THE GREATEST HITTER EVER WAS UNDERRATED

By Charlie Gargiulo

My earliest TV sports memory is sitting with my late Uncle Leo watching the Red Sox sometime during the 1960 season. I was already playing baseball for a few years but the bug about following major league baseball players was just beginning to bloom as an 8 year old when I became indoctrinated into a life of misery as a Red Sox fan by my loving family until the Sox finally broke the curse in 2004.

My mom and dad lived with my Uncles Leo and Arthur in Dracut after moving there in 1956 to help take care of Uncle Leo who was disabled from a severe case of multiple sclerosis. Although my dad, mom and Uncle Arthur casually caught glimpses of the Sox on TV, it became a real bonding experience for me and Uncle Leo as I started to watch every game from start to finish with him in the summer of 1960. We normally didn’t talk too much because he was very depressed from his deteriorating condition as he became paralyzed from the waist down and would often go into violent spasms that would require an adult’s help to prevent him from falling out of his wheelchair. He was always nice to me but, after all, I was an 8 year old kid, and there wasn’t much we had in common to talk about. Until I started playing baseball and became a bigger fan than any of the adults around Uncle Leo.

Once I realized how damn good it felt to connect a bat with a ball in the sweet spot and watch it fly over the heads of the kids I was playing with, I became obsessed with the sport. Fortunately, my friends seemed to become fanatics at the same time I did as we spent every waking minute that summer finding some field to play in hitting balls so often we would eventually need to start putting electric tape around the peeling hide of the ball when the stitches started to fall out.

If other kids weren’t around then I’d use some old beat up baseball bat to whack rocks and stones in the field behind my house trying to hit them over the trees in the distance while broadcasting each tree I cleared as if I was a radio play by play guy screaming excitingly, “There’s a long blast by Gargiulo, going back, back, back…HOME RUN! Oh my, Gargiulo just blasted another one completely out of the ballpark!”

It was inevitable that once we started to play ball we discovered the game required learning a completely new foreign language and culture unique to baseball. It also did more to increase our math skills than anything our teachers taught us at school. Soon we went from doing simple multiplication tables to figuring out on our own how to do sophisticated divisions to calculate somebody’s batting average.

It didn’t take long for Uncle Leo to catch on that he had an aspiring pupil on his hand that he could mentor with his vast knowledge and experience of the game. And to share his memories with somebody who would truly appreciate them. So every night or weekend day when a Red Sox game came on the tube, I would sit near or lie on the ground next to my Uncle Leo and watch every game with him, while he explained the nuances and strategies and told me stories of the legends he saw play before he joined the Army in World War II. His favorite story was seeing the Babe himself hit a home run well up into the bleachers at Fenway Park on a line drive and how he never heard a bat make an explosive sound like that before or since.

But my favorite and first vivid memory watching baseball with him was when he got my attention by stating very seriously one time, when Ted Williams was coming to bat while they were playing a game in Cleveland, “I want you to pay attention and try to remember this so you can tell your kids and grandkids that you actually saw Ted Williams live on TV. To let them know you were lucky enough to see the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Then, almost like in a movie, Ted connected on the next pitch and hit a home run. AND later hit another one out in the same game! Each time Ted hit the home run, Uncle Leo looked at me, did a small up and down nod of his head with a slight grin, then shakily pointed his hand to the screen and said, “See, now don’t forget you actually saw him.”

Funny how life works, here I am 65 years later at 73 and I have always maintained that special memory as the first baseball TV moment that has stayed with me. Followed that October by my first World Series and watching Bill Mazeroski’s game-winning home run in Game 7 for the Pirates against the Yankees. Yet, although everybody who knows anything about baseball knows that Ted Williams was one of the game’s greatest hitters, I am just beginning to understand that as great as we think he was, he was even better. In fact, after looking a little deeper in the stats, I am convinced that Uncle Leo was correct. I saw the greatest hitter who ever lived, not the greatest all around ballplayer for sure, BUT the GREATEST HITTER.

Sure, every baseball fan knows he was the last player to hit over .400 and some may even be aware that he holds the all-time Major League on base percentage record at .482 and that he generated his career totals of 521 home runs and .344 batting average while missing nearly FIVE of his peak athletic years serving in World War II and the Korean War. Another little known stat is that while everyone knows Joe DiMaggio had the longest hitting streak in MLB history, how many know Ted Williams has the longest streak of reaching base with either a hit or a walk at 84 games?

Okay, I also understand that for the first part of his career, his numbers can be questioned because he played when baseball was not integrated. However, unlike the great white hitters like Ruth, Foxx, Gehrig, Cobb, etc. and the great Negro League hitters like Gibson, Charleston, Leonard, etc. who only played against the best of their own race, Ted Williams final years are what blew me away when I examined them.

Let the numbers speak for themselves. I’m going to compare the LAST 6 years of Ted Williams’ career between the years 1955-60 when he was playing between the advanced ages of 37 and 42 years of age and compare him with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron during those same years, when they were playing in their athletic prime years. Mickey and Willie were between 24 and 29 years old and Henry was between 21 and 26 years old. I have averaged out over that six year span each of their batting averages, on base percentages, slugging %, OPS,  OPS+ and home run per at bat. To highlight how amazing these stats are I list in bold who has the highest of each category. Out of the 6 categories, Ted Williams leads in 5 of them.

Thanks Uncle Leo. I remember.

B.A.                  OBP         SLG         OPS       OPS+     HR per AB

Ted Williams                  .331                   .464          .615         1.078       190           13.76

Mickey Mantle                 .315                   .436          .608         1.047       185           13.2

Willie Mays                    .321                   .393          .594         0.987       162           16.4

Henry Aaron                  .323                   .375          .574         0.949        158           17.7