As manager

Theodore Samuel Williams (August 30, 1918 – July 5, 2002) was an American left fielder in Major League Baseball. He played 21 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, twice interrupted by military service as a Marine Corps pilot. Nicknamed The Kid, the Splendid Splinter, Teddy Ballgame, and The Thumper, he is widely considered one of the greatest hitters ever.

Williams was a two-time American League Most Valuable Player (MVP) winner, led the league in batting six times, and won the Triple Crown twice. He had a career batting average of .344, with 521 home runs, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966. He is the last player in Major League Baseball to bat over .400 in a single season (.406 in 1941). Williams holds the highest career batting average of anyone with 500 or more home runs. His career year was 1941 he hit .406 with 37 HR, 120 RBI, and 135 runs scored. His .551 on base percentage set a record that stood for 61 years. An avid sport fisherman, he hosted a television show about fishing and was inducted into the IGFA Fishing Hall of Fame.

Ted Williams was born in San Diego as Teddy Samuel Williams, named after his father, Samuel Stuart Williams, and Teddy Roosevelt. At some point, the name on his birth certificate was changed to Theodore, but his mother and his closest friends always called him "Teddy".[citation needed] He attended Hoover High School in San Diego—where the baseball field is named in his honor. His father was a soldier, sheriff, and photographer from New York and greatly admired the former president. His mother, May Venzor, was a Salvation Army worker from El Paso, Texas.

His paternal ancestors were a mix of Welsh and Irish and his maternal ancestors were of Mexican descent. The Mexican side of Williams' family was quite diverse, having Spanish (Basque), Russian, and Indian, namely mestizo, roots. Through his Mexican side, he is also distantly related to Mexican Revolutionary General Pascual Orozco, who in turn shares descent from the Habsburg family of Europe, and related to Maximilian I of Mexico. Of his Mexican ancestry he wrote: "If I had had my mother's name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, (considering) the prejudices people had in Southern California".

Williams lived in San Diego's North Park neighborhood (4121 Utah Street) and graduated from Herbert Hoover High School in San Diego, where he played baseball. Though he soon had offers from the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees, his mother thought he was too young to leave home so he signed with the local minor league club, the San Diego Padres, while still in high school. He also had a minor league stint with the Minneapolis Millers.

He had a younger brother Danny who was wayward. When Ted started making some money in 1941, he had the house on Utah Street enlarged and completely renovated. Danny promptly backed a truck up to the house, moved out all the new furniture, including a washing machine and a sewing machine, and sold these items. May, who had been able to get Danny out of his previous scrapes, gave up this time and had him arrested. He spent some time in jail.

Early in his career, Ted stated that he wished to be known as "The greatest hitter who ever lived," an honor that he achieved in the eyes of many by the end of his career. Williams once stated his goal was to have a father walk down the street with his son, point to Williams and remark, "Son, there goes the greatest hitter who ever lived." Carl Yastrzemski said of Williams, "He studied hitting the way a broker studies the stock market."

Williams moved up to the major league Red Sox in 1939, immediately making an impact by leading the American League in RBI and finishing 4th in MVP balloting. Williams quickly became known as one of the most potent left-handed hitters in MLB. A myth developed that his eyes were the best in history, being able to read the words on a 78 RPM record label while it was spinning. Williams disavowed that claim, but his eyesight was unusually keen; military ophthalmologists judged Williams' vision as "a one-in-100,000 proposition."

In 1941, he entered the last day of the season with a batting average of .39955. This would have been rounded up to .400, making him the first man to hit .400 since Bill Terry in 1930. Manager Joe Cronin left the decision whether to play up to him. Williams opted to play in both games of the day's doubleheader and risk falling short, explaining that "if I can't hit .400 all the way, I don't deserve it." He singled in his first at-bat, raising his average to .401, and followed it with a home run and two more hits in the first game. Williams went 2 for 3 in the second game, for a total of 6 hits in his last 8 at-bats, for a final average of .406. No player has hit .400 in a season since Williams. (Williams also hit .407 in 1953 (just 37 games), and in a six-game cameo in 1952.)