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off the dream trade that would put Joe DiMaggio in Fenway Park and Ted
Williams in Yankee Stadium. In later years, MacPhail would maintain that the
deal was all set until Ed Barrow, with malice aforethought, pulled the rug out
from under it.
The way the story goes, Ed Barrow was a guest of Yawkey at his sland estate in
South Carolina, and although Barrow was still nominally the Yankees general
manager, MacPhail, who was a little crazy in a genius kind of a way, had
stripped him of all his authority. Hating MacPhail as he did, Barrow--who just
might have invited himself down to the island for that purpose--told Yawkey
he'd have to be crazy to trade the twenty-seven-year-old Williams for the
thirty-year old, ulcer-ridden DiMaggio.
In the winter of 1948, Yawkey and Dan Topping shook hands on a
Williams-for-DiMaggio trade during a drinking session in New York. The next
morning, Yawkey was supposed to have told him, "I think I ought to get another
player. If you throw in that little left-fielder of yours, it's a deal." The
little left-fielder was Yogi Berra.
"I'm sure that story was true," Ted says. "No question about it. The way I
heard the story, it was a matter of these guys getting together one night,
half looped. Players were like prize possessions to them, I guess, and they
made this deal, and supposedly they agreed on it, and the next day Yawkey
called Topping and told him, 'You know I'm a man of my word, but I just can't
go through with it.' " Ted has heard the Yogi Berra version, too, and he
doesn't completely discount it. "DiMaggio wasn't at the height of his career
and I was. But of course the great DiMaggio was such a great player. He would
have hit better at Fenway Park, and I might have hit better at Yankee
Stadium."
Ted is also sure--no question whatsoever about this--that he came very close
to signing with the Yankees a few days after he played his final game for the
Red Sox. When Ted left the ballpark that day, he
was unemployed, not terribly solvent, and in view of all the responsibilities
he had taken on, terribly worried. Because if the truth be known, he had
retired only because Tom Yawkey had been after him to retire for at least two
years.
The season had ended for Ted on a Wednesday. Thursday was an off day. "I
didn't go to New York with the team, and Saturday morning I got a telegram
from George Struthers, the merchandising vice president of Sears, telling me
they had something they wanted to talk to me about. I knew exactly what it was
going to be." They wanted Ted to come in and upgrade their entire sporting
goods line. "Everything involved with sporting goods. Hunting, fishing,
camping, skiing." They were offering him far more money than he had ever made
in baseball. And they were offering him a ten-year contract.
The American League season ended on Sunday, and on Monday the Yankees asked
Ted--through his manager, Fred Corcoran--for permission to talk to the Red Sox
about signing him for one year, exclusively as a pinch hitter, at the same
salary he had been getting with the Red Sox.
Ted has little doubt that if the talks with Sears hadn't been progressing so
rapidly he would have given it very serious consideration. "It had got to the
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point, though, where I was just tired of what had been going on. And I
thought, Hell, I'm going to do this with Sears. So I told Fred Corcoran I
wasn't interested. And that was the end of it."
The tantalizing question is whether Yawkey would have given his permission for
Ted Williams to end his career in Yankee pinstripes or whether he would have
heaved up a sigh and told Ted that if he really wanted to stick around for
another year he would match the Yankees' offer.
What does Ted think?
"Yawkey's relations with me were always to do what I wanted to do, more or
less. I think that--" Suddenly, his voice took on a tone of certainty. "I
don't know how he would have reacted. I think he was pretty sure, like ] was,
that I didn't want to play anymore."
Like everybody else in Boston, Ted Williams genuflected toward
Tom Yawkey in public. There was nothing Yawkey could ask of him, for as long
as Yawkey was alive, that Ted wouldn't do. There was also a kind of pretense
to a closer relationship than actually existed. Yawkey's island in South
Carolina was a hunting preserve, and everybody assumed that Ted spent a great
deal of time down there with him. Everybody was wrong. Ted went down to the
hunting preserve in South Carolina exactly once.
"It was not a father-and-son relationship," Ted says flatly. "I felt Yawkey
liked me, but I never pursued trying to get extra close to him." Then, so
there would be no misunderstanding: "He was there. He was a simple man. He
knew how lucky he had been in his life and he tried to do everything he could
to be a good guy. He had an open heart for charity, an open heart for a sad
story. He was just a nice easy man, really and truly."
But, when you think about it, why should Ted have wanted to get close to him?
Yawkey wasn't really bright. There was nothing Ted could learn from him.
Yawkey did two things: he drank and he played bridge. Ted did not drink, and
he did not play cards.
True enough, they were involved in the Jimmy Fund together, but that
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