Posted on: Saturday, July 6, 2002

Legendary career filled with what ifs

By Mike Lopresti
Gannett News Service

.406.

One by one, the giants of the past depart. Their legacies do not. The memory Ted Williams leaves behind will forever rest upon a batting average in 1941.

Sixty-one years later, nobody has been back. The .400 wall has been unassailable, too demanding for any to do what he had done at the age of 23.

Still, there is so much more to the legend of Williams, and a career of many colors. Monumental feats, but also aching loss. Deep admiration for his abilities, but also detachment from the masses, forced by a contrary personality.

As the years went by, there seemed always something in his way. War, mostly. Or the Yankees.

And so, in the counting of Williams' baseball life, it is easy to be struck not only by the batting average and the home runs, but all the what-ifs.

What if he had not lost nearly five seasons of his prime to two wars?

What if he had not had the lousy and unlucky timing of sharing his era with the Joe DiMaggio Yankees?

What if he had tipped his cap to the fans? Just once in awhile?

It is the greatest of baseball ironies that a man many consider the finest hitter in the history of the game ranks only No. 60 on the all-time hit list. But then, so many at-bats were lost, while the fighting had to be done against Germany and North Korea, not American League pitchers.

The stack of his statistics could have been so much higher. The number of awards, too.

He was twice a league MVP. But what about 1941?

Batting .406 was not good enough. He lost out to DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak.

And what about 1942?

Winning the Triple Crown was not good enough. He lost out to another Yankee, Joe Gordon.

The Yankees were often the nemesis. A major reason there was only a single World Series for Williams, and that a futile one. When the Red Sox lost to St. Louis in seven games in 1946, Williams hit .200 and drove in one run.

The last decade of his career was spent on also-ran Boston teams with bad pitching. So there was never a championship. That void will be forever.

But if he could not decide a famous game in October, he could in July, with a two-out, three-run homer that won the 1941 All-Star Game.

And if he could not have happier endings to most of his seasons, he could at least fashion the perfect last bow to his career, homering on his final at-bat in 1960.

By 1999, when he took that emotional golf cart ride into Fenway Park for the All-Star Game, whatever distance there had been with the public and media no longer mattered.

It turned out to be his farewell, for all intent and purposes. The modern stars of the game gathered around in open awe of a frail man who needed help to stand.

But in his eyes was still the fire of the indomitable hitter who had become immortal a long time before. Probably on that September afternoon in 1941, the last day of the season, when he refused to sit on a .3996 average that was officially .400. Instead, he took the risk and played a meaningless doubleheader, and went 6-for-8.

In the years to come, there might have been more awards, more World Series, more smiles to the customers. Fate and Ted Williams had other things in mind.

But something was never in doubt. The man could hit, possibly like no other. It is the purest of baseball legacies to own, born of a sweet swing, line drives on summer afternoons, and one immortal number.

.406.