Why I Seldom Mention Ted Williams

It must seem odd to some that a column dedicated to hitting the old-fashioned way should almost never refer to the man judged by most to rank among the three greatest batsmen ever. I do not harbor any secret animosity toward Teddy Ballgame. I think his Science of Hitting is presumptuous at many points but also delivers many very important insights. He seems to have been obnoxious and even tyrannical as a manager (as when he ended John Roseboro’s active career because Rosey would not humiliate a pitcher during a game who couldn’t get his curveballs over)—yet these qualities were not in short supply among the managers of Williams’s day. His instructional videos, wherein he enlists stars like Harmon Killebrew to shill and play mannequin so that the brilliance of the Williams system may shine, are actually no more didactic than more recent products I have seen—sometimes much less so.

No, the reason for my reticence is simple and innocent: Williams really wasn’t a very “old school” hitter. He disdained using the whole field, and—despite his legendary .406 batting average in 1941—he preferred hitting for power rather than average. Ballplayers of his day occasionally criticized him for being too picky at the plate, charging that he would get just his pitch or else take a walk when the winning run needed only weak contact from him to reach home. (DiMaggio usually occupies the favorable end of this contrast.) In many ways, Ted was the exemplar of the fifties style—not its guru so much as its offspring: the “guru” days would come later, with the book and videos. Guys may not have talked about opening the hips before he did, as Williams always claimed; but they were certainly leaning back and hacking, from Mantle to Colavito to Gus Triandos and Dale Long.

You don’t know all those names? Well, I’m not surprised. The “lean back and hack” technique is not a recipe for longevity, though it may catapult offensive stars into prominence for two or three seasons. Throwing the front hip open and hitting off the back leg turns out to anchor the swing around one focal point and, thus, to prohibit any kind of forward glide. Only when the weight can carry somewhat forward is the swing flattened into an ellipse, greatly multiplying its chances of making contact—especially with an outside pitch—and of staying squared to the ball. Most hitting coaches call this “staying inside the ball” or “leading with the hands”. They seldom remark that the maneuver works best in tandem with a mild forward transfer of weight. Ted’s method (as taught to him and then by him) produced a generation of dead-pull hitters who either nailed the pitch, missed it entirely, or weakly popped up: shades of today! This was not the method which aging batsmen like Red Schoendienst employed, and the emerging talents from the Negro Leagues like Bob Boyd were so “old school” resistant to the Williams style that managerial preachers of power benched many of them for not hitting enough home runs. The whole trend probably had far more to do with “The Year of the Pitcher” than did high mounds and small strike zones.

The irony is that The Splendid Splinter didn’t really follow his own advice. (After all, he won six batting crowns!) Neither did Mickey Mantle: more often than not, Mick was trailing his rear foot upon contact, though he always seemed to believe that his weight had settled upon it. Hitters of Williams’s and Mantle’s day didn’t have the luxury of reviewing their stroke in slow motion on tape, but we may do so today. Ted’s weight routinely leached forward on him (perhaps somewhat less than Mickey’s), and his hands therefore trailed his body and came forward very level. (To be fair: his book explicitly recommends a slight upper-cut in defiance of the Kiner/Kluszewski school of swinging down to create backspin.) He even spread his hands sometimes, though he denied ever doing so. He was, in short, a great natural hitter—so great that he could get away with using only half the field, so natural that he didn’t really understand why he enjoyed dazzling success.