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Cure for the Shift? When his own turn comes, Slugger Williams steps up to the plate, gingerly paws a hole for the heel spikes of his left foot, then takes a yard-wide stride forward with his right foot. He places his bat on the far corner of the plate, to prove that he can cover all of it with his swing, and flexes his legs and hips, twisting his long brown hands around the bat handle and wrenching them in opposite directions. "The important thing," he says, "is to be relaxed, yet able to hit whatever comes over that plate." His alert, smooth-muscled confidence is the envy of other ballplayers.
His only known weakness at bat is his notorious tendency as a left-handed power hitter to pull at least 75% of his hits toward right field. In 1946, Cleveland Manager Lou Boudreau experimented with an exaggerated defensive shift against Williams: he ordered everybody but his leftfielder into the right-hand half of the diamond (see chart). It worked well because Williams consistently refused to try to poke the ball into undefended left field. He likes his extra-base hits too much, and he loses power when he has to hold up and shorten his swing to chop the ball to left. Soon every team developed a modified version of the shift, and it cost Williams dozens of hits a season.
In the first exhibition game against the Yankees this year, he switched on the shift and won a game. He had tied it up in the tenth inning by lining a screaming double to dead right field. In the twelfth he sewed up the game by shifting his feet and poking a towering fly ball into undefended left. Said he: "Jeez, if I could do that three times in a row it would cure that shift business." But nobody thought Ted Williams would ever just poke at a ball three times in a row.
"Don't Be Scared." He had a particularly big grin on later in the training season when he and his teammates were flying back to Sarasota from an exhibition game with the Yankees at Miami. Ted was flying especially high, for he had hit a towering 375-footer over the Scoreboard in right center. He sang in a high, simulated falsetto, bowed to his mates' jeers, then went to the pilot's compartment, put on the earphones, handled the controls for a while. As the plane headed down for a landing, Ted came scrambling back into the passenger compartment and yelled,
"Don't be scared, you guys. I'm going to let the regular driver take it in."
A Boston baseball writer, known as a Williams needler, spoke to a passenger alongside as if confessing his sins. "You know," the writer said, "I'm falling in love with that character. He has never been so nice. He can be a terrific guy and he's always terrific copy, nice or not. I hope the stiff hits .494."
It sounded like a new and unprecedented era of good feeling. Actually, the newspaperman was talking about the semi-relaxed, grapefruit-circuit Williams; with spring busting out all over and the teams heading north for the opening league games April 18, the cordiality and enthusiasm were highly seasonal. Before long the situation would no doubt return to normal: Ted Williams would be rattling the right-field fences and Boston fans and sportwriters would be booing him as usual.
*As compared with Babe Ruth's 714 in 22 seasons.