In the fallout from the cryonics affair, people were reminded of the fact that Williams was not just the greatest hitter who ever lived, not just the war hero, and not just the man who had helped sick children but also a man with all the same human frailties that fans had. He had never really shaken the shame he carried from childhood -- about his mother, the Salvation Army zealot, who had time for street urchins but not for him; about his absent and indifferent father, who finally abandoned the family; about his jealous, thieving brother; and about his own bloodlines and ethnicity.
Ben Bradlee, Jr., The Kid (Little Brown and Company 2013).
When I was a child in the fifties Ted Williams and Elvis Presley were my heroes, due in no small part not only to how much they accomplished but also to how much they were disliked by adults for their unwillingness to conform. One of my favorite stories about Williams is how in 1941 he could have sat out the last two games of the year, a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics, and would have ended up with a .39955 average, which would have been rounded up to .400. But Williams was no Jose Reyes, who in 2011 removed himself from the last game of the season in order to win the batting title, and Williams went six for eight in the two games to end the season with a .406 average. Bradlee points out that Williams is the only .400 hitter in the modern era who did not benefit from the sacrifice fly rule: the sacrifice fly rule, a sacrifice fly does not count as a time at bat, was not in effect from 1940 to 1954; if the rule had been in effect in 1941 Williams, who hit six sacrifice flies that year, would have batted .411.
Williams was a great hitter on mostly mediocre Red Sox teams, owned by cheapskate Tom Yawkey and the last major league team to have an African-American player. When I was a kid on vacation in New Hampshire in the fifties I did see Williams hit a home run in Fenway Park and he did not tip his hat to the fans, though he did not spit at them, as he was known to do and for which he was vilified in the Boston newspapers, of which there were from seven to nine during Williams's career. The good that Williams did for the Jimmy fund, which raised money for kids with cancer, he kept out of the newspapers, but he neglected his own three children as much as his mother (whose Mexican heritage he concealed) had neglected him. When Williams died, in 2002, Williams's son John-Henry arranged to have Ted Williams's head frozen indefinitely, with the announced hope of possibly marketing the DNA at some future point. It was never cleared up whether John-Henry had permission to do this from Williams, whose will said he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the ocean. John-Henry himself died from cancer in 2004 and he also was frozen.
Williams was married and divorced three times and had numerous affairs, during and between the marriages. Two other women he is known to have proposed to: one said that she would only marry him if he put her first and he said no, baseball was first, fishing was second and she would be third. Another woman turned him down because he wanted exclusive rights to her and he would only marry her if she put her children in boarding school.
Williams had quite an ego and was known to pop off often, his tirades full of obscenities; Bradlee does a superb job of quoting much of what Williams said publicly as well as personally, having interviewed many of those in Williams's life. Williams was considered a hero for forfeiting three years of his career for service in the Korean War and WW II; Bradlee documents how Williams fought his induction in both cases, though this did not stop him from an accomplished career as a pilot in both wars.
The one thing I have a quibble with in this biography is that there is little devoted to Williams's fielding, playing in the pre-DH era. He supposedly was slow and didn't have much of an arm, but Bradlee does not discuss how well or how poorly Williams played left field. After all, the fielding abilities of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth are seldom mentioned or analyzed but rather taken for granted.
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