INTRODUCTION: THE KID
“I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park,” John Updike wrote: Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” p. 112.
“Ted just had that natural ability,” said Hall of Fame second baseman Bobby Doerr: Nowlin and Prime, Ted Williams, p. 34.
“Ted Williams sees more of the ball than any man alive,” Ty Cobb once remarked: USA Today Editors, “In every sense, Williams saw more than most.”
In the same vein, former Cincinnati pitcher Johnny Vander Meer adds:
The first time I saw Ted Williams was at an exhibition game at Plant Field in Tampa. He was a rookie with the Boston club and I was with Cincinnati. He was the last man up in the game, in the ninth, and I was working the last two or three innings. Ted took a third strike.
The game was over and I was walking off the field, he came up to me and asked, “Did you make the ball spin the other way? Did you turn it over?” The ball was low and inside; it was a sinker. “I sure did,” I said. I had turned my hand over—my wrist over—and put a reverse spin on the ball. Bucky Walters was standing right close by and I said to Bucky, “That guy sees which way the stitches are turning! He ought to prove a pretty good hitter.” Hell yeah, he saw the stitches! Or he wouldn’t have asked me if I’d turned the ball over. (From Nowlin and Prime, Ted Williams, p. 34.)
“a lot of bull”: Montville, Ted Williams, p. 26.
“His whole life was hitting the ball,” recalled a boyhood friend.
The friend is Roy Engle. Two separate quotes are stitched together here. (Nowlin and Prime, Ted Williams.)
In 1991, biographer Bill Nowlin was in San Diego to attend the renaming of Williams’s old practice field as “Ted Williams Field.” Nowlin spent time with many people who had known Ted from childhood. “I had wondered if there was any indication when Ted was a boy that he would turn into the great player that he was; any indication that he was to be the anointed one. While obviously a good player, apparently nothing stood out that marked Ted above the other good players around the neighborhoods at that time. As one old friend put it, ‘He was good all right, but it wasn’t until about 15 that he started shooting ahead of the rest of us. After that, there was just no stopping him.’” (Nowlin, The Kid, p. 210.)
At San Diego’s old North Park field: Edes, “Gone.”
Frank Shellenback noticed that his new recruit: Nowlin and Prime, Ted Williams, p. 14.
“He discussed the science of hitting”: Nowlin and Prime, Ted Williams, p. x.
“pitchers figure out [batters’] weaknesses,” said Cedric Durst: Nowlin and Prime, Ted Williams, p. 13.
If humans were fruit flies, with a new generation appearing every eleven days, we might be tempted to chalk it up to genetics and rapid evolution.
A single fly’s random genetic mutation can spread into a whole community in a matter of months. Scientists have demonstrated this many times over, breeding gladiator flies, super-memory flies, flightless flies, and so on.
“unactualized potential”: This term comes from Ceci, Rosenblum, de Bruyn, and Lee, “A Bio-Ecological Model of Intellectual Development,” p. 304.
“We have no way of knowing how much unactualized genetic potential exists”: Ceci, Rosenblum, de Bruyn, and Lee, “A Bio-Ecological Model of Intellectual Development,” p. xv.
This new paradigm does not herald a simple shift from “nature” to “nurture.” Instead, it reveals how bankrupt the phrase “nature versus nurture” really is and demands a whole new consideration of how each of us becomes us.
Among the many scientists calling for this new consideration are Penn State geneticist Gerald E. McClearn. “For most of the past century,” he writes, “the evidence has been clear that a more collaborative model of coaction and interaction of genetic and environmental agencies is more appropriate.” (Gerald E. McClearn, “Nature and nurture,” pp. 124–30.)
As this book was going to press, Mark Blumberg made me aware of a new paper arguing that the phrase “nature versus nurture” should be forever banished. The citation: Spencer, J. P., M. S. Blumberg, R. McMurray, S. R. Robinson, L. K. Samuelson, and J. B. Tomblin. “Short arms and talking eggs: why we should no longer abide the nativist-empiricist debate.” (Child Development Perspectives, July 2009.)