball immortality? A game-winning, three-run homer, of course.
Or, we can look at September of 1960, when an aging Ted stepped to the plate at
Fenway for the last at-bat of his storied career. One doesn’t need to be told to know what
happened. That was simply what Ted did
all the time; his ability to do so has perhaps devalued his unique greatness.
When World War II
broke out, Ted Williams was just another great baseball player. By the time the Korean conflict ended, he was
a national hero who had served in two wars.
Before and after that, Ted had missed many games with injuries. Where then would he stand on the all-time
home run list if he had been able to play in all those games during the prime
of his career? One thing is known for
sure. Even without those homers, when
Ted Williams retired he was in 3rd place all-time behind only Ruth
and Jimmie Foxx.
With this in mind,
estimates to extrapolate his “true” career totals can be done in a variety of
ways. One such estimate would be to
throw out games missed due to injury (all players get injured sometime with the
singular exception of Cal Ripken) and add projected homers for seasons missed
due to military service. If we take a
very conservative approach by adding totals based upon an average of 20 home
runs per season (well below William’s standard) against five missed seasons,
Ted’s additional 100 home runs would put him in the very elite 600 Homer Club
with Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Barry Bonds.
If we ratchet
those numbers up to reflect his average home-run performance during his 12-year
“prime” (five years of which Williams missed) between 1941-1953 (when he won
the Triple Crown and four batting titles), Williams would have an additional
190 homers for a career total of 711, only three shy of Ruth’s all-time record
which stood for forty-one years before Aaron broke it. The answer is clear any
way we crunch the numbers; based on total plate appearances, Ted Williams is
one of the three best home run hitters the game has seen.
Finally, there is
the undisputed fact that Ted Williams cared more about his hitting than any
other player ever did. In fact, Ted
spent so much time practicing his swing in the outfield, during games, that his first and only minor league manager demanded
that either he or “the kid” go. Ted
stayed. (Cramer, 66)
Williams became so
obsessed with hitting that he would drive roommates crazy with his constant
batting stance adjustments in front of the mirror at three in the morning. He used rolled-up newspapers in coffee shops
to illustrate his vision. He eventually
wrote books, The Science of Hitting
and Ted William’s Hit List, that
would become both standards for hitters and a bone of contention between
physicists who believed his baseball-applied theories on rotational mechanics
and batting coaches who didn’t need to confuse their young charges anymore than
they already were! Perhaps under his
brusque exterior, Ted Williams was really the definition of a
scholar-athlete.
Perhaps the most
fitting tribute to Ted’s study of hitting was Mark McGwire’s revelation at the
1999 All-Star Game that Ted had asked him if he ever smelled the bat burning. (McGwire, 1999 interview) What Ted was referring to was the friction
caused by the perfectly aligned seams of a 95 mile-an-hour fastball ricocheting
upward off the surface of a bat traveling seventy miles-an-hour in the opposite
direction. There are only a handful of
men in the world who have ever smelled this phenomenon, who can take scientific
pleasure in missing a towering home run by less than a centimeter. Ted was their leader.
There is no other
player in the history of the major leagues who has combined the talent of
hitting home runs often with a flair for the dramatic like “The Splendid
Splinter” did. No other great hitter ever lost so much playing time, in his
prime, as “Teddy Ballgame” did. There has never been another player who has
been able to explain how and why he hit the way he did quite like “The
Kid.” He was an arrogant, loud,
prickly, complicated man. And he was the
greatest hitter who ever lived.
