Teddy Ballgame: King of Swing

E-mail this article Print this article

Today: Boston's Ted Williams, the greatest player in All-Star history, goes 4 for 4 and smacks two homers, including Rip Sewell's infamous "eephus pitch" at Fenway Park.

If Reggie Jackson is Mr. October, then Ted Williams is undeniably Mr. July, the undisputed king of All-Star highlights.

Teddy All-Star Game had the most dramatic home run in midsummer classic history, a two-out, three-run, walk-off winner off Claude Passeau in 1941 that lifted the American League to a 7-5 victory in Detroit.

Cumulatively, Williams hit .304 with four homers and 12 RBI in his 18 All-Star games, and threw out the first pitch at the 1953, '61, and '99 games.

But Williams' indelible stamp on All-Star lore came in 1946, when he conquered the unconquerable "eephus pitch" of Pittsburgh's Rip Sewell, knocking the slow, high-arcing pitch out of his hometown Fenway Park.

Truett Banks "Rip" Sewell had led the National League with 17 losses in 1941, but a horrific hunting accident on Dec. 7 - the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor - actually resurrected his career. Shot at close range by another hunter - "he tore holes in me as big as marbles," Sewell would say" - he wound up severely injuring his foot. As a result, he had to throw while holding his right big toe up in the air, which led him to develop his famous blooper pitch.

Tossed as high as 25 feet into the air, the pitch amused, confounded and sometimes infuriated hitters - but it made Sewell a winner. He led the NL with 21 wins and 25 complete games in 1943 and won 21 the following year.

"By the grace of God, by being shot, I became a better pitcher," Sewell said.

It was Pittsburgh outfielder Maurice Van Robays who came up with the name for the lob ball, which Sewell mixed in effectively with his conventional pitches. "Eephus ain't nothin', and that's a nothin' pitch," Van Robays said.

But fans loved it, swelling Pirates' attendance by as many as 10,000 fans on Sewell's turns in the rotation.

No one had ever homered off the ball, however, heading into the 1946 All-Star Game at Fenway Park, and the assumption was that it couldn't be done. The mood at Fenway was unusually festive that day; not only was the All-Star Game returning after a one-year break for the war, but the Red Sox, on the way to the AL pennant, had eight players in the game.

Williams, returning from three year's in the service, was hitting .347 with 23 homers and 72 RBI, on his way to the Most Valuable Player award. And he would turn in the greatest individual performance ever by an All-Star, going 4 for 4 with two homers and five RBI in a 12-0 American League rout.

Before the game, Williams had said to the 40-year-old Sewell, "You're not going to throw that pitch to me, are you?" Sewell assured him he would. With the game already out of hand, 9-0 in the eighth inning, NL Manager Charlie Grimm told Sewell to warm up "and throw that blooper pitch and see if you can wake up this crowd."

In his autobiography, "My Turn at Bat," Williams recalls watching Sewell warm up from the dugout and telling Yankee catcher Bill Dickey, " `Gee, I don't think you could ever generate enough power to hit that pitch out of the park.' ... Dickey said the way to do it was to advance a step or two as it came toward you. Kind of run at it. That's about what I did, and I hit it into the bullpen in right field."

Upon stepping into the batter's box with two runners aboard, Williams shook his head at Sewell as if to say, "Don't do it." Sewell nodded back at him - "Yes, I am" - and immediately lobbed an eephus pitch, at which Williams swung mightily but popped it foul out of play.

Sewell threw a fastball for a called strike and tried another eephus pitch for a ball before lobbing a floater that he later called his "Sunday Super Dooper Blooper." Using Dickey's run-up technique, Williams smacked a home run. Williams laughed all the way around the bases, and he wasn't alone.

"It was kind of laughable, almost a comic thing," said Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr, Williams' Red Sox teammate, from his Oregon home. "I remember that Ted got quite a kick out of it. It's just one of those things that lives on forever. You needed a guy with guts enough to throw a pitch like that, and a guy great enough to hit it out."

Larry Stone can be reached at 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com.