The Splendid Splinter + Best Series Ever?

Baseball Extravaganza, Part 2.

Books & Culture April 17, 2014

Comprehensive biographies are always a risk, both to write and to read. So much information, so many details, such a risk to lose the thread. When I came to The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams, I felt some trepidation as I riffled through the almost 800 pages. The Splendid Splinter lived a long, eventful life, having played in four different decades, managed into a fifth, and remained active and controversial up to, and even after, his death in 2002. Yes, this book—by Ben Bradlee, Jr.—is a long haul (the index officially ends at page 855—a Tolstoyan span). But it's also a feast.

The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

LITTLE, BROWN

864 pages

$21.50

Down to the Last Pitch: How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves Gave Us the Best World Series of All Time

The Kid is a tale of two halves (the first bigger than the second, as Yogi Berra might say). Bradlee's treatment of Williams' life up to the end of his playing career has the strong thematic element of baseball to hold the story together and keep it from descending into soap opera. Though we get more time on Ted's dysfunctional marriages and parenting as the book moves forward, the account of his Hall of Fame induction in 1966 and even of his rather quixotic managerial foray with the Senators/Rangers in the late 1960s and early '70s sustains the narrative drive.

Of baseball anecdotes there are many, more than enough to get one through the rockier psychodramatic sequences, which Williams appears to have had with as much frequency as multi-hit games. Bradlee attends at length to Williams' childhood and adolescence, with an absentee father and hyper-pious and also absentee Salvation Army mother leaving Ted and his brother lonely and bitter. (His brother became a petty criminal and died young of cancer.) Intriguing and indicative is the information that Ted's mom was of Mexican lineage on both sides, and further that Williams never spoke publically (and rarely privately) about the fact that he was half-Mexican.

From the start to the finish, Ted retreated into what he was good at, such as fishing and baseball. The trope of playing ball all day long at the park was for Ted a necessity—and he would practice hitting the whole time. Even as a skinny teen, he commanded the respect of the older kids (who would pitch to him) at the park, and the awe of the younger kids (who would shag balls all day long for him). This double theme—of trauma and loss, but also of entitlement and selfishness—is at the heart of Bradlee's book, and he uses it deftly to reveal many of the sharp paradoxes of Williams' life.

"The Kid," as the 20-year-old Williams was christened by the Red Sox equipment manager on the first day of spring training in 1938, would always live dramatically in the public eye, whether openly deriding fans and reporters (sometimes psychotically so), or creating baseball lore with the light bats and lithe arms he sported. Williams' flair for the mythic is the single most powerful theme I took from this account. His screwball antics, much beloved by the press in his one minor-league season in Minneapolis and in his rookie year of 1939, would fade as his ornery side emerged, but the hitting prowess never diminished. I had no idea that Williams' rookie tour was so shockingly good. The guard of American League power was changing that year, as the first putout Williams made as a fielder in his first major league game was off the bat of an already sick Lou Gehrig. And Williams immediately made his presence felt; in his first game at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, "Ted limbered up by lacing the first pitch over the right-field roof, 120 feet high, but just foul. No player had ever hit a ball over the roof at Briggs Stadium." In his next at bat, Ted "worked the count to three and two, then unloaded on a high fastball and drove it on top of the roof in right-center." His third time up, "Williams crushed a rising line drive. The ball screamed out to right field in a heartbeat, flew over the roof, fair by a dozen feet, and landed across adjoining Trumbull Avenue, bouncing against a taxi garage on one hop." This from a 6'4" young man who may have weighed 170 pounds with his flannels and spikes! All in the wrists, indeed!

I'm tempted to continue with the rookie lore (at the next stop after Detroit, the St. Louis Browns knocked him down twice—each time, he got up and hit the next pitch for a home run). He was the talk of the league. Then, at mid-season, a dark mood took him (shades of 1 Samuel?!), and he bristled toward fans and writers. And so the cycle of heroism and villainy began, which Bradlee plumbs at length (as did the Boston sportswriters) but never quite figures out. Along the way over the next few seasons, Williams peaked as a hitter, coupling what he always called his greatest hit, the game-winning home run at the 1941 All-Star Game (with Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, then 48 games into his fabled hitting streak, on first base), with the quest to hit .400, which his great eye, respected by all AL umpires, and his willingness to take a walk in any and all situations (a source of criticism throughout his career) made possible.

On the last day of the season, entering a double header with the Philadelphia A's, his average stood at .39955, enough to round up for the coveted prize—but not legitimately so, in Ted's mind. Connie Mack, the A's legendary owner and manager (and the last man to wear street-clothes in the dugout, a rule that disallowed him from ever entering the field of play to argue!), made things as hard as he could on Ted, starting rookie righthanders, neither of whom Ted had faced, in both games. In the first game, Williams went 4 for 5, and not with slap hits either, hitting three hot shots past the first baseman and a fourth ball "over the right-field wall and onto the street, about 440 feet away, for his thirty-seventh home run of the season." Though he stood at .4039 after the first game—.400 was thus assured no matter if he went 0-4 in the finale—Ted still provided more drama, singling in the second and then, "in the fourth, Williams absolutely crushed Caligiuri's 2-0 pitch, and years later he would call it the hardest hit ball of his career. It was a wicked, rising line drive that reached the top of the right-field wall in a heartbeat before slamming into a loudspeaker mounted on the wall, knocking a hole in it, and dropping back to the playing field for a ground-rule double." (194). For the day, he went 6-8, finishing the year at .4057—as Bradlee epitomizes the feat, "it was a day that would define his playing career and shape his legacy."

That statement cuts both ways, as Bradlee often reminds us: Ted's greatest achievements in baseball were almost all individual in nature, in situations (like flying a fighter plane or high-intensity sport fishing) where he could be in control. But what if the selfishness and the greatness go hand in hand?

That being said, Ted's service in WW II as a flight trainee and later instructor followed the 1942 season in which he won the triple crown but lost the MVP for the second straight year (in '41, DiMaggio won it), this time to Joe Gordon of the Yankees. Ted's .356, 36 HR, 137 RBI season dwarfed Gordon's .322, 18 HR, 103 RBI, but the Yankees were champions, and Ted had been vilified all summer in a draft status controversy (he was listed 3A as sole supporter of his mother). Ironically, Williams volunteered for the Navy at the end of the season, and willingly surrendered the 1943-1945 seasons, as well as all of 1952 and most of 1953, when he was flying combat missions in Korea (note: he resented the call-up from the Marine Reserves to Korea and made his opinion known for the rest of his life, often embarrassingly). Again, the contradictions abound—the man who didn't necessarily want to serve in either war was a faithful and successful pilot, who didn't go in for the coddling of ballplayers at military bases that was part-and-parcel of the 1940s and '50s military establishment, but sought out the Marine Corps and combat (he was in San Francisco on his way to a Pacific Theater assignment on V-J Day). Intriguingly, during his WWII training at the Chapel Hill, NC Flight School, he was joined by a college baseball player, George H.W. Bush, who had attended games at Fenway when he was a student at Phillips Andover Academy. Ted, a virulent Republican, would later stump for Bush, Sr. in New Hampshire (Ted roomed in Korea with fellow fighter pilot and future astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn).

Williams' return from World War II service began the ascent of the Red Sox as true contenders, which lasted from 1946 through 1949. During these years, the team lost the '46 World Series in 7 games (Williams' only World Series, as it turned out), lost the pennant to the Indians in '48 in a playoff game, and then folded to the Yankees on the final day of the '49 season. These failures, in the minds of the Boston sports press and of many fans, would be as defining for Ted's legacy as the tremendous impact of his first four seasons. Ted's return in 1946 was triumphant in many ways, as he hit well over .400 through May, the Sox won fifteen in a row at one point, and "on June 9, he capped the surge with a titanic blow off the Tigers' Fred Hutchinson that landed thirty-seven rows up in the right-field bleachers at Fenway." Bradlee observes in a footnote that the Red Sox management later measured the blow at 502 feet and painted that bleacher seat red. ("Latter-day Sox sluggers such as Mo Vaughan and David Ortiz," Bradlee adds, "have called the distant red seat impossible to reach, even in the steroids era, and dismissed it as a management propaganda designed to enhance the Williams mythos." Classy!) It was in the 1946 All-Star Game that Ted stepped up on Rip Sewell's eephus pitch and uppercut it into the AL bullpen, the only home run that had ever been hit off the blooper. By the middle of 1946, Ted's ascent as a hitter seemed to have no ceiling, and now he was pulling the Red Sox upward with him. Finally, it seemed, he could match his rival Joltin' Joe by wedding individual splendor with championship credentials.

But 1946 also showed some of the cracks in Williams' armor, cracks that would widen and haunt him, difficulties on the field (so rare for him, at least at the plate) directly correlative to his vast abilities. Five days after the All-Star Game, Ted had arguably the greatest performance of his career, abusing Cleveland pitching in the first game of a double-header with a 3 HR, 8 RBI performance. In the second game, Indians' player-manager Lou Boudreau invented the "Ted Williams shift," putting 3 infielders on the right-side, with the second-baseman on the right-field grass. In Boudreau's model, he stayed in place at shortstop, but the third-baseman played behind second base, and the left-fielder came in to the edge of the outfield grass. It was baseball hyperbole, a direct challenge to Williams' pride as a pull-hitter, the concession of automatic singles if The Kid wanted to stroke the ball to left. And interestingly, the psychological element proved confounding; as Bradlee points out, "Ted could never shake a fundamental ambivalence over how to cope with the shift … . [H]e was loath to meddle with the mechanics of his swing, to artificially alter its rhythm and flow. He was, after all, the Natural, and style was important to Williams." By the time they reached the World Series, the Cardinals had added the strategy of junk-balling Williams consistently: "The Cardinals told their pitchers what Williams would be expecting from them in a variety of situations and then ordered them to keep him off balance by throwing something different." Again, the Kid's strengths were used against him—he had only five singles (and five strikeouts) in his only Fall Classic ever, and the Cardinals won on Enos Slaughter's mad dash from first to home in the eighth inning of Game Seven. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that Ted had hit two blasts of more than 400' to the capacious center-field at St. Louis, both of which were tracked down by Cardinal outfielders.

More ironies and contradictions epitomized 1947, as Bradlee fluidly reveals the ugly with the good. It appears that the Yankees and Red Sox contemplated trading Joe DiMaggio straight up for Williams prior to the season, in order to finally match their power strokes to their home parks: DiMag would eat up the Green Monster (and not lose home runs to Yankee Stadium's 430' left-center, and Ted would shower the 295' right-field porch at the Stadium. As it turned out, each stayed home, and Ted won the Triple Crown again, and lost the MVP again, this time to DiMaggio by a single point! Once he retired, Joe D. remained bristly about his rivalry with Williams, and though he publically called Ted a great hitter (sometimes he used the term "greatest"), he privately mocked Ted: "He throws like a broad and runs like a ruptured duck," or the more biting but widely shared question, "Tell him to hold up his hands. Where are the rings?" But Ted, who would bluster and abuse sportswriters and fans on a regular basis, always made a point of taking the high road regarding Joe (perhaps because of Ted's close friendship with younger brother and Red Sox center-fielder Dom DiMaggio). For the rest of their lives, especially as both dealt with the sports memorabilia industry, observers commented equally on Ted's enduring generosity and Joe's enduring stinginess.

This surprising even-handedness also characterized Ted's response to Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby arriving as the first black players in the Major Leagues in the 20th century. Ted and Jackie had both played in the 1936 Los Angeles County baseball tournament (though their teams didn't meet), and Ted wrote a congratulatory letter to Jackie when he made the big club (a gesture that Rachel Robinson noted years later was especially gratifying to Jackie). Doby noted that Williams specifically came over to welcome him when the Red Sox played the Indians: "He just gave me the feeling of being welcome, which was important to me, especially when you had a lot of other people not saying anything." Such sentiments were echoed in Williams' 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech, perhaps the highlight of the second half of his life (and the second half of Bradlee's book), when Ted shocked many listeners (and the stodgy baseball world) by lauding Willie Mays, who had just surpassed his own home run total, and then proclaiming, "'I hope that someday, the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the Negro players that are not here only because they were never given a chance." Largely based on Williams' remarks, the Baseball Hall of Fame decided a few years later to open up at the Veteran's Committee level a process for giving Negro League greats of the past the privilege, not of a special exhibition, but of full induction. This from the oddly generous selfish man, Ted Williams.

Bradlee casts the second half of Williams' playing career, after his return from the Korean War, as a series of unexpected comebacks or repeated "rising from the ashes" of lay-off and injury and plain old age. That the Red Sox were not competitive during the whole decade seems apt, as the story of the team became the story of Ted alone. This was not Ted's fault, but he didn't seem to mind.

Perhaps the best anecdote of the whole book is the return of Williams from Korea toward the end of the 1953 season. Ted hadn't hit for over a year, and former batboy and now journalist George Sullivan was in the office of Sox owner Tom Yawkey when Ted showed up. They convinced him to head right to the batting cage a few hours before game time, and he stepped in among ushers and concession kids. Sullivan recalled the scene: "Ted hit a couple of line drives. Then he hit one out, next to the bull pen. This is the first time he's hit since coming back from Korea. Schreiber threw another. Ted hit it out. Then a third that went way out. Schreiber was following the flight of the ball. 'Never mind watching,' Ted screams at him. 'Throw the ______ ball!' He must have hit about twelve out. Then I noticed that blood was coming through his clenched fingers. His skin was tender. Finally, after, like, the thirteenth one, he just went back to the dugout. It was the greatest display I ever saw." Such moments of will and concentration, of muscle memory and prodigious ability, seem to have been Ted's gift to the world, amidst slow decline and the constant upheaval in his personal relationships.

The final line for Williams' truncated 1953 season was one of his finest, albeit in miniature: "He hit .407 in 91 at bats, with 13 home runs and 34 RBIs. His on-base percentage was .509, his slugging performance an astonishing .901. Yogi Berra of the Yankees remarked in September that Ted 'don't look like he used to. He looks better.'" Leave it to Yogi to capture the essence—and Yogi's words seemed to have kept echoing forth. In 1954, a rather out-of-shape Williams broke his collarbone in spring training, and then sat out more of the season until his divorce (and the financial implications) got settled. He returned to the lineup for a doubleheader in Detroit (yet again!), and "he put on a show. After getting three singles in four times up in the first game, Ted surprised his teammates by opting to play the second game, too, and he proceeded to go 5-5, with two home runs and a double. That was 8-9 on the day—'the greatest batting show I have ever seen,' said Curt Gowdy." In a July exhibition at the Polo Grounds against the Giants, Williams led a group against Willie Mays's group in a home run contest. No one but Willie hit more than two (Say Hey hit three out). Then, Ted stepped up, "and the air crackled with anticipation … . He smashed the next pitch into the lower deck in right field. Ted pulled Schreiber's next offering down the line just inside the foul pole for home run number two. Then came a shot into the upper deck to tie Mays at three. The crowd rose to its feet, and players in both dugouts moved to the top step as the drama built. In came the pitch, and out flew the ball, deeper into the upper deck this time. That was four swings, four home runs. Could he make it five for five? Williams let one pitch go—too low. Then he turned on the next one and crushed a rising line drive high in the sky. The ball struck off the base of the light towers and bounced down into the stands. The fans and players from both sides gave Ted a five-minute standing ovation. 'Unbelievable!' said Red Sox rookie pitcher Russ Kemmerer. 'I've never seen anything like it and most likely never will.'" Such shocking achievements, but Bradlee points out over and over that none of these moments were for the glory of Red Sox—in the miraculous 8-9 doubleheader in Detroit, Boston lost both games by a run, and of course the exhibition against the Giants was not part of the actual season. That shadow of selfishness always loomed in the corner.

Apparently batting titles in the '50s were based on a certain number of at-bats to qualify (not plate appearances, as has been the case for decades now); hence, bases on balls, a Williams specialty, actually cost him the batting title in 1954 and 1955. When he was healthy, he hit better than anyone in the league, but he didn't have enough at-bats to qualify. In 1957, though, he qualified, not only for the batting title, but also for another rung on the ladder of his baseball immortality, as he again flirted with .400—and this in a season during which he turned 39! (Ask Derek Jeter how tough that must have been.) In the stretch run of the season, Williams was battling a young and peaking Mickey Mantle for the AL home run crown. After a two-week bout with pneumonia (lung ailments dogged him throughout his career), Williams returned to the lineup, and outdid all his former exploits—he didn't make an out for a week. First pinch-hitting and then back in the field, "He had hit four home runs in four official times at bat since returning on the seventeenth, and he had reached base safely his first sixteen times up"—and one of those shots was in the ninth inning off of Whitey Ford! By season's end, he was only five hits away from .400; his .388 average "marked what Williams himself considered the grandest achievement of his career, surpassing his .406 in 1941." Yet, he lost the MVP once again, to Mantle of course (though this was one year the Yankees hadn't won it all). To his credit, Mantle was shocked that Ted didn't get it, a gracious response for a man who hit .365 on the season, and lost the batting title by 23 points!

There is more gold in the final few seasons of Williams' career, and Bradlee gives it ample coverage, especially to the home run in his final at bat at Fenway (and subsequent refusal, as always, to tip his cap to the Boston faithful)—but here Bradlee wisely defers to John Updike, whose story of the event in The New Yorker, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," is rightly acknowledged as perhaps "the best sports essay ever." Bradlee does his best work more than halfway through the book, right at the end of the playing career, in a chapter simply entitled "Kindness." Though he spares no details of Williams' tantrums, abuses, philandering, and at times stunning vulgarity, he always arcs back across the contradictions, to show a more hopeful side to the man. In this particular chapter, Bradlee discusses something Williams rarely talked about publically: his work for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston-based charity established to help the victims of juvenile cancer. As it turns out, "His innate kindness to sick kids and to others who were having a hard time in life was Ted's most redeeming quality—the quiet counter-balance to all those moments when he boiled with rage and became unhinged." I felt in reading this chapter a return of all the affection I have felt in the past for the self-destructive but affable and kind Babe Ruth, who would often travel hours out of his way when the Yankees were on the road in order to visit a sick or disabled child. Troubled kids themselves, neglected and never quite readjusted, both Ruth and Williams found themselves at home with these needy kids, who they could unequivocally please (unlike wives and managers and the press). In May of 1947, Ted visited a young double-amputee, Glenny Brann: "Williams promised the boy a homer in his next game, then hit not one but two—the first balls he hit over the left-field wall at Fenway." But the game exploits weren't the whole story: "Mike Andrews, the former Red Sox second baseman who went on to become the Jimmy Fund chairman, told of a time when a little boy wouldn't let go of Williams's hand, so Ted had someone pull up a cot, and he slept next to the boy." In fact, Bradlee reveals that, "Until Ted died, he would stay in touch with, and be a mentor to, some of the children who had survived." Certainly, Ted's relationship with his own kids was spotty, overbearing, in the end indulgent and, in the case of his son John Henry, myopic; long-term intimacy was always a struggle for him, as Bradlee's long finale reveals, but this spot of light—or rather long, steady ray of light—he exhibited with the Jimmy Fund is one of the most meaningful treasures found in this biography.

What to say about the finale? Well, I've said more than enough already, and the plot thickens in ways that I found hard to slot through, but I'll offer one last moment of comeback for the Splendid Splinter, this time in the early '70s, when he was manager of the Senators become Texas Rangers. Ted had been named AL manager of the year in 1969, but he had subsequently endured player subversion (led by fugitive from Detroit and later fugitive from the law Denny McLain), not to mention his own obvious lack of interest and engagement (he often mocked and abused his own pitchers as "stupid," and gave no advice except on hitting). On August 25, 1972, the Rangers were in Fenway, a few days before Ted turned 54. All proceeds of the game were tabbed for the Jimmy Fund, and several ex-Red Sox stars were going to hit before the game, many of them Ted's old teammates. Williams was not slated to hit at all, but after a visit from his old employer Tom Yawkey, Ted appeared in the Ranger dugout, rifled through most of the bats, and found one he liked, a Louisville Slugger model named for him. After letting the crowd chant, then cheer, he stepped up, rebuking the soft-serve toss of the batting practice coach: "Then Ted began hitting line drives all over right field and center field. They were all ropes. One ball cleared the right-field fence by Pesky's Pole. Another hit the bull-pen wall on a short hop. After ten or twelve swings, Ted flipped his bat in the air dramatically and walked back to his dugout in triumph, as the entire park cheered deliriously. Players from both benches also stood to applaud. Dick Billings, one of the Rangers players, said 'It was the most electrifying experience in my life … . We sat on the bench with our mouths open. He never hit in spring training or during batting practice … . What I saw that day, he still could have hit .300 if he didn't have to run.'" In a few months, he would retire from managing and leave the everyday world of baseball behind. But for a few minutes he pushed back the athlete's nemesis, time, and brought that splendid stroke to life, just because he could. (Bradlee includes a stirring photograph of a portly Williams in a homely Rangers uniform, following through on a beautiful swing.)

Certainly, the last 30 years of his life were not filled with the grace and majesty of that swing, because, though Williams well declared that hitting a round ball with a round bat is the toughest act in sports, it's nevertheless easy compared to living life in the web of relationships and obligations that humans share. From childhood through old age, Williams struggled with the human element, and the legacy of wounds and scars in that sphere is on display throughout Bradlee's narrative. There is a dark cloud over this volume, a cloud of pain suffered and especially of pain caused. But there is also kindness done, for family and friends, for dying children and commonplace people, a kind of penance from one who seemed to know intuitively the adage "Sin boldly." And ultimately, there is the loneliest of stages, the man with a wooden bat standing alone in the box, doing with dogged and recursive excellence something we've all longed to do, but none has ever done as well—see it, turn on it, clear the hips, power through with the arms, and watch it fly!

I want to mention, by contrast, Tim Wendel's slender volume Down to the Last Pitch: How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves Gave Us the Best World Series of All Time. Wendel is an accomplished baseball journalist and a writer who finds the intriguing and quirky angles that the study of baseball history invites. I enjoyed very much reading and reviewing his book High Heat a few years ago, a history of fastball pitchers and the cultural obsession with fireballers (and an illuminating account of the fastest of them all, the ill-starred Steve Dalkowski!). So I received this new book with some eagerness, and within a few pages I was transported in memory back to the worst place I've ever lived in, a "strip motel" set in the rougher edges of Annapolis, Maryland (yes, this splendid colonial city has a couple of tough streets), an apartment where I had only a chair, a desk, and books, and so slept on the floor, which was problematic for both me and the books when I awakened one morning with a splash, as two inches of water washed through from the water-pipe breakage. But my roommate from Texas must have secured an old TV, because I watched at least a portion of each of the seven games, and the stubbly visage of Mark Lemke was emblazoned forever in my mind. I remembered that both teams had gone worst-to-first that year (a fact dimmed by the Braves subsequent near two decades of winning), and I remember the exciting plays at the plate, and of course Kirby Puckett's walk-off homer in Game 6. But Wendel's specialty is contextualizing and nuancing the details of the games, and in pursuing this end, he both heightens and, at times, diverts the intensity of those memories.

Now and then the reader gets a bit lost in the backstory and sidestory, as the web of details and allusions is woven. I'll admit I'm rather drawn to Wendel's desultory and episodic style, and I find most of the forays into biography and lore to be fascinating. But the "unities" are not sustained, as E.M. Forster or Edith Wharton might require. At times, the actual events of the games are tucked in at the end of the chapters, or broken into odd pacings. For a World Series that had "five games determined in the home team's last at-bat … [,] a series that would see four games decided on the last pitch," the style is a tad anti-dramatic.

Nevertheless this is a thoroughly enjoyable book, especially in the later chapters as the Series moves towards its climax. And there are great tidbits all along (e.g., on the Twins blue-collar manager Tom Kelly: "He played in the minors for thirteen seasons, and in 1975 he reached the Twins for forty-nine games, where he batted .181 and hit his only major league home run off the Tigers' Vern Ruhle"). The Metrodome itself is an intriguing, ugly, cacophonous character in the story, with its "ear-splitting noise and that infernal, mesmerizing roof." The events of Games 1 and 2 get a little lost, though the unlikely home run heroics of the Twins light-hitting left side of the infield, with Greg Gagne homering in the first game and Scott Leius in the second, are described with nice detail. (Wendel interviewed the players extensively to help reconstruct the situations.) I especially liked the "ironic twist that baseball often offers," as Leius, who grew up in Yonkers as an early '80s Yankee lover, became part of the Twins third base platoon with his boyhood hero, Mike Pagliarulo.

The account of Game 3 is intriguing but diffuse, as Wendel intersperses a number of disparate elements at work in society in the early '90's, including high-profile born-again conversions, such as Gary Gaetti's, that seemed to rough up the chemistry left over from the 1987 World Champion Twins, as well as the Native American protests against the "tomahawk chop" rally gesture of the Braves fans, led by owner and TV magnate Ted Turner and his wife and erstwhile activist Jane Fonda. The chapters drag a bit, sort of like the Braves blowout of the Twins in Game 5 (the only tension-less game of the Series), but Wendel redeems and revivifies the narrative with his work on the other three games, all decided on the final play.

The account of Game 4, which ends with Twins catcher Brian Harper and Braves underdog second baseman Mark Lemke sprawled at the plate in one of the closest deciding players ever witnessed, is a great mix of human interest and baseball tension (dulled just a bit by a long account of the Pete Rose scandal, still resonating in 1991, and exhausting even then). It was Harper's third attempt to save a run the hard way that game, and Wendel, aware of the rule changes in place for this season to prevent home plate violence, notes nevertheless that "A close play at the plate ranks among baseball's classic moments," and that "Harper had long ago made his pact with the devil. He didn't care about the price of playing behind the plate as long as he could win a place on a major league roster." Invariably, the injuries to catchers Ray Fosse and Buster Posey come up for discussion, but Wendel's tone is elegiac toward the now-diminished status of the home plate collision. As it turns out, in the bottom of the ninth of Game 4, Lemke, a defense utility guy who had his one superior hitting streak during late September and October of '91, chose not to plow through Harper on the tag-up throw from right fielder Shane Mack (one of the great clutch throws ever). Rather, Lemke avoided Harper, veering right, feeling contact as the catcher swung his arm around to try for the tag, and reaching out his left hand to touch home plate on the way by. " 'He's out,' Jack Buck told his television audience, 'safe, safe, safe'"—and so Wendell captures the wonderful confusion, the settling dust of this "game of inches."

So also, it is the significance of those "inches" that Wendel concentrates upon in his finest chapter, the account of Game 6 and, more broadly, of the tragicomedy of Kirby Puckett. Anyone who saw that game remembers Kirby's fist-pumping celebration rounding second in the 11th inning, having put a Charlie Liebrandt change-up just over the plexiglass wall in center field where he'd earlier leapt—all 5'8" of him—to rob Ron Gant of a home run (and the likely deciding run of the Series) by inches. The fireplug centerfielder, the loose and laughing heart of the Twins team, was exemplary of those sports heroes who possess a "common touch that transcends the every day and can reach out to so many"—and then, there are the flaws, that humanize and humiliate our heroes, which Ted Williams wore on his sleeve, and which Kirby hid away until the end of his life.

Puckett's end was doubly tragic—first the untimely baseball end, the brutal beaning and broken jaw at the end of the 1995 season, then the quixotic comeback in the spring of '96 ended, forever, by the sudden onset of glaucoma. He retired that year at 36, the same age as DiMaggio when he hung up the spikes, and both are in the Hall of Fame. But Puckett's second tragedy—the drift from his teammates and from the Twin Cities after retirement, the revelations and charges of domestic and sexual abuse, the dark secrets behind the beaming smile and all-or-nothing swing—provides the dark cloud over Wendel's whole story and makes it stronger, a morality tale of the fleeting nature of fame and moments of glory, but also a lesson in how bright things, bright moments, endure even such disappointments. Hence, Wendel's account of Puckett's funeral—lonely and estranged, he died of a stroke in 2006, at age 45—deepens our sense of this magical Series: "The White Sox's Ozzie Guillen watched the ceremony on television and wept. 'I think Dave Winfield said the right thing,' Guillen said. '[Puckett] was the only player in the history of baseball everybody loved.'" And like the Splendid Splinter who died a few years before him, Puck will be remembered as great, and as flawed, inseparably pieces of human puzzles.

As with Carlton Fisk leaping and waving in another Game 6 in extra innings, watching his shot clear the Green Monster in the midnight hours, the image of Puckett's fist-pump belies the fact that there was still a Game 7 to play. It's hard to call an extra-innings Game 7 a denouement, but the reality was a pitcher's duel, with the bristly veteran Jack Morris facing the young, emerging John Smoltz, who as a teen in Lansing, Michigan had idolized Morris, then the Tigers ace. Master and apprentice. The splitter and the cutter. Steel will (Morris refused to come out of the game, and, over 120 pitches in, and in his late thirties, he so persuaded manager Tom Kelly that TK was prepared to send him in for the eleventh) against positive visualization (Smoltz had seen a sports psychologist after a horrible crisis of confidence early in the season). And as it turned out, Morris had two other things going for him, in the crucial eighth inning: the Metrodome roof and a cast of "mimes" in the field. Lonnie Smith's fatal pause near second base on Terry Pendleton's drive to the gap is presented craftily by Wendel as a mix of likelihood and lore. Smith claimed he lost the ball, which was all too easy against the white roof, low lights, and sea of white "homer hankies"—and yet, the fake double-play gestures of Greg Gagne and Chuck Knoblauch, a spontaneous outgrowth of practice field shenanigans, along with Dan Gladden's decoy gesture of catching a ball well out of his reach, may have, possibly, maybe subconsciously, cost Smith a step. All to say, he only got to third, albeit with no outs, and then Morris shut the Braves down, no runs scored, a goat was crowned, and the door was opened for one more hero. He couldn't run because of tendinitis in the knee. And he was an Ivy Leaguer, the challenger to all Lou Gehrig's baseball records at Columbia University. And he was so nervous that he could barely make it to the plate to hit. And so Gene Larkin's drive over a pulled-in outfield in the bottom of the tenth in the Metrodome. I'm out of breath and exhilarated just writing this, and Wendel offers Jack Morris' summation as an apt homage: " 'Somebody had to go home a loser,' Morris said years later, 'but nobody was a loser in my mind.'" That, from a bulldog competitor who never gave an inch, speaks volumes about the psychological impact of such stirring competition in this, the Series for the ages, the "Series of inches." Bravo Tim Wendel, for an occasionally distracted but finally riveting piece of work.

Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Copyright © 2014 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

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