But I am damn sure I would never spit at those fans again. The Boston fans were the best. What I hadn't realized before was that they enjoyed being intimate with me, in that small ball park where they were right on top of the play. Too many cases prove the point. For example, the day I went to Korea and they all joined hands in the park and sang farewell to me; the day I came back; the ovations I always got, and the crowds that would wait around after the games for me. I was, in the final analysis, the darling of the fans of Boston. I am sorry I was late finding out, but I'm glad I did find it out.

Just this last spring in Ocala one of the Red Sox minor league players said to me, "You know, my dad used to be out there in left field when you played, and he used to boo the hell out of you. He used to go out there and have a few beers, and he'd really have fun giving you the old raspberry. But you know," he said, "my old man liked you." I had to smile. "Well, you tell the old rascal I'd like to have a talk with him," I said. The kid said, "Well, he's dead now."

The thing that writers like Huck Finnigan kept harping on until the day they died and probably the thing that hurt me most because it was so unfair was that, as one of them wrote, in the "10 most important games of his life, Williams hit .232." In capsule: the .200 in the World Series, seven games; 1 for 4 against Cleveland in the playoff for the pennant in 1948, and 1 for 3 and 0 for 2 against the Yankees in 1949, when we lost a one-game lead with two games to play. In those last two I walked twice each game. That was against Allie Reynolds and Vic Raschi, two pretty fair pitchers. I put one right up against the damn fence the last day, but it was caught.

Well, you can take any 10 games you want out of a guy's career and pick his record apart if that's how you want to judge him. But if you're fair, you've got to say in the end, "The guy played 22 years. And there were a lot of games where he did come through." They don't talk about the time the Yankees came into Boston in 1948, one game back, and I beat Tommy Byrne the first day with a two-run home run and knocked them out of the race. They don't talk about going 6 for 8 when we won our last three to force the playoff with Cleveland. They don't talk about the 11-game winning streak we went on in the last three weeks of 1949 to take the lead, and I won four of the games with homers off Hal Newhouser, Steve Gromek, Reynolds and Eddie Lopat. I led the league four times in RBIs in those years when we were in the pennant races. I led six times in runs scored. I think if you'll check you'll find that no batter who ever played this game had a better on-base percentage than Ted Williams. To space all that out so that, as the Egans would say, I helped only my own average would have been a damn miracle of self-service.

Egan was great for this. One day in Detroit, I think it was 1955, we were behind 4-3 in the ninth inning and I struck out with the tying and winning runs on base. Before the score was up Egan had fired off the most vicious thing you've ever read. I got the paper in the mail the next morning in Detroit. (I always kept up with my critics.) "Typical Williams, never hits 'em when we need 'em, yow, yow, yow." You would have thought I was the first man who ever struck out with the bases loaded.

The very next day we're losing again, 3-0, and it's the ninth inning and damn if we don't get three men on, two away, and I'm up. All I could think of was Egan. It seemed I always had something like that to goad me on. They brought in a lefthander, Al Aber. He had a side-arm, kind of crossfire delivery. Well, I got him to 2 and 0 and I hit a home run to win the game. That didn't put an end to Egan for good, of course, because he could always be illogical, but the reason I bring it up is that nobody can do it all the time.

Then they would say I took too many bases on balls, and they'd quote somebody like Ty Cobb. " Williams sees more of the ball than any man alive, but he demands a perfect pitch. He takes too many bases on balls." I have two arguments for that. The best years I had for driving in runs were when I had Joe Cronin hitting behind me, my first years, and when I had Vern Stephens hitting behind me. No pitcher was going to walk me, boy, to pitch to Cronin or Stephens. I had opportunities unlimited. I had other good hitters behind me some years, like Rudy York and Bobby Doerr, but the pitchers worked around me even with them, and in other years, when the Red Sox lineup wasn't exactly murderers' row, they often just flat out walked me. I set a league record in 1957 for intentional walks.

All right, so Cobb and a couple of others said I took too many close pitches, "begging walks," that I should have gone for the close pitch when we were behind and needed runs. My argument is, to be a good hitter you've got to get a good ball to hit. It's the first rule in the book. Now, if I'm a real dangerous hitter and they're pitching me cutely, a little outside, a little low, a hair inside, I'm not going to get that ball I can really hit, I'll have to bite at stuff that is out of my happy zone. Out there, now, I'm not a .344 hitter, I might be only a .250 hitter. My argument is, if the guy behind me is, say, a .300 hitter and, having walked me, they have to pitch to him, they'll probably have to get in his happy zone, his .300 zone. A good hitter, I believe, can hit a ball that is over the plate three times better than a great hitter can hit a questionable ball that is not in the strike zone.

Fortunately, of course, pitchers still make enough slips or get in situations where they can't walk you, and a guy like me winds up averaging .344. But the greatest hitter in the world can't hit bad balls well. You've got to get a good ball. Once you start going for the pitch an inch off, the next time that pitcher will throw it two inches off, then three, and before you know it you're hitting .250. I never gave pitchers that luxury. As a result they walked me more than 100 times a season for nine of the 19 years I was in the big leagues.

In 1948 and 1949, with Stephens behind me, my two-year total of at bats was more than in any two years after the war. Stephens was at the top of his game, and I had a couple of hellish hitters in front of me, Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky. We had a great thing going. In 1949 Stephens and I each drove in 159 runs. Nobody has driven in that many runs in either league since. I remember being bothered because the writers had been writing about this "feud" with Stephens. Just for spite, we decided to never shake hands in public view. Any applause we had for each other was confined to the dugout. Anyway, during the last game of the season I was on second and Vern hit a blue darter into left field, a base hit. Ordinarily I would have scored, but the ball was hit so hard right at the fielder I had to hold at third. That bothered me because I felt some people might think I should have gone home and Stephens should have led for the season in RBIs. But he'd do that, Stephens, hit those vicious line drives. He was a strong little guy. Nobody booed.