Replies

At Fenway Park, they have just done a memorial for Mr. Williams. The announcer finished, appropriately, with the words Ted Williams himself hoped people would say when remembering him: There goes...the greatest hitter who ever lived! The crowd at the game gave him a standing ovation; his uniform number 9 is cut into the grass in left field, and now...the silence. The Red Sox wear black armbands on their right uniform sleeves with a black number 9 above the band. An honour guard stands for him and "Taps" is being blown.

God rest Ted Williams.

Thanks for the post. I'm a Sox fan and can't get the game on TV down here in SC. Here is something I posted about Ted on another thread:

I had the opportunity to go to Ted William's Baseball Camp in Lakeville, MA during the magical summer of '67 (Impossible Dream Red Sox). I was there for three weeks, played baseball for 8 hours a day. Ted came for a visit during the end of my first week there. He would stand behind the backstop while we hit, a constant flow of comments, critcisms, and suggestions. I'm sure that he imagined himself being in our place and this was a carbon copy of the way he talked to himself while at bat.

The next day it rained all day. Here we were, a couple hundred baseball junkies aged 9-18 with nothing to do. We even tried playing catch indoors. After lunch, (Ted ate with us although he sat a table with the counselors/coaches) Ted started talking about hitting a baseball. He talked for almost three hours. Nobody moved, everyone (even the 8 year olds) sat in awe, listening intently. He talked with a passion, an excitement that you rarely see anymore. He would get up with a bat in hand, demonstrating the proper angle of a swing, explaining adjustments that you needed to make in an at bat, etc.

He did all this using the Socratic method (that Boswell referred to in his article), asking questions in that big voice of his and then excitedly barking out the answer. All the while a couple hundred kids that loved baseball sat under the tent on picnic tables in awe of a man bigger than life. Bless you Teddy Ballgame...