Ted Williams

Did You Know?

• His mother, May Venzor, was a Mexican-American evangelist and lifelong soldier in the Salvation Army.
• After retiring as a player, he served as executive assistant to Tom Yawkey and later as a team vice president, and resumed spring training instruction with the Red Sox in 1978.

Professional career

Williams began his professional career as a backup for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League in 1936, behind Vince DiMaggio and Ivey Shiver. When Shiver left to become a high-school football coach, Williams took over the job, posting a .271 batting average with 11 RBI in 42 games. In 1937, after graduating from Hoover High, he broke into the lineup on June 22 with an inside-the-park home run, finishing the season with a .291 average, 23 home runs, and 98 RBI in 138 games. Boston Red Sox general manager Eddie Collins, who had scouted Williams in 1936, negotiated a deal with Padres owner Bill "Hardrock" Lane in December 1937, sending Williams to Boston for $35,000, Dom D'Allessandro, Al Niemiec, and two other minor leaguers.

Player profile

Williams was an obsessive student of hitting and used a lighter bat than most sluggers to generate a faster swing. In 1970, he published The Science of Hitting, which described his strategy of swinging only at pitches in ideal areas of his strike zone; his bases-on-balls-to-plate-appearances ratio of .2065 is the highest of any Hall of Fame player. He nearly always took the first pitch and passed his expertise of playing left field in front of the Green Monster to his successor, Carl Yastrzemski.

Williams had a strained relationship with Boston newspapers for nearly twenty years, feeling they focused on his personal life, and maintained a career-long feud with Sport magazine over a 1948 article that included a quote from his mother. After winning the Triple Crown in 1947, he narrowly lost the MVP award when one Midwestern writer left him off his ten-player ballot. Sportswriters also criticized his fielding and clutch hitting, but Williams defended his approach, arguing against risking injury by crashing into outfield walls.

Military service

Williams served as a Naval Aviator during World War II and the Korean War, and unlike many major league players, he did not spend all his war time playing on service teams. Initially classified 3-A for dependency deferment, his status was changed to 1-A after the American entry into World War II; after an appeal, the draft board ruled his status should not have changed, but following media criticism and the loss of an endorsement contract, he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve on May 22, 1942.

He joined the V-5 program to become a Naval aviator rather than take an easy assignment playing baseball, and was sent to Amherst College for six months of academic instruction, achieving a 3.85 grade point average. Williams was so talented as a pilot that the Navy had to order him to leave training to accept his 1942 Triple Crown. Teammate Johnny Pesky noted that Williams mastered complex problems in fifteen minutes that took others an hour, and that he broke the all-time record for hits on the aerial gunnery range, with exceptional reflexes, coordination, and visual-reaction time.

Awards and recognition

Williams was named The Sporting News MLB Player of the Year in 1941, 1942, 1947, 1949, and 1957, and was honored as the Associated Press Athlete of the Year in 1957. He was inducted into the Breitbard Hall of Fame in 1954 and the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame in 2002. In 1999, The Sporting News ranked him number 8 on its list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, the highest-ranking left fielder, and he was elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.

In 2020, The Athletic ranked him number 6 on its "Baseball 100" list, and in 2022, The Sporting News named him on its "Boston Mount Rushmore of Sports" alongside Bill Russell, Bobby Orr, and Tom Brady. Williams was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 25, 1966; in his speech, he called for recognition of Negro leagues players, specifically mentioning Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, a statement seen as a first crack in the door that led to their eventual induction.