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1941: A SEASON FOR THE BOOKS
Exclamation mark
His .406 campaign was punctuated by determination and emotion
By Bob Duffy, Globe Staff, 07/05/02
The players listed below hit .400 in the
modern era (since 1901). Another 29 players
hit .400 prior to 1901, including 13 in 1887
when bases on balls counted as hits. The
highest average (excluding 1887) was Hugh
Duffy’s .440 for Boston (NL)in 1894.
‘‘What a thrill!’’ said Ted Williams in the Red
Sox clubhouse at Philadelphia's Shibe Park on
Sept. 28, 1941.‘‘I wasn ’t saying anything about
it before the game, but I never wanted anything
harder in my life.’’
The object of his affection was a .400 season ’s
average, and he achieved it with heroic bravado.
Rather than sitting out the final doubleheader of
the season to preserve a .3995 average that
would have been rounded up to .400, he decided,‘‘The record’s no good unless it’s made in all
the games.’’
So he went 6 for 8 against the Athletics – four
singles, a double, and a home run that gave him
the American League championship with 37 —
as he hiked his final average to .406.
The accomplishment was hailed as remarkable, but it was not considered an epic. A .400
average was a rarity, but not an endangered
species. It had last been reached by Bill Terry
(.401) of the National League New York Giants
in 1930. The AL ’s last .400 hitter had been the
Detroit Tigers ’ Harry Heilmann (.403) in 1923.
There had been an appreciable gap before
Williams joined the club,but it wasn’t a lifetime.
‘‘Even after he hit .400, I don’t think the magnitude of the accomplishment was realized,’’ says Williams's outfield partner that season,
Dom DiMaggio.‘‘Maybe when a couple of guys
hit .370, people said .400 was such an achievement.’’
The deed has become honored through its absence. In the past 60 years, only the Kansas City
Royals’ George Brett (.390) and the San Diego
Padres’ Tony Gwynn (.394 in a strike-shortened
season ) have come within hailing distance of
.400, and the mark now has assumed mythic
proportions. Williams’s feat is regarded as not
necessarily once-in-a-lifetime but one-last-time-
forever.
Yet in that splendid summer of 1941, baseball ’s last before the ravages of World War II
spelled the end of any trace of American innocence, Williams did not occupy the spotlight
alone.
His chief rival for baseball eminence, New
York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio, established a standard that was immediately regarded as immortal. From May 15 to July 17, DiMaggio hit in every game the Yankees played — 56 in row. It shattered the previous milestones for
hitting streaks — the modern mark of 41 by the
St.Louis Browns ’ George Sisler in 1923 and the
all-time record of 44 by the Baltimore Orioles ’
Wee Willie Keeler in 1897.
DiMaggio ’s target was more finite, more readily comprehensible, than Williams ’s, and his
streak dominated fans’ interest and news coverage as the summer progressed. But there were
no hard feelings from Williams. While the two
may have been portrayed as the symbols of the
eternal Boston-New York feud, such enmity in
fact was not personal.
Dom DiMaggio, Joe ’s brother as well as Williams’s teammate, had a unique perspective.
‘‘All I can remember,’’ he
says,‘‘is that Ted would look at
the scoreboard and yell over,
‘Hey, Dommy, Joe got another
one.’ ’’
Williams’s appreciation was
sincere, Dom DiMaggio believes.
‘‘I think they had a great admiration for each other,’’ he
says.‘‘Ted thought Joe was the
greatest player ever, and Joe
said many times that Ted was
the finest hitter he ’d ever seen.’’
The writers, with whom
Williams was perpetually at
odds, apparently considered
DiMaggio ’s achievement — and
the fact that he won the one
component of the triple
crown that Williams didn ’t, the RBI title with
125 — the more noteworthy. After the season,
they voted him the Most Valuable Player Award,
with Williams a close runner-up.
But a certain perspective is in order. Without
diminishing DiMaggio ’s streak, the fact is that
during that 56-game stretch in which he was un-
stoppable, he batted .408, just .002 higher than
Williams hit during the full 154-game season.
And Williams did it despite being walked a
league-leading 145 times, getting 456 at-bats. So
loath were pitchers to challenge Williams that
he often had only one or two chances to swing
the bat in games; otherwise, he was on a constant free shuttle to first base.
Beyond that, he was suffering from bone
chips in his right ankle that, while not debilitating, were a lingering source of irritation.‘‘He
stood back more,’’ says another of his teammates
that year, Hall of Fame second baseman Bobby
Doerr.‘‘He must have hit 100 sinking line drives
between second and right field.’’
That was one thing that set him apart in Dom
DiMaggio ’s eyes.
‘‘I once told Ted, ‘Nobody hits like you,’ ’’ recalls DiMaggio.‘‘He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I
said, ‘You swing over and up.’ The ball would go
through like a bullet. How else could he hit the
ball with so much spin on it — and it sunk over
the outfielders’ heads.’’
While Joe DiMaggio was a metronome during his streak, Williams’s bid was in a constant
state of flux. In fact, quite rightly, nobody acknowledged it as a legitimate bid, such is the cumulative nature of hitting for average.
But the seeds were sown
early as Williams went on
some prodigious binges. The
same day DiMaggio began his
record streak, Williams
launched a 23-game hitting
streak. He was hitting .333,
15th in the league, at the
time, but his 30-for-56 surge
brought him up to .373, and
10 days later, he reached .400
— and the AL batting lead —
for the first time. On Memorial Day, he had six hits in a
doubleheader that left him at
.429, .100 higher than DiMaggio.
Two days later, Williams
went 4 for 9 in a doubleheader, and by June 6, he was at
the nosebleed height of .436.
Then came the ups and downs
— to .416 to .420 to .403 to
.412 — with his cold spells offset by gangs of hits.
He went into the All-Star break at .405, and
despite his later success, this was perhaps his
defining moment of the season.
The AL was the dominant league in those
days, but NL manager Bill McKechnie of the
Cincinnati Reds had won the 1940 All-Star
Game, 4-0, by using four pitchers for two innings and one for the ninth. In ’41 at Detroit ’s
Briggs Stadium, McKechnie departed from this
strategy by leaving in Claude Passeau for the
final three innings to protect a 5-2 lead. It seemed
safe, even though the DiMaggio brothers produced a pair of doubles in the eighth, Dom scoring Joe to make it 5-3.
Then in the ninth, the AL loaded the bases.
Ken Keltner reached on a bad-hop grounder to
shortstop Eddie Miller. Joe Gordon singled
cleanly to right, and Cecil Travis walked on a 3-2
count. Still, Passeau seemingly escaped when
Joe DiMaggio — who had received a hero ’s welcome during pregame introductions — hit an apparent game-ending double-play ball to Miller.
But the shortstop hurried his throw to second
baseman Billy Herman, whose awkward relay to
first allowed Joe to reach and the AL to close
within 5-4.
Then up stepped Williams, who had struck
out in the eighth. On a 2-1 pitch, Passeau fed
him a sliding fastball belt-high, and Williams
told himself,‘‘Be quick. Be quick.’’ He quickly
detonated a blast that hit the green woodwork
on the right-field roof for a three-run homer and
a 7-5 AL victory. The All-Star Game wasn’t considered a mere sideshow then, and Williams
would recall in later years, it was ‘‘the greatest
thrill of my life.’’
After this grand interlude, the assault on .400
resumed, almost in secret.
‘‘There wasn’t that much talk among us,’’ says
Doerr. ‘‘You were conscious of him hitting .400,
but it hadn’t been that long ago that it had been
done. But that big All-Star Game must have
pumped him up.’’
In September’s crunch, Williams got as high as
.413 at mid-month, ended the home portion of the
season at .406, and a 1-for-7 doubleheader in
Washington before the final series left him at .401.
He'd been hitting only .270 since Sept.10, and
manager Joe Cronin considered sitting him out of
the Philadelphia series to protect the milestone.
But Red Sox coach Hugh Duffy counseled
Williams on the eve of the last series: ‘‘Listen,
kid, it ’s an honor to hit .400. I know because I
once hit .400 myself [the all-time high of .440
for the Boston National League team in 1894 ].
But it won’t mean a thing unless you earn it the
right way. Go out there tomorrow and show ’em
you ’re a .400 hitter.’’
The speech was inspiring but unnecessary.
Williams already had told Cronin he intended to
play out the season. There was no question after
he went 1 for 4 in the series opener, which left
him at that irksome .3995. He couldn ’t sit now;
even though his average would be listed as .400,
he knew it would be a technicality. Cronin debated whether to have him sit out the nightcap of
the doubleheader if he reached .400 in the opener because of the treacherous Shibe shadows in
late afternoon, but again, Williams would have
none of it.
Now, with the pressure really on,Williams
made the world — even his teammates — aware
of his distinction.
‘‘I ’ll never forget,’’ Dom DiMaggio says reverently. ‘‘4 for 5 and 2 for 3 on the final Sunday of
the season.’’
No one was aware of it at the time, but they
may have been witnessing the end of an era —
and a celebration of singular greatness.
Material from the book ‘‘Baseball In ’41 ’’
by Robert W.Creamer was used in this report.
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e finally admitted it. This self-styled
hitting automaton who absorbed
himself in every at-bat, who scrutinized a pitcher’s every nuance, and whose universe consisted entirely
of deciphering a baseball’s aerodynamics on its
flight to home plate, betrayed a vestige of human
frailty when it came to his favorite, obsessive
subject.