Ted williams biography home run list
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Ted Williams
Any argument as to the greatest hitter of all time always involves Ted Williams. It’s an argument that can never be definitively answered, but that it always involves Williams says a lot. One could probably count the legitimate contenders on the fingers of one grabb. Most would narrow the field to just two players, Babe Ruth being the other. One could make a good case for Lou Gehrig, and a very small handful of others. Ted himself ranked Ruth, Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Rogers Hornsby, and Joe DiMaggio as the top five (he elected not to include himself in any such ranking).1
If the name of the game is getting on base, no one ranks above Williams. His lifetime on-base average was .482, and think what that means. He reached base safely 48.2% of the time he came up to bat — almost half the time. Ruth comes in second, at .474. One of the reasons Williams ranked first was his self-discipline; he refused to swing at pitches outside the strike zone. In time, he developed such a
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Ted Williams Home Runs
MLB Home Runs Hit by Ted Williams | Baseball Almanac
Ted Williams played his first Major League Baseball game on April 20, 1939, with the Boston Red Sox. Every home run Ted Williams hit over the course of his big league career appears below in chronological order, along with the date of the home run, his age at the time he homered, the pitcher who surrendered the home run, the inning (Inn), his batting order position (BOP) in the lineup, and where he was playing that day (Pos). The following abbreviations are used, where applicable, in the Notes column: Birthday (BD), Inside the Park Home Run (IPHR), Lead-Off (LO), Opening Day (OD), Switch-Hit Home Run (SWHR), and Walk-Off (WO). Research by Baseball Almanac."Giant centerfield Willie Mays compared (Ted) Williams and (Stan) Musial to sportswriter Roger Kahn. 'Ted Williams was the best pure hitter I ever saw,' Mays said. 'But Ted was stubborn. When they shifted on him, everybody to the right side, he still
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Ted Williams
Ted Williams always knew what he wanted. Others could debate who was the best all-around player in baseball history. But Williams was a hitter.
"All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived,'" Williams said.
Mission accomplished. The debate will rage forever, but the question of "greatest hitter" will always include the the longtime Red Sox left fielder.
Williams won six batting titles, but that doesn’t really explain his mastery at the plate. Thanks to an excellent batting eye, Williams led the American League in on-base percentage 12 times overall, including each season he played from 1940-49, when he missed three full years due to his service in the Marines. His .482 career on-base percentage is the best of all time.
Williams also led the AL in home runs four times, and his .634 career slugging percentage is second to only Babe Ruth.
In his third big league season in 1941, Williams