"Joe Cronin was the manager," John Underwood recalled recently. "He asked Williams, the night before, if he wanted to sit out. Ted told him if he couldn't hit .400 all the way, he didn't deserve it."
Underwood is one of the few journalists Williams ever trusted. Hunted with him in Africa, fished with him in the sweetest spots for salmon, collaborated with him on some of the best baseball books ever written.
He has finished a "treatment" for a movie about Williams. Treatment - that's the prelude to a screenplay, once they find producers, actors and a director. It won't hurt that the Postal Service is putting Williams' portrait on a stamp, and it won't hurt that it has been 70 years since anyone has hit .400 in the big leagues.
Williams has already been in a movie, subliminally. "Robert Redford asked Ted to be a consultant on 'The Natural,' " Underwood said. "But it interfered with fishing season and he turned it down.
"Redford loved Ted. Which is why the guy in the movie wears 9, hits third in the lineup. When they call him up, he says he wants to be the greatest player that ever lived. Well, Ted used to say, when he walked down the street, he wanted people to say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.' "
Maybe that bulb-shattering homer in "The Natural" is a reminder of Teddy Ballgame's double off the loudspeaker? Rambling ahead of the story again. That Saturday night, after dinner, Williams called Johnny Orlando, the Boston clubhouse guy, asked him to take a walk with him.
"Ted," Underwood explained, "throughout his baseball career, his friends were always the little guys; guys like Johnny Orlando. They walked about 10 miles that night, through the Philadelphia streets. Orlando stopped twice, in bars, for a scotch. Ted had two ice-cream cones.
