The chase for .406

Spent some time wandering around the Printers Row Book Fair in downtown Chicago this morning, and discovered that Leigh Montville, former Boston Globe columnist and one of my favorite Sports Illustrated writers of all time, was appearing in a lecture hall to discuss his new book Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero. Haven't had a chance to pick the book up yet (I'm a paperback kinda guy, and I just got around to reading Moneyball), but one of the things I remembered about Montville as a writer is how excellent he is when it comes to breaking down the barriers professional athletes tend to erect for themselves and approaching his subjects in very human (and humane) terms.

Montville's talk and subsequent Q&A session were pretty illuminating. Despite having one of the worst 1970s era porn star mustaches this side of Jayson Stark, Montville comes off as a pretty regular fella -- he opened by joking about being obsessed with his own Amazon sales rank and detailing some of the critiques he's received of the book (mostly dealing with how he has chosen to order and present some of its facts and information). But his research seems exhaustive: Montville came to know Williams in the 1970s, when he was working as a hitting instructor for the Red Sox, and supplemented his brief interviews with the subject by interviewing all of his wives and a number of his ex-teammates.

Also, Montville's summary of his own book made me realize that I know nothing about Ted Williams, which is consistent with the book's observation that Williams didn't have a chance to shape a lasting public persona in the era before television. Some eye-opening factoids that interested me:

* Williams' mother was Mexican. Williams made no pains to hide or promote his ethnic identity, and it generally wasn't discussed.

* Williams had serious anger management issues. His third wife seems to think he would've been an excellent candidate for Prozac. Montville suggests that personal anger was the single most determining factor in Williams' success as a player.

* Williams served in the armed forces in WWII and, later, the Korean War. I knew this, but what I didn't know was that a) Williams sought a deferment during WWII and was rejected and b) served most of his time stateside as a flight instructor, only briefly reporting to Pearl Harbor after the bomb was dropped in Nagasaki. A point of interest considering how differently this has come to be portrayed in hindsight.

Montville didn't comment much on the huge legal struggle that ensured after Williams death, when his estranged son John Henry opted to have his body cryogenically frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation at a cost of $120,000. It supplies the ugly coda for Montville's book, though the story is far from over: John Henry Williams died earlier this year and his body was committed to the same storage facility, where bodies of the deceased are placed in multi-person units and frozen at 328 degrees below zero. Williams' daughter Bobby Jo Ferrell lost her first appeal to have Williams' body removed from the facility, and if you read this interview with Williams' close friend Buzz Hamon, it's easy to see why she's dead set on fulfilling her father's reported wish for cremation. Mike Piazza recently pledged support of the case, and backed off quickly for fear of a lawsuit, though the additional publicity couldn't have hurt the cause. At this point, the greatest pure hitter in baseball is hanging upside down in a tank, naked, in a strip mall around the corner from a Ponderosa. Sorry, it just can't get any worse than that.