The Statistical, Scientific, and Sensory Proof of Teddy Ballgame’s Mammoth Shot

For a large segment of the Red Sox Nation, the horrendous 1883 explosion of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which killed over thirty-five thousand people, pales by comparison to the storm stirred up and still continuing about Ted Williams’s mammoth home run struck in 1946 at Fenway Park in Boston. The main reason seems to be that no one looking at the lonely red seat high in the right-field bleachers marking where the ball landed can believe a baseball can be hit that far, including Ian Kinsler, but we’ll get to that.

I was fifteen in 1946, an avid Red Sox and Splendid Splinter fan, and lucky to be seated in the center-field bleachers on June 9 with a sideways view of Ted’s man-made volcano. I guess you had to be there. In the seventy-five years since then, all those people and personages whom I have told about the event have cast a dubious eye on me and my story, including such notables as Theo Epstein and the aforementioned Ian Kinsler.

That is, until I became acquainted lately with Chaim Bloom, the present chief baseball officer of the Red Sox, who read my account of the home run (about which you will read) in my 2018 short memoir, “My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway Park: From Teddy Ballgame to Mookie Betts.”

Chaim wrote to me, “I must admit I was a skeptic myself, but I believe you.” Hey, I believe in this guy whose Yale University– and Tampa Bay Rays– enhanced smarts will lead the Boston Red Sox to nirvana yet again. I am supposing Chaim was persuaded by the wealth of facts I recited in the subsequent long quote from the memoir. One would have to be more Machiavellian than Machiavelli to make this stuff up. Here is my account. I’ll supply even more facts from my own memories of the event. God forbid that I should be labeled “More Machiavellian than Machiavelli”:

In 1946 the Boston Red Sox won the American League pennant in a romp. It might be said that Ted Williams’s career rose to an apogee and descended to its perigee that summer. Perhaps the apogee was on June 9, 1946, by which time the Sox were all alone in first place and Ted led the league in every major batting category. Accompanied again by my good friend then and now, Yale Altman, rifle armed all-city third baseman for English High School in Boston, I attended a doubleheader between the Sox and the Detroit Tigers. In the first game, Ted hit a soaring home run off the screen at the back of the Red Sox bullpen off ace Detroit curve-ball specialist Tommy Bridges. But the best was yet to come in the nightcap on this beautiful June day when the west wind was briskly blowing from home plate out to right field.

Ted stepped in against Detroit’s fine right hander (and later a respected manager) Freddy Hutchinson. I can see and hear it all clearly in my mind’s eye and ear. The pitch was thrown hard and to the inside. Ted’s quick bat flashed through the strike zone striking the ball so hard that a sharp crack was heard all over Fenway Park. Indeed, the ball rose high and fast describing a relatively flat arc in the sky, more like a gargantuan line drive than a big fly. The ball sailed and sailed, landing very high in the sixty or so row right field bleachers. From my position in the center field section of the bleachers I saw the ball come down and quickly bounce up to the very last rows of the bleachers, close to six hundred feet away from home plate and thirty-five or more feet off the ground. As reported in the newspapers the next day, what actually happened is that the ball went through a man’s straw hat in the 42nd row, bouncing off his head to the position I just described. That man was 502 feet...