Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [94]
Red Sox pitching coach Lee “Stinger” Stange faced Ted that day. Stinger had retired from the major leagues only the year before. He had just turned thirty-five and could still throw his fastball in the high eighties. He started Ted off with a blooping batting-practice pitch that arrived waist-high in the middle of the plate. It had nothing on it, a meatball your great-aunt Sadie could have bashed over an outfielder’s head. Ted had expected something carrying a little more bite. He swung too hard, pulling the ball on a line into the Red Sox dugout, scattering several players sitting on the bench. He shook his head in disgust. “God damn it,” he screamed at Stange, “give me your real stuff. Put some muscle on the ball.”
Stinger nodded. He delivered a hard, cross-seamed fastball that looked like a strike. Except it never passed home plate. Ted hit that pitch more than 380 feet into the bullpen for a home run. After that he put on a show. The faster Stinger threw, the harder Ted whacked the ball. Nearly every shot off Williams’s bat either soared over the fence or rattled against it. Boston manager Eddie Kasko had placed me in right field to shag fly balls for the contest, and I can tell you that not one of Ted’s home runs was a cheapie. He cost the Red Sox a lot of money that afternoon.
Watching him effortlessly stroke one long ball after another convinced me that he could have ended his retirement to play in the major leagues that very afternoon. He would not have hit .350 like the Williams of old. He no longer possessed reflexes sharp enough to cope with professional breaking pitches. But Ted’s hands still retained so much quickness, he could time any pitcher’s fastball. Had he made a comeback, I imagine he might have hit .270 while finishing among the league’s home run leaders. He was fifty-three years old.
So I’m thinking, those stories those coaches told me? They were not bullshitting. From that point on, I believed anything anyone ever said about Ted Williams.
Ted and I occasionally met after that in spring training. We didn’t get to know each other until 1986, when he worked as a special hitting instructor at the Red Sox fantasy camp in Winter Haven, Florida. I came down to manage a team of fans who had paid hefty fees to play baseball with former major leaguers. Ted spent hours with these weekend athletes, patiently honing their swings and discussing the nuances of hitting such as weight shift and strike zone judgment.
One afternoon he lumbered onto the practice field hours before any of his pupils and found me sitting alone in our dugout. Ted seldom said much to the pitchers; he still considered us the enemy. Nevertheless, he plopped down on the bench and draped a beefy arm around my shoulder.
“Christ,” Ted growled at the empty field, “they got me stuck in here with a fucking pitcher. And he’s a damned Communist too!” He gave me that charming who-gives-a-shit grin of his and said, “You’re a California kid like me, Lee, so you must be all right. For a pitcher, that is. But you are dumb. All pitchers are dumb. The only thing dumber than you pitchers are the hitters you get out.”
“You don’t really think pitchers are dumb. . . .”
“Oh, no? Just look at you! You throw that curveball, right? But I bet you don’t even know what makes the damned thing curve.”
“Sure I do. The same thing that lifted those jet fighters you used to pilot off the ground only in reverse. Bernoulli’s principle.”
His eyes widened in feigned astonishment. “You know about that?” he squealed.
“It’s basic physics. The seams on a curveball rotate over the top, creating a high-pressure area above the ball and a low-pressure area below it. The high pressure pushes down, and the pitch drops as it crosses the plate because the low pressure on the bottom