Ted Williams’ Last Game

(Brearley Collection Photo from Opening Day 1947)

By Lew Freedman | Staff Historian

He refused to tip his cap to the fans after the last majestic hit of his wondrous 21-year Major League career with the Boston Red Sox. He refused to step out of the dugout to acknowledge the cheers filling the air at Fenway Park in the last game of his professional life. And that was so Ted.

The ballplayer who said his only ambition in life was to have people see him walk down the street and say, “There goes the best hitter there ever was,” achieved his goal and slipped away from his sport on his own terms.

Ted Williams may well have been the best hitter in baseball history, although some can argue statistics for Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby or Babe Ruth, those who like Williams are in the penthouse of the Hall of Fame.

It is 52 years since Williams retired his Boston Red Sox spikes on September 28, 1960, as was true throughout most of his career, they were going nowhere but home as the regular-season ended. Williams saw too few Octobers in his career with the Red Sox.

By October, rather than watch those annoying New York Yankees play in yet another World Series, Williams had retreated to one of his favorite haunts to pursue one of his favorite pleasures, fishing for Atlantic salmon, tarpon, or bonefish. It would be too much of a cliché to say that this was Williams’ relaxation because he fished with the same aggressive attitude that he brought to the batter’s box. Also a member of the Fishing Hall of Fame, Williams was just about as good at it as he was hitting. He once caught a 1,235-pound black marlin off the coast of Peru that would not have fit into his Fenway locker.

Reaching the majors in 1939, Williams was the rare player whose career touched four decades. He was 42 in 1960 and would have given up his left-field perch a year sooner, except that he was disgusted with his 1959 showing when he hit just 10 home runs with a .254 batting average. That was not the Ted Williams he wanted people to remember.

Even Williams was astonished by his tumble since he was coming off two seasons, 1957 and 1958 when he batted .388 and .328 respectively, and won the American League batting title for his fifth and sixth career championships. A less-confident individual would have heeded the .254 as a warning signal that he had overstayed his welcome, but Williams took it as a challenge.

The man who had the eyesight of an eagle, who could pick up the spin of a 90-mph fastball in the split second after it left the pitcher’s hand, did not want to admit he might be trapped in athletic old age. That 1960 season Williams smacked 29 home runs and batted .316.

When Ted Williams was a baseball prodigy coming out of San Diego, his first Boston teammates, who found him to be insufferably cocky, called him “The Kid.” He stood 6-foot-3, but seemed taller because his weight was stuck somewhere in the 170s before filling out to a muscular 205. The nicknames piled up over time and Williams was called “The Splendid Splinter,” “Teddy Ballgame,” and “Thumper.”

If there was annoyance among veterans because Williams had a big mouth it did not take long to show there was heft to his braggadocio. As a 20-year-old he batted .327 with a league-leading 145 RBIs. The next year he hit .344, which coincidentally would end up being his lifetime average. In Williams’ third season, 1941, he batted .406. Anyone who bats .400 in the majors is in very elite company and no one has done it in the 71 years since Williams.

There was no designated hitter in the American League in 1960, but one must wonder if there had been, if coming off a near-30-homer, .300-plus season would Williams have stuck around another year. It would have been tempting for a player who loved hitting far more than other facets of the game. In his younger days Williams used to stand in the outfield and take imaginary swings. To him, it seemed, fielding was an obligation that inconveniently interrupted his at-bats.

It wasn’t as if staying around another season would give Williams another chance at a World Series. During his long career the Red Sox advanced to just one Series, in 1946, and lost it in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals. The Red Sox finished 24 games under .500 in 1960 and 10 games under in 1961.

The official announcement of Williams’ retirement was made with three home games left against the Baltimore Orioles and three games on the road against the New York Yankees.

The Red Sox knew they should do something special on the cold, damp end-of-homestand 28th, but Williams did not want a fancy farewell party. Broadcaster Curt Gowdy said his piece and in Williams’ name Boston Mayor John Collins presented a check to the Jimmy Fund, the organization long associated with helping children with cancer.

Williams did not make a full speech to the 10,454 fans. He offered a few brief remarks, then it was Play Ball!

Williams walked in the first inning and scored on a sacrifice fly, and he flew out to center in the third. In-between innings, it was announced that after this game Williams’ No. 9 Sox jersey would be retired. That meant Williams was not going with the team to New York. This was his last game. Williams lined out to right field in the fifth inning.

When Williams moved into the batter’s box in the eighth inning, fans gave him a two-minute standing ovation. Williams ignored it and focused on Orioles pitcher Jack Fisher. On a 1-1 pitch, Williams connected, sending the ball 440 feet into the right-field stands.

With his long stride, Williams made it around the bases swiftly. He didn’t look up, but did complete a congratulatory handshake with Sox catcher Jim Pagliaroni, the on-deck hitter, as he reached the plate.

Williams ran straight into the Red Sox dugout as the crowd, on its feet again, roared and applauded. The ovation was clocked at four minutes, an eternity in such a situation, but Williams, despite the urgings of his teammates, would not step out of the dugout to wave.

That was home run No. 521 for Williams, a total that undoubtedly would have been much higher if he had not missed 3 ½ of his prime playing years because of military service as a pilot in World War II and in the Korean War.

Williams took his position in left for the ninth inning, but manager Mike Higgins immediately sent Carroll Hardy (the only man ever to pinch-hit for Williams) into the game. As Williams trotted off the Fenway field for the last time the crowd offered another two-minute ovation. Again he did not look up.

In a famous bit of prose summing up the day, author John Updike, writing for The New Yorker, said, “Gods do not answer letters.” Over the years, Williams had been prickly, irritated those fans, feuded with the press, and was not ready to let-bygones-be-bygones mood. As he aged, however, he mellowed, becoming more cooperative with future generations of reporters, taking a stand demanding that the Hall of Fame open its doors to the best African-American players shut out of the majors by discrimination. At the All-Star game of 1999, played at Fenway Park, Major League Baseball announced its all-century team. The grandest ovation was saved for Ted Williams, driven in a golf cart to the mound to throw out the first pitch. The modern-day All-Stars mobbed Williams and brought tears to his eyes. “Wasn’t it great?” Williams said. And then he launched into praise of Boston fans, saying the team was lucky to have them and calling them “the best.” It was the speech he might have made in 1960. On his circuit around the field in the cart, as the fans stood and cheered, Williams removed his hat and waved it high in the air, over and over again. It took a half century, but Williams had at last doffed his cap to his fans. Lew Freedman has authored 54 books, including a biography with Juan Marichal, a biography with Ferguson Jenkins, and several works of baseball history, including Going Yard:  The Everything Home Run book in cooperation with Frank Thomas, and Hard-Luck Harvey Haddix and the Greatest Game Ever Lost.