I Met Ted Williams When I Was a Kid

The event has become a bit of a mystery to me, something that occasionally spins me out on deep, existential ruminations of memory and time and the myths we tell ourselves. It is something I’ve bragged about and it is something I’ve been embarrassed about and it is something I’ve taken for granted, forgotten and then remembered again with a dissipating Oh yeah…

Mostly it’s just been a mark on the timeline of my life — which is a bad metaphor because I’m not really sure when I met Williams. And that, right there, is the rub. It happened. I know I met him, but the meeting holds as much life for me as the signing of the Magna Carta.

My remembering of it is removed from the memory itself, past-tense, the memory of a memory.

A digression: I am twenty-eight years old now and I have recently found myself questioning the validity of childhood memories. Events that are so vivid in my head, stories I have told again and again, now feel fabricated this time on the merry-go-round. As if each retelling has polished them. What was a rock, raw and live-edged, has become smooth. It’s still a rock, but it feels different in the hand. It’s easier to hold and maybe that’s the problem. I am no longer the character but the narrator of the story. I’m in control of it.

I asked my older brother, Matt: Do you remember the time dad threw a Snapple bottle at a car that cut in front of us when we were crossing the street? Oh yeah, that was crazy, he said. Do you remember him finishing the Snapple and then throwing it? Oh yeah, that was crazy. The bottle shattered, the car stopped, he told us to run home and we bolted…

But even with my brother’s emphatic confirmation, the event still feels impossible to me. Or maybe not impossible, but something altered, changed by time, pickled in the vinegar of my brain to become something better. No one can taste the cucumber in the pickle. But that’s how it started. That’s where it all began.

The cucumber: is that what I’m after with this Ted Williams thing? Do I want what it was or what it has become? The transformation is the interesting part…but who wants a cucumber over a pickle? We want the end result, the last, certain word. Can a pickle pickle itself into something else? Never let a metaphor die. This is poetry.

***

The story is that I met Ted Williams when I was kid at a foul pole raising ceremony for the future Petco Park in San Diego, California. My father, brother and I were there because we were in with some people who were in with the Padres front office. I think our friends’ apartment was bought out by the team to house offices for the new stadium or something. Anyway, as part of the deal for having to move they got good tickets to games and got invited to Padre things.

At the event, we stood next to Ted Williams, or were ushered up to him for a short period of time. He was in a wheelchair. I think he was wearing a hat and a white shirt but I really have no idea. A photo of us was taken but we don’t have the photo. We didn’t bring anything to get signed by Ted Williams, which is insane because he was absolutely there to sign things. Our friend’s kid got an autograph, on a ball or glove, but somehow we left empty handed.

It’s possible we didn’t understand how rare the event was, how this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for people (especially for kids our age, born long after Ted’s playing days). We were young! Or maybe we had taken the scene in “The Sandlot” too literally, when the ephemeral Babe tells Benny “The Jet” that Legends never die? Maybe we had been to too many Sunday school classes and heard too many flan-o-graph sermons where the stone was rolled away revealing the empty tomb, where Jesus rose into the clouds, where in the end we proclaim ‘almighty Death, where are thou sting?’

It seems that the point of all of this is to avoid speculation, to avoid retroactive reasoning, or explanations that I want to be true now but were not true then. I don’t know why we didn’t bring anything to sign and that’s just going to stay a mystery. My dad always says it was one of the greatest parenting mistakes that he ever made. Looking back on it now, yeah, dad screwed up — but Matt and I should’ve known better too.

My brother and I weren’t baseball dummies. I know some might think we just didn’t know who Ted Williams was and that was the problem. That was not the case, I assure you, and again: we were no dummies. We were in love with baseball and we loved its history. We collected and traded baseball cards. We went out of our way to destroy Pokemon cards because we saw their Charizards and Pikachus as direct competitors with our Gary Gaettis and Dan Quisnberrys. My brother could name the line-up of the 1975, 76 Big Red Machine, his favorite team. We named our cat Ozzie, after Ozzie Smith and spent a fair amount of time watching our VHS of MLB’s greatest plays in which Ozzie talks about his famous defensive feat fielding a bad-hop grounder with his bare hand mid-dive before throwing out the guy at first (this was early 80’s Ozzie as a Padre). We knew about the Catch. We hated the Yankees. I got a perfect score on a book report about Jackie Robinson in third grade. We were brought up properly in the history of the sport. We knew exactly who Ted Williams was on that day we met him.

And maybe there’s the answer to why we didn’t get anything signed by Williams. My brother and I were, above all else, middle-infielders and that is one thing Ted Williams was not. The guy didn’t care about defense. In all the highlight reels I’ve seen of Ted Williams, I can’t remember a single clip of him making a play in the outfield. He spent his time in left field practicing his swing. If the Designated Hitter was around when Williams was playing, he never would’ve stepped into the outfield again. I like to think we brought our baseball mitts — we tended to bring them to anything baseball or non-baseball related — and chose not to get them signed.

Why would we take the gloves we spat in and oiled and slept with under our pillows each night off our hands to give to a man like that? A DH? There’s no way.

This is the story I want to tell: My brother and I went to meet Ted Williams with the intention of snubbing the greatest hitter to ever play the game. He reached out for our gloves to autograph and we smiled and said No thanks, Ted — we prefer .262 hitters with 28 home runs to their name.

Of course, there was no way that was the case either. The Williams meeting was not a victory, not a proud moment of resilience in which I stood up for the purity of the sport I believed in. No. It was a routine grounder through the legs. An error. All I can do now is turn around and watch the ball roll further away into the outfield.

***

Ted Williams grew up in San Diego. He lived on Utah Street in the North Park neighborhood. I know his house. He went to Hoover High School. They have a huge photograph of him in a baseball uniform on their gym wall. My high school badminton team (yes) would go there every other year and I remember walking out onto the court to play my matches with his eyes looking down on me. Eyes that had looked on me before.

I went to college on Boston’s North Shore and anytime I went to Fenway, I was inundated with Williams photos, memorabilia and number 9 t-shirts. There’s a statue of him putting his cap on a little kid’s head in front of the park. I would brag to my Sox fan friends: Yeah, well I met him. He grew up in San Diego just like me. I made it sound as if we were as thick as thieves, as if that kid cast in bronze beside him was based on my like-ness. Uncanny. Boston had him for his career but he was a San Diegan. He was mine.

I was talking to a professor about baseball once and he had said he had met Carl Yastrzemski in an elevator. I quickly told him I had met Ted Williams He was good-natured about it, saying, You saw my outfielder and raised me with another! and I nodded and laughed. But he was right–something in me had to one up him, as if his Yastrzemski anecdote threatened my own brush with baseball immortality.

I cringe thinking about this interaction now. My insecurities about the Williams memory are painfully transparent. I needed to reassure myself that I knew exactly what went down that day and by telling it again and again, I was gaining control over it. I convinced myself of its truthfulness by telling it slant, half-coloring it in, and giving no real-details. It was bad fiction.

***

I met Ted Williams. Yes. I know. It has been corroborated by multiple witnesses. The context was a foul pole raising ceremony for the future Petco Park in San Diego, California. But things are definitely murky. I don’t remember exactly what foul pole it was but I suspect that it was right field’s (left field’s is attached to the corner of the Western Metal Supply building).

I do not remember when this happened. Petco Park was officially opened in 2004. I figured that the ceremony then took place maybe the year before the opening of the park, putting me around eleven years of age. A kid! Fifth grade! But after some minor googling, I discovered that the park’s opening was delayed from 2002 by funding problems and drama around the aforementioned Western Metal Supply building, which was slated for demolition in the original design, before it was deemed a historical landmark and spared.

Side note: I’m glad it didn’t get wrecked. The building is the one defining feature that actually heralds back to San Diego’s rough-and-tumble, Navy town past. It’s a monolith of brick that refuses to be drowned in the wave of surf’s up, hang-loose, Billabong aesthetics that is Petco Park.

But again, after some more minor googling, I realized my time frame was off: Ted Williams had died in July of 2002. My memory shifted again. I was shrinking, younger than ten, aging backwards. I couldn’t find a newspaper article or web-page referencing the foul pole ceremony to get a specific date — if Google can’t find it, did it even happen? — so I brought down the year of the event to sometime in 2000. I was probably eight years old. My brother: ten or eleven. Two seasons removed from Tony Gwynn’s Padres being swept by the Yankees in the World Series. We were still in the thick of the Jeter/Torre dynasty and I hated them so much that I basically don’t remember any other team from that era. I think if Luis Gonzalez didn’t bloop that single over a pulled-in Jeter and the Yankees won in 2001, I probably never would’ve watched another baseball game for the rest of my life — but maybe that’s another essay.

This is the story: Sometime around the turn of the millennium, I met Ted Williams, or stood next to him or near him or saw him in a crowd. I have no keepsake or totem. I did not reach out to touch his cloak… Sometime around the turn of the millennium I was in the same place as the best pure hitter in baseball history and it went over my head.

Twenty years on, the cucumber is long gone, pickled and pickling into something new.