PicoBlog

Installment 7: From May 15, 1941 to July 16, 1941, Ted Williams outhit Joe DiMaggio, .412 to .408.

0.
Did you know Ted Williams nearly homered in the final at-bat of his career three times?

In 1952, he had been called to active duty during the war in Korea. He was still probably the best hitter in baseball, but he’d shown some decline, he’d had some injuries, he was known to be a perfectionist, and several times in his career he’d spoken favorably about retirement. The conventional wisdom was that he would “probably” never play again after two years away: “He’ll be… an old man by baseball standards in 1954,” the AP wrote. “He has said a comeback then might be too tough to attempt.” In his final game that year, on April 30, he homered in the bottom of the seventh, and the hub fans bid him adieu: “Fittingly climaxing a 14-year career, Ted Williams, in what may have been his last appearance at bat, hit a two-run homer as his parting gift to Boston fans,” the Boston Globe said.

Once in Korea, Williams reportedly told some confidants that he was done with baseball, but it turned out he was not. He returned from the war and rejoined the Red Sox for 37 games late in 1953. (He finished 10th in the American League in win probability added in a quarter of a season, hahaha.) But then the next April, he announced that he really was retiring at the end of the 1954 season. He declared it, he wrote a farewell article in the Saturday Evening Post, he repeated his intentions throughout the year, and on the final day of the season he went out and again homered in the bottom of the seventh. It was an incredible, emotional moment—except that the Red Sox that batted after him kept getting hits, so Williams unexpectedly got another at-bat in the eighth inning. He popped out. Still, the hub fans bid him adieu! His manager pulled him off the field in the top of the ninth so he could get a big ovation. Photos of him hanging his jersey in his locker for the final time in the next day’s papers. Then photos of him fishing in Maine on his first day of retirement in the next week’s papers. Ted told a reporter who’d followed him out to Maine that he didn’t regret a thing.

Over the next several months sports pages tracked his offseason exploits—updates on the rod-and-reel business that he was devoting himself to, photos of the 1,200-pound marlin he caught—and then he fell off the radar for a bit. Boston’s GM Joe Cronin stated in February that he wasn’t in contact with Ted, that Ted had never responded to a contract the Sox had sent him, and so he must really have meant it about that retirement. Spring training, no Ted. Opening Day, no Ted. Red Sox in seventh place in May, no Ted. And then, suddenly, Ted! The retirement had apparently all been a ploy to get a more favorable divorce settlement by establishing a lower income level. Just a big, year-long prank on the world and the league and his teammates so he could stiff an ex-wife. After the divorce was final he quickly returned, though too late to qualify for the batting title he otherwise would have won.

He hit .336/.470/.623 in the six years after his so-called retirement, culminating in a home run in the bottom of the eighth inning of the Red Sox’ final home game in 1960. Minutes after that homer he announced, to stunned reporters, that he wouldn’t play in the final road series in New York. His final home at-bat had become, retroactively, his final final at-bat. And that produced one of the greatest pieces of baseball non-fiction ever written, by John Updike, who wrote in it: “Every true story has an anticlimax.”

1. Joe
Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, from May 15 through July 16 in 1941, is generally considered the greatest standing record in baseball. As the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote during his years as a baseball intellectual, DiMaggio’s streak is “both the greatest factual achievement in the history of baseball and a principal icon of American mythology.” As other iconic records have fallen, 56 has become baseball’s most well-known number, the most romantically expressive, and if it were ever to come under serious threat it might create the richest storytelling vein still accessible to the sport.  

In some ways it’s fascinating that this is the record above all others. A hitting streak has much less to do with winning baseball games than most records do. Hits are good, of course, but three hits spaced over three days are no more useful than those same three hits crammed into one. Joe DiMaggio, from May 15, 1941 through July 16,1941, wasn’t the best hitter in baseball. Ted Williams was better. For that matter, Joe DiMaggio’s best 56-game stretch as a ballplayer didn’t come during the streak. He had at least three distinct, better heaters in his career:

·      He hit .399/.481/.825 in the 56 games beginning on June 25, 1937

·      He hit .414/.471/.735 in the 56 games beginning on Aug. 10, 1940

·      He hit .398/.494/.704 in the 56 games beginning on Sept. 3, 1948

Even in 1941, DiMaggio’s best 56-game stretch wasn’t a clean overlap with the streak. From June 1 to Aug. 2, a span of 56 games, he hit .419/.485/.786, while during the May-to-July streak itself he hit just .408/.463/.718. (Ted Williams hit .406/.553/.735 that season.)

DiMaggio’s streak isn’t really a factual achievement in the history of baseball. It’s a factual achievement in a different game, a side-quest that took place on a baseball field during baseball games but with different rules and values. The rules of the Hitting Streak Game were in one sense simple—“get at least one hit every day,” those are the entire rules—and as a result they were also somewhat sloppy and arbitrary: Some days the game would only last five innings because of rain or darkness (that happened three times to DiMaggio during the streak) and some days the game might go 10 or 11 or, theoretically, 50 innings, but these games would all count the same. In the Hitting Streak Game, a walk wasn’t as good as a single, as it (basically) is in baseball, but was actually as bad as a strikeout. In this game, a home run and a single were the same, even if the single was immediately followed by the batter being thrown out at second base trying to stretch it to a double. This game sometimes lasted less than one inning, because once the player got a hit the Hitting Streak Game was over for the rest of the day.

I’m not knocking the Hitting Streak Game. It turns out it can be even more fun than baseball. It is absolutely undeniable that what Joe DiMaggio did playing it from May through July of 1941 was far more enjoyable to the world than what Ted Williams did playing superior baseball during the same stretch. Williams was, surely, a sight to behold. But Joe’s baseball-adjacent game was outrageously exciting. Gould says DiMaggio was “cheating death” when he played his game. In the sense that every day began on a narrow beam above an unsurvivable drop, that’s right. The overwhelming emotion one feels upon trying to internalize Joe DiMaggio’s quest is: Sweaty palms.

Psychologists sometimes distinguish between two types of emotions: Activating emotions and deactivating emotions. Activating emotions are those that make you want to take action: Pride, hope, anxiety, anger. De-activating emotions are the opposite: Relief, relaxation, boredom, hopelessness. “Stories that evoke activating emotions inspire us to retell them; stories that evoke deactivating emotions cause us to clam up,” the narrative scholar Jonathan Gottschall wrote in The Story Paradox.  

Baseball’s regular season is, you might say, a triumph of de-activating emotions. It’s so steady, so voluminous and so consistently pleasant that, from opening day, one can happily retreat into de-activation. Most of a loss can be enjoyed almost as contentedly as a victory, and the season is a constant series of reliefs: The hard loss is followed by the next day’s game, the lead-off walk is followed by the 6-4-3. The regular season lulls you into contentedness and napping. Sometimes even boredom, which is one of the most enjoyable parts of adulthood if done right. 

For those two months Ted Williams was the greatest hitter in the baseball game. But DiMaggio was better at the baseball-adjacent Hitting Streak Game, and it turns out that a lot more people wanted to talk about what happened in Joe’s game, because of how much it made them feel. “Who are the players they talk about and remember,” Williams once said. “Joe DiMaggio, because he hit in 56 straight games. Those are the best, top performances in baseball. They’re what I’m aiming at.”

2. Ted
Joe DiMaggio has the game’s longest hitting streak. Ted Williams has the game’s longest on-base streak. He reached base in 84 consecutive games in 1949. These two records are roughly comparable in terms of difficulty. Joe’s streak is 11 games longer than any other player in history, and 12 games longer than any player since him. Ted’s streak is 10 games longer than any other player in history, and 21 games longer than any player since him.

The obvious reason Joe’s record became more famous is that, when Joe was chasing his, people knew it existed, which is the very minimum required to produce an emotion. Nobody was even tracking Ted Williams’ streak when it was happening. After Game 85, when he failed to reach base, no newspaper even mentioned it. The streak was literally invisible to most readers, because batters’ walks weren’t in box scores.

So that explains why Joe’s record became a bigger deal. But if we assume that with a long enough future both records will someday be broken, which will become the bigger record? If Player A hits in 57 straight games in or around the year 2048 and Player B reaches base in 85 straight games in or around same year, who will be the bigger star and whose record will be seen as incomparable? Might Ted Williams someday retroactively have held the greatest factual achievement in the history of baseball this whole time?

The Hitting Streak Game and the On-Base Streak Game are awfully similar. They’re the same format, and they measure almost the same thing—a batter reaching base by certain types of skill and initiative. From a dramatic perspective, the Hitting Streak Game is more likely to extend deep into a baseball game, since hits are harder to get than hits and walks combined. On the other hand, the On-Base Streak Game lasts longer, giving us four more weeks to go nuts. The hitting streak produces more Yikes!, the on-base streak produces more Yeah!s.

The on-base streak would often produce a less satisfying daily climax, since a walk (or a hit-by-pitch) is less interesting than a ball hit safely into play. But the hitting streak could produce the more unjust, more gruesome defeat: A batter can lose an on-base streak because the opposing pitcher is just too good, but a batter can lose a hitting streak because the opposing pitcher is too bad—too wild. Bad design.

Ultimately, to me, the fact that a walk is a good outcome for a baseball hitter, but a bad outcome for a hit-streaker, is too contradictory for me to feel good about. In our modern understanding of baseball, with our emphasis on OBP over average, on reaching base rather than just getting hits, the On-Base Streak Game is a closer fit to baseball. We’re in a Ted era, not a Joe era.

Ted Williams’ record produced no experience, and thus wasn’t passed down in the collective soul as the great icon of American mythology. But if both records are someday broken, the On-Base Streak record could well surpass the Hitting Streak record as the greatest factual achievement in the history of baseball. The biggest impediment to Ted getting the credit he deserves for holding it is that nobody ever gets close enough to challenge him, and to make this record an experienced emotion for any of us. He basically set the record by too much.

3. Bob
But would it be that the greatest factual achievement in so on and so forth? What of Bob Johnson?

ncG1vNJzZmiolZevrbHHrqWtoZ6ce7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY6pZq2glWLBqb7EnmSsrKKarqy%2FjKidZqKfmnq1scNmmKec