Ted: “Let’s Malt Up”
Ted: “Let’s malt up”
An exclusive excerpt of Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Growing up, Ted liked to hang out at the Majestic Malt Shop, not far from his house, where you could buy 10-inch-high malts for a quarter. Or at Doc Powelson’s drug store across from Hoover High School, often mixing the malts with eggs in his perpetual quest to gain weight. (“Let’s malt up,” Ted would say to his friends.)
There was time for mischief, though nothing too serious. Once, Ted and his brother climbed a nearby water tower, got stuck, and the fire department was called to get them down. On Halloween, Ted would join his pals in greasing the trolley tracks to play havoc with the streetcars. One year, the group pilfered some fruit from downtown storefronts with the intention of using it to raise hell that night. The police caught them. Most were apologetic and let go, but Ted was a smart aleck, so he was hauled in to the station. The cops ended up playing pinochle with him and driving him home at midnight, charmed. But beyond such childish pranks, Williams was straight as an arrow—never smoked a cigarette as a kid, always in bed by 10:00.
(PHOTO: Danny Williams, Ted’s brother, at work on his truck. May Williams Collection)
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An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: [Ted] Williams’s hitting credo was simple: get a good pitch to hit. Critics said he followed this rule to the extreme by refusing to chase a pitch that was even an inch off the strike zone, thereby hurting his team by having its best hitter often pass up an opportunity to drive a runner home. But Ted made the slippery slope counter-argument: that if he chased a pitch an inch from the plate, it would only encourage pitchers to throw two inches outside the zone, then three inches, and so on. History has vindicated Ted’s approach, as there is now broad acceptance of the value of reaching base, or on-base-percentage, a statistic that was not appreciated and barely even kept in Williams’s day.
(PHOTO: Ted Williams happily crossing home plate at Fenway Park, 1939. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library - Leslie Jones Collection.)
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Just some musings and electronic gatherings of an ink-stained wretch turned social media junkie. As JADAL says: No trees were destroyed in the sending of this organic message. I do concede, however, a significant number of electrons may have been inconvenienced.
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