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"I remember I was a scared rookie, hitting .220 after the first three months of my baseball season, and doubting my ability."

It was a changing of the guard. As an aging Ted Williams contemplated retirement, a young prospect from the heart of Yankee country emerged in the Boston system. So it was that Carl Yastrzemski would succeed the great Ted Williams in Left Field, and carry on the Green Monster's grand tradition.

The thought of Teddy Ballgame is a melancholy one in New England of late, as the man who served our country as well as he served our ballclub passed away in the Summer of 2002. It is some consolation though, to know that the only Red Sox player to ever come close to his greatness is still with us, often referred to by Ted as "The Kid".

Yastrzemski took the hallowed field for the Red Sox in 1961 and carved out his own Hall of Fame career. He remembers when he lockered next to Williams at spring training in 1960:

"I was only 20 years old," said Yaz. "He was always talking about hitting, but it was beyond me what he was talking about. All I knew was to see the ball and try to hit it. He loved to argue hitting and we'd get going on that and you couldn't win. He'd shout you down after a while.

"He was something. Very competitive, no matter what. We played tennis, golf. He just had a lot of competitive juices flowing all the time. We had a lot of laughs. I can remember one time in Winter Haven I caught a 13-pound largemouth bass. I kept it alive overnight and put it in a cooler in front of his locker the next day.

"One of the last times I saw him was at the All-Star Game here [in Boston] in 1999, but there were a lot of people around him. Before that, I had breakfast with him in Ocala when I went into his Hitters Hall of Fame. His mind was sharp. And all he wanted to do was talk hitting."

They shared a passion for the sport, among other things. In fact Yaz learned of his old friend's passing following a day spent doing what he and Ted loved best: fishing.

"They can talk about Ruth and Cobb and Hornsby and Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio and all the rest, but I'm sure not one of them could hold cards and spades to [Ted] Williams in his sheer knowledge of hitting. He studied hitting the way a broker studies the stock market, and could spot at a glance mistakes that others couldn't see in a week."

From Jim Huber, CNNSI, 7/7/2002

It is unthinkable. Teddy Williams is gone. It's nearly impossible, isn't it? Disappeared perhaps, for he loved to do that. Quietly leaving us for some deserted fishing hole. But gone completely? Why, that's impossible. He was, after all, Teddy Ballgame. The Splendid Splinter. As close to Superman as anybody from this planet who had ever put on a baseball uniform. That he could be vulnerable seemed ludicrous, though his decline in recent years had become public knowledge, surgery to reduce blockage in a neck artery beginning his slide. In our minds, he never seemed a day over 30. Tough as nails and surely able to slip right back into a batting box and hit .400 again today.

The Hall of Famer played his entire magnificent career with the Boston Red Sox from 1939 through 1960. A lifetime average over those 19 years of .344, the centerpiece, of course, 1941 when he became the last major leaguer to hit over .400. He finished at .406. 1939 to 1960. Nineteen seasons. There's something missing there, you say. Well, of course -- three years during World War II when he was in the Navy air corps. And if you take into account the Korean conflict, during which he only went to bat 43 times in two years because of a stint as a Marine fighter pilot, war took a significant toll.

But if baseball was a passion, war was a duty -- and he worked just as hard at one as the other. "I could never resent the three years I spent in World War II," Williams said. "Not that I did anything, but the very fact that everybody was in the service or doing something -- never regretted those years. I was proud of those years. I was happy that it happened that way."

He was the consummate hitter of a baseball. But he never took it for granted, sometimes waking his roommates when he was practicing his swing in the middle of the night. "When some guy said one day, 'Boy, that kid has got quick wrists!' Well, I even today don't think that quick wrists are that important. I didn't know whether it was good or bad, but it sounded like a compliment to me. And when I heard that I said, 'Just wait 'til the next time he sees me!' I was going to get quicker yet!" It was a talent of which he was quite proud. And when he had his worst season in 1959, a year he considered retiring after hitting just .254, he refused to leave the game on that note. And so he stayed another season, hit .316 with 29 home runs, including one in his final at-bat.

He spent four seasons managing before finally retiring to the solitude of the fishing hole. From the Florida Keys to New Brunswick, Canada, and finally to the Florida Gulf Coast, he was a lifelong loner. But he came back to us several times, once to help promote the opening of a Ted Williams Museum in central Florida. And there, midst the statutes and memorabilia, came one single line that best sums up Theodore Samuel Williams. He said, "I want people to say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'"

Williams had a gleam in his eye as he told the gathered crowd, "They can never write ever again that I was hardheaded. And never write again that I never tipped my hat to the crowd. Because today," he said with a chuckle as he lifted his baseball cap from his head and listened to the appreciative cheers as his fans anticipated his next move, "I tip my hat to all the people in New England."

And all of the people of the world tip their caps now in the utmost of respect.

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