It was a fantasy come true for baseball fans in the Bronx when a team led by Ted Williams, the last of the .400 hitters, met up with a team led by all-time slugger Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium on July 28, 1943, to benefit war-relief efforts and the American Red Cross.
Then-Aviation Cadet Williams was the star left fielder for a Navy team called the “Cloudbusters” that featured other major leaguers such as Johnny Sain, Harry Craft, Johnny Pesky and Buddy Hassett who were now in Navy flight training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They were among the roughly 500 major league players who served in World War II. Player-manager Ruth’s team, called the “Yanklands,” was made up of former Yankee and Cleveland Indians players.
Williams hit a run-producing single in the Cloudbusters 8-5 win, but the moment the fans had been waiting for came in the sixth inning when Ruth, now 48 years old and beginning to ail from the effects of the throat cancer that would take his life five years later, trudged up to the plate in his familiar No. 3 pinstripes as a pinch-hitter against the Cloudbusters’ Johnny Sain, a breaking ball pitcher.
Catcher Al Sabo came out to the mound to tell Sain not to throw Ruth any curves and risk embarrassing him. As Sain later said, “Taking away my curveball was like cutting off two of my fingers, but it was Babe Ruth in Yankee Stadium. Then, it became obvious that the home plate umpire wasn’t going to call any strikes on him. So I threw five medium fastballs, almost batting practice pitches. Ruth took one, then hit a long foul ball and then walked on the last three pitches,” according to the Society for American Baseball Research.
In addition to throwing the last pitch to Ruth in a game, Sain, on April 15, 1947, pitching for the Boston Braves, would throw the first pitch in the major leagues ever seen by Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The Cloudbusters’ performance that day in Yankee Stadium has become a focal point for Anne R. Keene’s new book The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II. Keene came to the story after the death of her father, James Raugh, when she discovered the scrapbook he began after serving as a batboy for the Cloudbusters.
The book is a glimpse back to the time when baseball was king and much of the nation had never actually seen a major leaguer play ball, except in newsreels. The Cloudbusters and other wartime barnstorming teams took the Major League game to places it had never been, and Williams’ drive to be the best was rubbing off on other players.
In a foreword to the book, Claudia Williams, Ted Williams’ daughter, said her father “never did anything half-assed. He firmly believed that ‘Perfection is attainable if you dare to work hard enough.’”
Williams’ intensity appeared to rub off on his teammates, according to the Cloudbusters coach, Lt. George D. Kepler. He told the Burlington Times-News that “Since the arrival of Cadet Williams, Pesky and the other ex-major leaguers, most of our games have been won by one-sided scores. We have been getting good hitting and pitching, and both the cadets and officers on the team love to play baseball.”
Remarkably, Williams, the ultimate student of the art of hitting, was also getting batting tips from the flight school instructors who taught aerodynamics and the theory of flight to the cadets from Chapel Hill at Amherst College. Amherst Professor Harold Irving “Doc” Ewen took Williams to a lab to teach him about the effects of wind velocity and to tell him why a curveball curved, Keene wrote in her book.
Ewen, who taught celestial navigation, also explained to Williams why “a bat of a certain density would drive a ball farther than one of lighter density.” A medium-weight bat swung fast “would drive a ball farther than a heavier bat with a slower swing,” Ewen told Williams. Williams also took the lessons about wind velocity back with him to the Boston Red Sox, where he teamed up again with Johnny Pesky after the war.
According to Pesky, Williams would check which way the flags above the stands were blowing as soon as they took the field, and Williams would routinely remind Johnny that “If a little bit of wind affects a 100,000-pound aircraft, what do you think it does to a baseball?”
Williams served stateside as an instructor during the war and then returned to the Red Sox but was called up again for the Korean War where, as Marine Capt. Theodore S. Williams, he flew 39 combat missions in the Grumman F9F Panther jet while serving in the same squadron as John Glenn, who would later become legend as an astronaut and a Democratic Senator from Ohio.
Glenn would later tell MLB.com that “Much as I appreciate baseball, Ted to me will always be a Marine fighter pilot.”
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