BILL BUCKNER AND ME: A PLAY, A CLINIC -- LIFE AND BASEBALL

All the obituaries led with the error. Bill Buckner, whose fielding mistake in Game Six of the 1986 World Series cost the Boston Red Sox their first championship since 1918, since the Curse Of The Bambino was laid on the team after the 1919 season, when their owner sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. It is not the way any of us would care to be remembered, and it is unfair, and I had a chance to see up close the effect it has on a life.

In 1993, I was Vice President for European Operations for Major League Baseball International, and I had Buck in Britain for some coaching clinics and a little baseball publicity. He was an affable guy, there to do a job, and did everything he was asked to do. He turned out to be a natural instructor, which is not always true of very talented athletes, and smooth with the media. To a point. We staged a PR event at Lillywhites in Piccadilly Circus, and a number of reporters from national papers turned out. Before we started, I took them aside and asked if they would refrain from concentrating on, or hounding Bill about, the '86 Series. The wound was too fresh, the story too familiar.

So of course a guy from the biggest Sunday paper, as things are going fine, asks a convoluted question about watching a movie where a baseball player drops an easy fly ball and loses the most important game for his team. Such a movie did not, to my rather extensive knowledge, exist. But this guy wanted Buck's opinion. I don't think the question bothered Bill as much as its transparent dishonesty did, and he gave a perfunctory answer and visibly lost his enthusiasm for the rest of the event.

I walked away with him afterwards, apologized in an ineffective way, and went off with him and the other coaches for a beer and lunch. I knew Buckner had received death threats immediately after the World Series. I knew he'd been abused by fans in New York. I knew the media would never let that be forgotten (and imagine how much worse it would have been in today's world of half-baked mockery on the internet). But this is the story I should have told him right then and there. Because I am a Red Sox fan, and in 1986 I was probably twice as fervent as I am today. Which is still pretty fervent. I followed them religiously, though from afar. But I was working for ABC Sports in 1986, and ABC had a WATS line with New York, which meant my counterpart and friend in New York, David Downs and I could throw in extensive Sox chat as we discussed business daily.

On the evening of Saturday October 25, 1986 I was in Monaco. I had spent the previous three days with David and two of our colleagues from New York doing business at the annual congress of AGFIS, the association of international sports federations. The others had left for the airport Saturday morning, leaving me to finish business with the head of the World Weightlifting Federation over breakfast. In the afternoon, my then-girlfriend arrived by train from Milan. We had dinner, and were asleep in my room in the Hotel de Paris when the phone rang, sometime after five in the morning. It was David calling from New York. “Two outs, two strikes, bottom of the tenth: I wanted you to hear this!” He held the phone to his TV speaker. I heard “Stanley's pitch...” followed by a scream and a curse. And he hung up.

I grabbed the Sony short-wave I'd always carried since my days as a journalist for UPITN, and tried desperately to tune in Armed Forces Network, from Germany or Italy. Cornelia was half awake in the bed, asking in Italian what was going on. But the sun had risen in France, and I couldn't find a signal. I waited a while and then took the immense step of calling New York from an expensive hotel phone. The Sox had lost, the New York Mets had tied the series at 3-3 and the deciding game would be played Sunday night.

Let me explain something now. The moment I heard (or didn't hear) over the phone was a wild pitch by Bob Stanley (or passed ball by catcher Rich Gedman, the point is still being argued) with the Sox still leading 5-4 in the bottom of the tenth inning. It allowed the tying run to score. Mookie Wilson, the batter, then hit the ground ball down the first base line that skipped between Buckner's legs and allowed the winning run to score. The Mets won the game 6-5 and tied the series 3 games each.

Buckner had the misfortune of making the highly visible error, the perfect photo, the metaphor for the loss: but the win implied by Boston's scoring two runs in the top of the tenth had already been erased before Mookie's ground ball.

It wasn't Buckner's fault manager John McNamara pinch hit for his starting pitcher, Roger Clemens, in the eighth inning up 3-2 (the hitter, Mike Greenwell, struck out). Nor that Calvin Schiraldi, the closer acquired late in the season from the Mets, immediately allowed the tying run. It wasn't Buck's fault that after going up 4-3 in the top of the tenth, McNamara called allowed Schiraldi to hit for himself, nor with the lead now 5-3 he called on Schiraldi to pitch a third inning of relief. It's not Buck's fault that after getting two outs, Schiraldi allowed three straight hits before McNamara pulled him. Nor that the new pitcher, Bob Stanley, didn't see Marty Barrett calling desperately for a throw that would pick Ray Knight off second base for the third out. Most of all, it isn't Bill Buckner's fault that McNamara, for the first time in the playoffs, neglected to send Dave Stapleton, a slick fielding infielder, in as a defensive replacement for Buckner. Johnny Mac, old school all the way, wanted Buck to be on the field for the moment of the triumph.

I knew all the back-stories: how Schiraldi's ex Met teammates knew how he was likely to pitch to him. How McNamara claimed Clemens had 'begged' to be taken out, which the pitcher vehemently denied. How Stanley, lumbering over to cover first, might not have beaten Mookie to the bad even had Buckner made the play. The basic point was: you lose as a team, and there was more than enough blame to go around.

And of course, the Series was still there to be won; Game Seven was supposed to be played the next night. I was still in Monaco, but it rained Sunday in New York, so the game was played Monday Night (opposite it, the lowest-rated Monday Night Football game in history) and, back in London, I listened on AFN from Wiesbaden.

The delay allowed McNamara to give the start to lefty Bruce Hurst, albeit on three days rest rather than four. Hurst had two wins already and had been the Sox best player in the series so far. But here Johnny Mac made his biggest mistake. The pitcher on Sunday would have been Dennis 'Oil Can' Boyd. Boyd was told he wasn't starting Monday. But instead of the manager saying something like “look, Can, Bruce has been our best. But he'll get tired, and when he does, I want you ready to go. Not pacing yourself, just giving us your best innings. It's not who starts the game, it's who finishes it, and we need you to finish it. OK?” Mac just told him and walked away. He was the skipper and his word was law. As it was, Can went to the clubhouse and started drinking beer (that's where his 'Oil Can' nickname came from) and by the time pitching coach Bill Fischer found him he was angry and drunk. Or drunk and angry. He supposedly spent the whole game in the manager's office.

The Sox led 3-0 going into the bottom of the sixth, when Hurst tired and allowed three runs, which would have been more had not Dewey Evans thrown out Keith Hernandez on the bases. Now tied 3-3, the seventh would have been the moment for Boyd. Instead, McNamara had to call on Schiraldi who gave up a home run to the first batter and allowed two more runs before giving way to two walks from Joe Sambito and finally the third out from Stanley.

The Sox got two back in the top of the eighth, a rally started by Buckner's single. But Jesse Orosco came in and shut the rally down. It was now 6-5 Mets, and McNamara replaced Stanley, who'd faced only one batter, with Al Nipper, in order to make a 'double switch' to get Ed Romero into the lineup where his bat could be a factor. Like Schiraldi, Nipper gave up a leadoff home run (to Darryl Strawberry), then another run. Orosco closed down the Sox in the top of the ninth and the Mets won the game 8-5 and the Series 4 games to 3: since selling Babe Ruth the Sox had lost three World Series, in 1975, 1967, and 1946—all by 4-3 in seven games, all to arguably the decade's best National League team.

I would have told Buck that I blamed David, who had tickets to Game Seven but didn't go. All kidding and superstition aside, I blamed McNamara more than anyone. But I didn't mention that. I could have said the 'Curse Of The Bambino' thing was a modern construct, born of the nostalgia boom of the 80s and the Sox resurgence post 1975. But I was also stymied by my own evaluation of Buck's overall disappointment in the Series: only six hits, and no production with runners on base. Which was something I pondered as I watched him teach.

Buckner had 22 years in the majors. He was an amazing contact hitter: he didn't walk much, but he didn't strike out very often either. He wasn't a power hitter, but in his best home-run year, in Boston, he hit 18 and struck out only 25 times. For his career, his 162 games average season showed 29 walks, 29 strike outs. His career batting average was .289, lowered by a severe decline in his last three years. But he was also helped by playing much of his career in great hitting parks, Wrigley Field and Fenway. He came up with the Dodgers along with Bobby Valentine and Steve Garvey (see photo of them with Tommy Lasorda at rookie-league Ogden in 1968). Valentine was a similar kind of player whose career also wound up being limited by injury. Valentine was already a legendary high-school athlete when I was a kid in Connecticut, and they were both players with intense natural talent that matured early. Buck was a quick outfielder, contact hitter, without a great arm (career-wise, he's a pretty good match for Al Oliver). He was playing left field for the Dodgers when Hank Aaron hit a home run over his head to break Babe Ruth's career record, which makes another odd link between Buckner and the Babe. But the Dodgers produced a lot of talent in those days—they were constantly moving players out of the outfield, Bill Russell to short, Pedro Guerrero to third. With the ankle injury and infection limiting his mobility, they tried moving Buck to first but of course Garvey was there at the same time. Interestingly, Garvey is the third-closest comparison to Buckner's career, after Oliver and Mickey Vernon, though Vernon's a different type of player with an odd career pattern. Eventually they traded Buckner to the Cubs for Rick Monday, who proved integral to post-season success.

The Cubs were the only team in baseball with a longer history of futility than the Red Sox. In fact, there was an equation known as the Cub Factor which could be used to determine the outcome of nay post-season series: the team with fewer ex-Cubs would win. With the Cubs Buckner would win a batting title in 1980, the first of three straight years hitting over .300, including 105 RBIs in 1982. But in '82, a young outfielder named Leon Durham would make the All-Star team, and by '84 he'd been moved to first base, and Buckner was sidelined. He demanded a trade and was shipped to the Sox for pitchers Dennis Eckerlsey and Mike Gorman.

Here's where it gets weird. In the 1984 National League playoffs, the Cubs were on the verge of eliminating the San Diego Padres, a game where Durham's homer had staked them to a 3-0 lead. But with the margin cut to 3-2, and two runners on base, Durham allowed an easy ground ball by Tim Flannery through his legs, and the tying run scored. Another error by Ryne Sandberg would seal the Cubs' fate; it turned out Durham's glove was soaking wet because Sandberg had accidentally overturned a Gatorade barrell onto it. The play was an eerie foreshadowing of what would happen to Buckner two years later.

As a footnote, Eckersley, whose career as a starter was fading, would be reborn in Oakland as a closer, but he is perhaps best remembered now for the backdoor slider he threw with two strikes to a hobbled Kirk Gibson, which Gibson blasted for a home run on the way to a Dodgers' win and championship in 1988. Eck, of course, represented the Cub Factor in that game.

In '85, Buck had his best year with the Sox: .299 16 HR 110 RBI and even 18 stolen bases with only 4 caught stealings. He'd slipped a bit in '86, but still was over 100 rbis in a lineup loaded with players who got on base (Wade Boggs, Evans, Don Baylor) batting ahead of him. He was much less effective in '87, and the Sox traded him to the Angels, where he had a decent half-season, but after that his career was effectively over, though he hung on for three more years, retiring at age 40. He lived in Boise, made good real estate investments, and later returned to baseball as a coach of an independent minor league team outside Boston.

But in 1993 Buckner responded to being admired by young baseball players and respected by British coaches as only someone with major league credentials can be. There was no false modesty just as there was little defensiveness about '86, he knew what he had and hadn't accomplished in his career. As I said, I wished I'd expressed a little bit more of this at the time, but I too was more concerned with showing him the respect he was due, and helping him do his best for the clinics at which his talent was visible and his effort in teaching admirable.

The Red Sox finally broke the Curse of the Bambino, if such a thing existed in 2004, rallying back from three games down to the Yankees in the American League Championship, and sweeping the Cardinals, their nemesis in both 1946 and 1967.

In 2008, after a second World Series win in 2007, Buckner returned back to Fenway to throw out the first ball on opening day. The Fenway Park crowd rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation that lasted minutes. Buckner visibly wiped away tears a couple of times, but otherwise stood awkwardly, one hand in his pockets, without a hat to tip to acknowledge the fans. When the applause died down he threw a perfect 12 to 6 curve ball to Dewey Evans at the plate, and the two embraced as the crowd applauded again. Afterwards, Buckner said he had never carried animosity toward the fans when he was criticised, but he did have some for the media. Imagine again what that would have been like today. But the moment was a ceremonial and symbolic burying of that moment of surrender to a curse, and a reclamation of Bill Buckner as a player.

He died at the end of May in Boise, of Lewy Body Dementia. He was only 69. Had he lived another six years, he and Mookie Wilson would probably have gone on tour, like Gibson and Eckersley did, putting that moment of the past into historical, legendary, perspective. I could not help but wonder how his memory was affected by the dementia, and whether he would blessed to recall the cheers of 2008, the high points of his career, and of course the blessings of his life. There is one photo of him, with the Red Sox, that I think captures the joy we all get to feel with life, when it seems it will go one forever, that we will enjoy being part of it, that all our problems will be insignificant, or if not, will be overcome. Ironically, I'm writing about that one moment which will always be attached to his name, but I am grateful that I had the chance to put a real person ahead of that moment in my own memory. RIP Buck.

LISA HALLIDAY'S ASYMMETRY

Although Asymmetry might be considered to be about its eponymous subject, in reality it's primarily about something else. Toward the end of 'Madness', the second of the book's two stories (there is also a coda to the first story at the end) Amar Jafaari, an Iraqi-American economics graduate with a recent PhD, a Kurdish Iraqi born in the air over Cape Cod, is being detained at Heathrow after trying to enter the country while on his way back to Iraq to visit his brother. Amar, who once interned at a bio-ethics council in London, has a surprisingly vast recall of literature and is remembering having discovered a copy of The Portable Stephen Crane in the music seat of a piano his brother bought in New York. He recalls how he felt at that point in his life, eleven years old, with a sense of “the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of always being one person”. It is, he thinks, a problem “entirely up to our imaginations to solve.” And then he recalls lines from Crane, “it might perhaps be said—if anyone dared—that the most worthless literature in the world is that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another”.

This exquisite, if seemingly unlikely, bit of literary recall by an economics student is at the core of what Lisa Halliday is up to. Her two stories are actually moving, almost inevitably, toward a symmetry determined by each story's asymmetry. Amar's is multi-faceted, including the asymmetries of his life in the US and his family's life in Syria, but it is anchored by his interminable and frightening encounter with the officious staff of British customs, convinced his stop-over in London is something they should not allow. It is a frame around his wider tale, a constricting frame that seems to be tightening like a medieval torture device around him. It is also, we might later conclude, an attempt at a story of one nation written by a woman of another.

The book's first story, titled 'Folly', details one asymmetrical relationship, between Alice, an assistant editor at a literary publishing house, and Ezra Blazer, a major novelist, who seemed a cross between Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, if a bit less healthy than either. He approaches her in the park where she is half-reading, and recognises, looking at the book, that she 'likes old stuff'. Alice is 25, Ezra 66 (though in fact he seems somewhat older—which may only be the perception of youth) and their affair is of course one of assymetry, based mostly on his fame but also on his experience and his will (though interestingly Alice is more the aggressor sexually). The writing is young and dreamy; Alice doesn't know who she is, almost literally: her given name is Mary-Alice and Ezra soon gives her an alias to use when they are at public affairs. She also doesn't quite know Ezra: when he calls her, her phone always reads CALLER ID BLOCKED, which is a perfect millennial way to describe that part of relationships. She is also a Boston Red Sox fan; he, being a New Yorker, roots for the Yankees. Talk about asymmetry.

Because Lisa Halliday's Alice is so convincing in her ambivalence, 'Folly' as a whole works better than 'Madness', whose intensity in the immigration interrogation far outweighs the details of Amar's own life, or indeed the real story of what is going on with his family in Iraq. You realise there is another asymmetry on offer there, but you sense there is no real parallel to be made between Alice or Amar's love lives and the taking of hostages in a war zone. And you do marvel at the way the narration of 'Folly', while from Lisa's point of view, manages to build, subtly, a convincing portrait of Blazer. Men of another nation and all that.

The coda is an attempt to resolve some of the asymmetry, as Ezra is interviewed on Desert Island discs by a thinly-disguised Kirsty Young, providing a battle of more-or-less equals, with her situation, like that of the interrogator at British immigration, providing her with power, and Ezra using his tricks to re-establish footing. This seemed a little forced to me, and tonally not of a piece, but it does make her point, if narrowing it somewhat to a battle of the sexes.

I read Asymmetry on recommendation from my friend Alexis, whose praise for the writing was justified. So when I finished, I looked to see why I had missed the book, and discovered two things. Less importantly, in Britain, it was the coda that seemed to receive the most attention, a certain amount of critical cheerleading at the way Kirsty Young deals with the old man, mixed with a definite ignoring of the parallel situation at Heathrow Airport rather than Broadcasting House.

But more significantly, the real attention-grabber was that Lisa Halliday had actually had an affair with Philip Roth, when their ages were roughly what Alice and Ezra's are, and thus this fiction was, as the movies (or Granta books' PR probably) say, 'based on a true story'. This is not essential to enjoying the book, indeed, I think it probably reinforces the fiction's own asymmetry between Alice's and Amars stories. But this is not Joyce Maynard dishing the dirt and getting revenge on JD Salinger. In fact, in retrospect it reminded me more of Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year, detailing the time she spent as an assistant to Salinger's agent.

I would have preferred not to have learned the 'true story', especially since much of it occurs as Ezra is 68, when their ages total 95, and it all seems rather hopeless. Or pathetic. Or asymmetrical. Which seems reinforced as 'Folly' ends, with a Red Sox player striking out against a Yankee, and Alice holding Ezra's hand in hospital. It's a fine piece of writing, true story or no.

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Granta £8.99 ISBN 9781783783625

REMEMBERING DAVE HENDERSON, AND DONNIE MOORE

I was saddened immensely to learn that Dave Henderson had died aged 57, of a heart attack suffered while recovering from a kidney transplant. A heart attack seemed impossible: no one had a bigger heart than Hendu. I can't remember a Red Sox player who seemed to enjoy playing more; like a Fenway Park version of Wrigley's Ernie Banks. He never seemed to feel pressure, and it gave him an ability in the clutch that made him, briefly, the toast of Boston. But there was a dark side to Hendu's zenith, and the pitcher who surrendered Henderson's most famous hit never recovered from the loss.

It was October 12, 1986. The Red Sox were in Anaheim, down three games to one to the Angels in the best of seven American League Championship Series.  It was the top of the ninth inning,  and the Sox trailed 5-2. They'd led 2-1, but in the sixth inning Dave Henderson had played a long fly to the wall off his glove and over the fence for a home run, putting Anaheim in the lead. Henderson hadn't played much all season, batted only 54 times and hit a pathetic .196, but Tony Armas was out with an injured ankle, and I was thinking how much we'd regret that. California added two insurance runs in the seventh. Angels' starter Mike Witt had held Boston in check and was headed for his second complete-game win of the series; the Angels were three outs away from the World Series. But Bill Buckner led off the ninth with a single, and Dave Stapleton ran for him. Jim Rice struck out. Then Don Baylor, the former Angel, smacked Witt downtown for a home run, making it 5-4. Witt got Dewey Evans to pop up for the second out, but one out away from the win manager Gene Mauch pulled him. Rich Gedman, a lefty, was coming up and was 3 for 3, so Gary Lucas, a lefty came in, and promptly hit Gedman with his first pitch, putting the tying run on first. Mauch yanked Lucas, and brought in his closer, Donnie Moore, to face Henderson. His costly mistake in the field was the furthest thing from his mind, even though Moore seemed to be toying with him. Then, with the count 2-2, Henderson stretched for a high pitch and drove it over the fence for a home run. The Sox led 5-4.

Bob Stanley gave up a run in the bottom of the ninth, so the game went to extra innings, and the Red Sox won it in the 11th with a sacrifice fly by Henderson after Moore had loaded the bases. Calvin Schiraldi closed out the Angels in the bottom of the 11th, and the Sox headed back to Boston where they won games six and seven easily, and advanced to play the Mets in the World Series, a team with 108 wins, and like the Reds in 1976 and Cardinals in 1967, the Sox opponents in those ill-fated World Series, arguably the best National League team of the decade.

You all know how that went. How in Game Six, October 25th at Shea,the Sox stood one out away from their first World Series win since 1918, when Schiraldi, the former Met, couldn't close the game out, and Stanley came in, threw a wild pitch past Gedman, and a ground ball then went through Buckner's legs, since John McNamara had neglected for sentimental reasons to send Stapleton in for Buckner.  The Sox went on to lose in ten innings, and lost game seven after leading 3-0; their third consecutive decade with a classic seven game world series loss. Hendu hit .400 in the series, with two home runs and seven rbis in 25 at bats.

The Sox traded him to the Giants late in the 1987 season. In 1988 he signed with Oakland and had a string of good seasons, including an excellent run from 88 to '91, when he was an All-Star. He won a World Series with Oakland in 1989, no one could have deserved his ring more.

But by then, Donnie Moore was gone. The once-feared closer had been shaken by Henderson's home run, and the loss of game five of the ALCS, and he was never again the same pitcher. He had pitched through injury that October, but the fans didn't care, and they booed Moore for the next two seasons. He was plagued with injuries, and after the 1988 season was released. He signed with Kansas City, but was sent to the minors. In July, after an argument with his wife, he shot her three times. As one of his kids rushed her to a hospital, Moore, in front of another of his children, turned the gun on himself.

Boston didn't win the 1986 World Series, so Henderson remained just a popular footnote to one of baseball's most famous might-have-beens. But the loss never seemed to affect Hendu. There was another season, another game, another day to play ball. For Donnie Moore, the loss was more personal, the failure more immediate, the shadow of it inescapable. I can't think of Hendu and his broad smile without seeing Moore and his tight-lipped visage. I loved Dave Henderson for reminding me that it was, in the end, only a game. A game he had so much fun playing, and made watching him play so much fun as well.

TED WILLIAMS: THE LOST GUARDIAN OBIT

NOTE: Tonight I am doing a broadcast on BBC Radio, of the Red Sox season-opening game at Yankee Stadium against the Evil Empire. If you are a Red Sox fan, as I am, you will appreciate the appropriateness of April Fools Day to start the Sox' season, but in the eternal spirit of hope, I thought I'd post this obit, which I recently found in my files, of the greatest Red Sox of all, Ted Williams.

This one was written for the Guardian,with a British audience in mind, as a stock piece for their files before Williams died. But when Ted did finally pass away, on 5 July 2002, the Guardian's news desk thought it was important enough to run a short wire-service piece in the news pages, and the obits desk decided that was enough attention for one baseball player, although, of course, Williams was much more than that. I've left it as I wrote it, except to fill in his age when he died. The Red Sox did finally win another World Series, in 2004, and then again in 2007, but in the process somehow found themselves morphing into the Yankees-lite, anathema to old-school Sox fans like me. I've since written, though the Independent hasn't yet published it, an obit of Richard Ben Cramer, whose tremendous piece in Esquire's June 1986 special issue, The American Man: 1946-1986, is one of the best profiles ever written (you can link to it here). Look at the picture of Ted in the follow through of his swing.  That's the Ted Williams I will always remember, though I never actually saw him play.

TED WILLIAMS was born in 1918, the last year the Boston Red Sox won baseball’s World Series. The next winter, the Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, where he became the game’s greatest star, and launched a dynasty of Yankee championships that continues to this day. Boston fell under the so-called Curse of the Bambino, which not even stars as great as Williams were able to overcome. Now Williams has died aged 83, and his Red Sox are still without another championship.

Williams was America’s real-life John Wayne: baseball prodigy, war hero, record-holding fisherman. How many men could make reasonable claims at being the world’s best at three different things? He embodied a masculine image which became deeply unfashionable, yet in recent years a society which lavishes huge rewards on mediocrity came to re-evaluate his accomplishments, understand, and even embrace his uncompromising personality. What was brash in a youngster becomes lovable in an aging icon. In this he came to symbolise Boston, where he was destined to play tragic hero: the young god whose hubris was repaid by the denial of World Series glory with his cursed Red Sox. 

Williams epitomised some classic New England values, working with dedication to become prodigiously skilled at his craft. Using a narrow cylinder of wood to hit a baseball bearing down at your head at speeds above 95mph is arguably the single most difficult task in sports, but no one made it look easier than Williams. Ruth may be the sport’s greatest player, but for pure hitting talent, Williams is the only man who could argue he was Ruth’s better. He could also sacrifice. Although he was accused at one point of dodging military service (he was his mother's sole support) he eventually lost much of his baseball prime to military service. And he was loyal. Despite his feuds with the Boston press, the so-called 'knights of the keyboard' he despised, and despite his love/hate relationship with Boston's fans, he played all 22 seasons of his career with the Red Sox.

But Ted never possessed another New England trait: self-restraint. He never learned the grace, the taciturn style, the faux-worldliness, of New York’s glamorous Yankees like Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle. He debuted for the Red Sox in 1939, a 21 year old rookie calling himself “the Kid”. He resembled Wayne playing the Ringo Kid, tall, lean, and impossibly handsome: a combination of youthful innocence and lethal skill. He could count the stitches on a baseball hurtling at him, and uncoil his slender body like a finely-wound spring to make contact with it. Great players demand multiple definitions: soon they were calling him “The Splendid Splinter", later he would add "The Thumper".

 

His perfectionism contrasts with cricket’s equally obsessive Geoffrey Boycott. Like Boycott, Williams waged a career-long battle with the press, who accused him of placing individual success above his teams’ goals. When Cleveland manager Lou Boudreau shifted his fielders to pack the right side of the diamond, Ted refused to alter his technique and hit the opposite way. It would have stopped him taking his perfect swing. But unlike Boycott, Williams was exuberant in his abilities, generous with his chosen art to both teammate and opponent. His childish glee as he danced around the bases after winning the 1941 All-Star Game with a late home run earned him yet another nickname, “Teddy Ballgame”. “Jeffy Cricket-match” lacks the same ring. But Williams steadfastly refused to compromise for acceptance: he wouldn’t wear ties and he couldn’t pander to public relations; he never had an empathy for those who lacked the absolute sense of security his ability gave him.

Williams’ came by obsession naturally. His father abandoned his mother, a fanatical organiser for the Salvation Army. She in turn left him to his own devices; he haunted San Diego’s sandlots, hitting baseballs whenever he could persuade someone to pitch them. He was already playing semi-pro while still a high-school star, and at 18 turned pro with the San Diego Padres, then a top independent minor league team, in the Pacific Coast League, who eventually sold him to the Red Sox.

In 1941 Williams became the first player in almost 20 years to hit over .400 for the season. Where three safe hits every ten at-bats (.300) is considered excellent, the .400 barrier is regarded as nearly impossible. Before the season’s final day, Williams’ average stood at .3995. He refused his manager’s offer to sit out the final two-game double-header to protect his average, which would have been rounded up to .400. Instead, he stroked 6 hits in 8 at-bats, raising his mark to .406. No one has reached .400 since. Typically, however, 1941 was also the season DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games, and the Yankee Clipper captured the Most Valuable Player award. The two engaged in a triumphant reunion tour fifty years later, still New York chalk and Boston cheese. But by then, both they, and America, had learned to relish the contrast.

Williams’ career statistics fall short of many of the game’s greats, mostly because he lost five peak seasons to wars. He was so skilled a Marine fighter pilot that he was forced to spend World War II as an instructor. Recalled to Korea, he flew as John Glenn’s wingman. The future astronaut, Senator, and “right-stuff” test pilot called Williams the best combat flyer he had ever seen. 

 

In private Williams, whose ne’er do well brother died at age 39 of leukaemia, was a driving force behind the success of the Jimmy Fund, the Red Sox “pet” charity for children’s cancer research. In public, he used his induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame as a platform to call for the inclusion of Negro League stars, denied by segregation their chance to play in the majors.

But if baseball was his obsession, fishing was his passion. He retired to Florida where he could indulge himself with deep-sea fishing, where he held a number of world-record catches, and was equally adept with a fly rod, the same vision, coordination and patience that made him a great hitter of baseballs made him a great caster of lures.

Aged 38, and slow afoot, Williams still batted .388. Two years later, he retired. John Updike chronicled his final game in a famous New Yorker magazine essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”. In his final at-bat in Boston’s Fenway Park, Williams hit a home run. After he took his place in left field, he was replaced, allowing the fans the chance to give him one final ovation. He trotted back into the dugout, without tipping his cap, and disappeared. Despite prolonged cheering, he never returned. As Updike explained, “Gods do not reply to letters”.

DICK WILLIAMS: IN MEMORIAM

I had meant to write something earlier about the death of baseball manager Dick Williams; sadly his career didn't really have much of a hook for a British paper's readership. Most of his obits in the States seemed to concentrate on his time with the Oakland As, which was to be expected, as he won two World Series with them ('72-73) and they were a collection of larger-than-life characters--Reggie, Catfish, Vida Blue, Joe Rudi, Blue Moon, Rollie, Sal Bando, Gino Tenace, Campy and so on, all orchestrated by owner Charles O Finley, who made an interesting fit with the irascible Williams', who, like his team, appeared to simply ignore Finley as much as possible and get on with the business of winning baseball games (in fairness, it should be noted that it was Finley who put those teams together, as well as tried to keep them poor and hungry). He called that Oakland team '25 versions of me...we looked like damn hippies...but didn't care about anything but winning.'

I remember Williams most fondly as the manager of what remains my favourite baseball team and season: the Impossible Dream Red Sox of 1967, who won the American League pennant at the longest odds of any team in history. I was 16, starting as a junior on a prep school football team loaded with high-school graduates, and we played at Thompson Academy in Boston Harbor the same weekend the AL season was ended. I got dispensation to stay over at my uncle's in Chelmsford, and watched the season's final game, which the Sox won, and later won the pennant when the Angels beat the Twins that night. It cemented my lifelong obsession with the Red Sox (which has not even been dampened by their recent transformation into the Yankees-lite).

That '67 team was the perfect one to adore, and Williams was a rookie manager who made the perfect fit for that club for a number of reasons. Owner Tom Yawkey was the antithesis of Finley: he didn't need to make his living from the team and he adored his star players. Williams came in and used his 'my way or the highway' approach to shake some players of their comfort zone. He stripped Carl Yastrzemski of the team captaincy, sending a message that was taken on by the team's core of young stars: Yaz, Rico Petrocelli, Tony Conigliaro, George 'Boomer' Scott, pitcher Jim Lonborg. Yaz would turn in one of the all-time great seasons, winning the Triple Crown, Lonborg would dominate as a pitcher, and all the others would raise their performance levels.

Williams' approach worked because the Sox were a young team; Yaz being the oldest regular at 27, and many of them had played for Williams in the minors. He also inserted Reggie Smith (cf) and Mike Andrews (2b) into the starting lineup, making it older and better. General manager Dick O'Connell got him some pitching pieces, and when Conigliaro was lost for the season when he eye was shattered by a pitch, he got Hawk Harrelson to play right field.

The Sox lost a great seven game World Series to the Cardinals, the strongest National League winners of that decade, when Bob Gibson out-duelled Lonborg in the seventh game. Lonborg was pitching on two days rest and didn't have it; as they did in game seven in 86 against the Mets, the Sox didn't show enough faith in the rest of their staff.

The team didn't repeat in 1968, though Williams managed well. Lonborg broke his leg skiing, which is another of the dozens of Red Sox 'what if' scenarios, because O'Connell went out and picked up Ray Culp and Dick Ellsworth in the off-season' they won 16 games each and with a healthy Lonborg the Sox would have had the league's best rotation. Williams, meanwhile, fired pitching coach Sal Maglie, wanting his own guy: Maglie had made a winner of Lonborg, and other Sox pitchers like Dick Radatz, Earl Wilson, and Bill Monboquette, by insisting they pitch inside.

Yawkey fired Williams late in the 1969 season. He quit the As, mostly because Finley had tried to force him to place Andrews, now playing in Oakland, on the disabled list as punishment for making two errors in a World Series game. He early moved to the Evil Empire to manage the Yanquis, but Finley insisted on compensation, so he managed the Angels and Expos and then took the expansion Padres to a pennant in 1984, making him one of only seven guys to manage champions in both leagues. he was fired the next year, managed in Seattle, and then scouted for the Yanqui. As a manager he was great at changing the attiutude in a clubhouse, and getting the best out of players who wanted to do things his way. Eventually, of course, that approach wears itself out. As he said in a recent interview, about the current millionaire players, 'today I wouldn't last a week...(but) I don't know anybody who refused the World Series checks I helped them get.'

When I did the World Series for Sky with Rico Petrocelli we talked at great length about Williams, and how his drill sergeant approach worked in those heady days of the Sixties in Boston. The players were somewhat apart from the counter-cultural capital the Hub was (and if you doubt me listen to Earth Opera's song 'Red Sox Are Winning') but they were a team convinced of their own destiny; and if destiny worked they always had Yaz. Williams was the perfect face for that team, and we were always convinced that beneath his gruff exterior was a guy who'd fight for his players. He proved that in Oakland. RIP.

IN NEW YORK, MONEY TALKS...

It's been a big week in the Big Apple. On Tuesday, Michael Bloomberg was elected to his third term as mayor of New York. The next night, the New York Yankees won their 27^th World Series baseball championship, their first since 2000, to cap off their inaugural season in the brand-new Yankee Stadium. The next day, Happy Days Were Here Again on Wall Street as the Yankees celebrated with an old-fashioned ticker-tape parade. Behind the triumphalist cheering, the reality implicit in the imagery was easy for most New Yorkers to miss, as plain as a Leni Reifenstahl film to those of us outside the five boroughs.

Once upon a time, the tape cascading down from the windows of the financial institutions (in the days when such windows actually opened), came from the tickers of the brokers and merchant bankers. It was a tangible, if disposable, symbol celebrating the triumph of another old-fashioned American value: the power of cash. New York may have been the epicenter of the world's financial meltdown just a few short months ago, but you wouldn't have known it last week. It was as if Wall Street were celebrating, not just the Yankees' win, but the triumph of money itself. Because both the Yankees and Bloomberg, who made his fortune providing Wall Street's news, gained success by following a simple formula: outspend your opposition, outspend them by huge margins, and then keep on spending like it's 1999.

Some baseball traditionalists poo-poohed the idea that this Yankee win was a product of financial leverage. After all, they said, the Yankees have had baseball's largest payroll for each of the past eleven seasons, and for the last eight seasons had not won a championship, despite spending a total of $1.4 billion on player salaries in that time, roughly $500m more than their closest competitors. If money could buy success, the Yankees would never have been beaten.

Similarly, political analysts pointed to a lackluster campaign run by Bloomberg's Democratic opponent, William Thompson. A more fiery candidate, with better backing from his party, could have easily overcome a 14-1 deficit in campaign spending. Exactly how no one really explained.

Bloomberg, who had earlier campaigned for term limits, and then overturned them to allow himself another run, was, for this campaign, rebranded from Michael, New York Democrat turned Republican, to 'Mike', tough Conservative and just your simple average billionaire next door; an urban, Jewish Shrub Bush. 'Mike' became the predominant one-word identification on his campaign posters, as if he were already as iconic a figure as, Cher, Madonna, Roseanne or, say, Stalin. There was more than a hint of Stalinism (in a capitalist version) in the prospect of 'Mike' buying his way into perpetual rulership of the city. Since Republicans are outnumbered in the five boroughs by a margin almost as large as Bloomberg's spending advantage, this cult of the individual served to create an aura of inevitability about his re-election. Success was portrayed as breeding success, a self-fulfilling prophecy which worked to restrain the campaigning of some Democratic officials, especially those who have to work with the mayor, on behalf of their own candidate.

This season the Yankees' best-paid player, the steroid-stained Alex Rodriquez, received $33m. This was less than four million dollars short of the entire team payroll for the Florida Marlins. Like Bloomberg, Rodriquez is known by his nickname, A-Rod (or, after his steroid use became public, A-Roid). He too has been rebranded: from drugs cheat, serial adulterer, Madonna trophy-stud, and selfish choker of previous failed Yankee teams, to all-around nice guy and team leader of the current champions. In fact, it's hard to recall such a complete turnaround from the tabloid press, at least not since Princess Diana's tragic death turned her overnight from international slut and object of journalistic scorn to the people's saint.

Rodriquez and fellow sluggers Derek Jeter and Mark Texieira combined to rake in $75.2m in salary, more than the total payrolls of 16 teams. Throw in the Yankees' three top pitchers, for another $46.7 million, and the team's' six biggest stars earned $121.9m, slightly more than all 25 Boston Red Sox. And the Red Sox had the fourth biggest payroll in baseball! Texieira and pitcher CC Sabathia were considered the two best players available in last winter's free agent market; the Yankees, of course, signed them both.

They can do this because they have huge resources available to them, primarily their own subscription TV channel offering the team's games at premium prices to the nation's biggest television market. The brand-new Yankee Stadium boasts the highest ticket prices in baseball. Where the original stadium looked like a temple from the outside, the new version resembles a faceless bank or, yes, Stalinist ministry, as if 'Mike' had ordered the federal reserve moved up to the Bronx. It is the House That Ruth Built on steroids, its exterior swollen by massive walkways leading from 'shopping experience' to 'eating experience', the concrete paths already cracked as if the stadium itself were rebelling against being turned into a mall with a 'baseball experience' in its piazza. 

The playing field itself has been shrunken, like a steroid abuser's testicles, to bandbox proportions, a home-run friendly design which, in fairness, echoes the Babe Ruth-friendly proportions of the original. It may be garish, it may be expensive, but it's New York's, it's a winner, and New Yorkers have proven they will pay to follow a winner. In some cases any winner. Many of those celebrity fans devoted in the 1980s to the then-edgier stars of New York's other baseball club, the Mets, switched long ago to the more successful Yankees. We're lookin' at you, Spike Lee. We have it on film. The Mets have a new stadium of their own, Citi Field, sponsored by a bank, and built, like Yankee Stadium, next door to its predecessor. Sadly, Shea Stadium was located, like the New York World's Fair for which it was built, in the flight path to LaGuardia Airport, and the modern version echoes the same sense of planned obsolescence of the original.

Bloomberg seems to have internalised the Yankee blueprint. According to figures released 10 days before the election, he had already spent more than $85 million on his campaign. Those tracking the huge flood of advertising as election day closed in estimated Bloomberg's final spending total to come in around $110m. Of course Bloomberg, whose personal fortune is estimated at $16 billion, can afford it. The hapless Thompson had spent a mere $6m a week before the election—Bloomberg's 14-1 spending advantage is likely to have widened in the campaign's final week.

It doesn't seem to worry Americans that winning election as mayor of New York costs only half a much as winning the 'world' championship of baseball. And it certainly doesn't bother New Yorkers, who have an old saying: 'money talks and bullshit walks'. Let the losers gather the bovine droppings. New Yorkers don't worry that the Yankees' payroll of $208 million dollars was about 50% more than baseball's second most-expensive team. Especially because that team, with a payroll of $136m, was, of course, the Mets. It may have puzzled the perennially disappointed Mets fans, the hard core who haven't followed the herd to the Bronx. But it probably pleased many non-New Yorkers that at least the Mets didn't even make the post-season playoffs (nor did the team with the third-highest payroll, Chicago's perennially hapless Cubs). It may also be reassuring for non-New Yorkers to assume that, for now, 'Mike' Bloomberg has no Presidential ambitions. At least not this week. After all, most of the country are not Yankee fans. And can't necessarily be bought, not even by a winner.