The title of Best Living Baseball Player is up for grabs for the first time in quite a while due to the passing of baseball legend and national hero Ted Williams.
Williams passed away July 5 in a Florida hospital, leaving behind a legacy of baseball greatness.
The San Diego native reached the national spotlight in 1939 with the Boston Red Sox and never looked back. Williams’ numbers are god-like and truly worthy of his Hall of Fame status. However, one has to wonder what those numbers would have been like if the Splendid Splinter hadn’t lost five prime years to fighting in both World War II and the Korean War as a fighter pilot.
If Teddy Ballgame had those five seasons back, statisticians have projected that he would be the all-time leader in RBIs, runs and walks. He would have been close to 700 homers. He would have had 3,000-plus hits. In short, Williams would have been indisputably the greatest player to play the game.
Personally, I think that Ted Williams is already the greatest player to ever play the game. I’d like to see Barry Bonds hit .388 with 38 homers at the age of 40. I would like to see any modern slugger go through a season with less than 50 strikeouts like Williams did in all but three of his seasons — he had 64 as a rookie, 54 in his second year and 51 in his fourth year.
It’s a joke and borderline blasphemy to even compare players like Barry Bonds to Williams. I will grant that Bonds is a great player. But he’s not anywhere close to where Ted Williams was as a hitter.
Modern baseballs are wound tighter for more offense. Modern bats are crafted more accurately and solidly for better pop. Modern pitchers are not allowed to throw inside to hitters. Even if they are, modern sluggers like Bonds are allowed to wear armor on their elbows, eliminating fear and allowing them to put all of their weight into every pitch. The game is geared toward offense, yet modern players still can’t touch Williams as hitters.
Numbers aside for a minute, Ted Williams had something else that made him so great. It was a quality that can’t be measured. It was his courage and commitment to his country that made him a role model. That is a term that isn’t used too often to describe national athletes. But here was a guy who gave up five years of his professional career to defend this country and he never complained about how it hurt his statistics.
In times like these, when our nation is learning that heroes don’t just play for professional sports teams, but rise up in the face of national threats and crises, it is comforting to look back at the life of a man who was a hero in both respects.
Williams could have owned Cooperstown with his five lost seasons. I guess now he’ll have to settle for the admiration and respect of a college sports columnist.