When looking back at the baseball career of the famous Theodore Samuel Williams, more commonly known as Ted Williams, or by his plethora of nicknames: ‘The Kid’, ‘The Splendid Splinter’, ‘Teddy Ballgame’, ‘The Thumper’, the most rightly view him as one of the greatest sports hitters of all time.
Statistics and accolades don’t lie.
In his nineteen years competing with the Boston Red Sox, between 1939 and 1960, Williams amassed 2,654 hits, 521 home runs, 1,839 RBIs and a .344 batting average at the plate.
They all rank Williams in the top 100 of each category in MLB history, and his highest score is 10 in his career batting average.
He is also one of only two players in MLB history with two Triple Crowns (earned when a player leads an entire league in home runs, RBIs, and batting average at the end of a season), achieved in 1942 and 1947.
He also won the American League MVP award twice, in 1946 and 1949.
Williams accumulated several nicknames throughout his playing career, but “The Kid” was always his favorite. Gettyimages
A secret identity
“The Kid” left more than enough story to talk about on the baseball field, and if he were still alive, Williams would probably agree.
Off the field, and before even setting foot in one, Williams was the son of Samuel Stewart Williams and May Venzor.
His father, whose last name Ted would take, was of Welsh and Irish origin, and his mother was Mexican-American, born to Pablo Venzor and Natalia Hernández, originally from Valle de Allende, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Williams’ Mexican-American heritage is something that only the few writers who delved into his life and career have been able to unravel.
The baseball legend only dedicated a 44-word sentence in his 232-page autobiography published in 1970, My Turn at Bat, to mention his Mexican heritage.
“Her maiden name was Venzer, it was part Mexican and part French; And that was going to mark my destiny: “If I had carried my mother’s maiden name, there is no doubt that I would have had problems, given the prejudices that people in Southern California had at that time,” Williams wrote.
It could be said that with that phrase Williams publicly recognized his Mexican heritage for the first time, after 52 years and a baseball career framed in the Hall of Fame.
Williams feared that his Mexican heritage would prevent him from playing in the big leagues. Gettyimages
beat the venzor
It was also the phrase that motivated Boston baseball writer and historian Bill Nowlin to go on a long journey to discover more about Williams’ secret Mexican roots. He would end up publishing an article on the subject for Boston Globe Magazine in 2002, just a month before Williams passed away.
The trip is a preamble to Nowlin’s book, Ted Williams: The First Latino in the Baseball Hall of Fame, published in 2018, the same year that Williams would have turned 100.
“I did a nationwide internet search on the Venzer name. There were five people on the list. I called them. They knew nothing about having Ted Williams as a relative, “Nowlin wrote. “There was no thread that I could follow.”
Much more would be discovered, Nowlin recounts, after the publication of his first book on Williams, Ted Williams: A Tribute, in 1997.
A year after its publication, the book’s co-author Jim Prime received an email from a man named Manuel Herrera who claimed to be Williams’ cousin.
Nowlin called Herrera, and in this way found more thread to work with to put together the story of Williams’ Mexican heritage.
He even noticed that the self-proclaimed man “the greatest hitter who ever lived” had his mother’s maiden name misspelled in his autobiography.
“Maybe seven or eight minutes passed into the interview before I mentioned the Venzor surname,” Nowlin wrote of his conversation with Herrera. Venzor? Venz-remo? As he later transcribed the tape, I kept hearing him say “Venzor”, not “Venzer”, which he had always been pronouncing as “Venz-air”. Accent on the first syllable. Half Mexican and half French, Ted had written ”.
A cross reference to Williams and Nowlin’s birth certificate confirmed the error that had hampered their investigation for years.
His next stops were Santa Barbara, California and El Paso, Texas, to potentially meet more members of Williams’ extended Mexican family. Nowlin only managed to reunite with his relatives in El Paso, since those of Santa Barbara had all passed away.
Both cities, along with San Diego, are vital places in Williams’ and her family’s early life. El Paso is where her mother spent the first years of her life, and Santa Barbara is where her family would settle.
San Diego is where Williams’ parents May and Samuel would settle with him and his brother Danny.
After Nowlin, the next writer to take an interest in Williams’ Mexican legacy was Ben Bradlee Jr., a veteran journalist and editor of the Boston Globe. His Williams biography, The Kid, The Immortal Life of Ted Williams, was published in 2013 and became a New York Times bestseller.
Williams was told not to speak on behalf of black players in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, but decided to do so anyway. Gettyimages
Ashamed of his family
Bradlee Jr. took an in-depth look at the baseball legend’s Mexican heritage and how his childhood difficulties led to difficult relationships and angry outbursts later in life.
The first chapter of the book is titled “Shame.”
It begins by exposing Williams’ shame of his own family. Either from his mother, “the devotee of the Salvation Army and an example of the San Diego of the Depression era”.
“That she seemed much more committed to her street mission than to raising her two children.”
His father, “who ran a cheesy photo studio downtown, where he tended to the San Diego sailors and their whores.”
“And who liked to hit the bottle.”
Or his younger brother, “an evil and petty gun armed who was always one step ahead of the law.”
“Who bitterly resented Ted’s fame and success.”
“Ted was always ashamed of how he was raised,” reads the first sentence of Bradlee Jr.’s book.
Regardless, his Mexican uncle, Saul Venzor, is recognized by many biographers (including Bradlee Jr.) as the first to introduce Williams to baseball.
Williams is known as one of the greatest MLB players of all time and dubbed “the greatest hitter of all time.” Gettyimages
Ashamed of his origins
The resentment towards his family extended to his Mexican heritage, which throughout his playing career he saw as something that would prevent him from competing on the biggest stage of baseball.
“Ted didn’t want anyone to know that he was part Mexican,” Bradlee Jr. wrote, quoting Williams’ longtime friend Al Cassidy.
Instead, due to his fair complexion, Williams would identify himself as “Basque”, a native of the Basque Country, in Spain. The lie was upheld even by her closest relative, Sarah Venzor Diaz, when Bradlee Jr. interviewed her for his book.
“We do not have Mexican heritage in our family. We are Basques, ”he said.
“We do not have Mexican heritage in our family. We are Basques, ”he said.
Once, while riding the train back to San Diego after his rookie season in which he rose to fourth place in MVP voting and was declared Rookie of the Year by Babe Ruth, Williams encountered his predominantly Mexican family. waiting to receive it on the platform.
“Ted hastily left after seeing the mixed bag from afar,” wrote Bradlee Jr.
He thought that being seen with them would spell the end of his career.
1939 was eight years before Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Williams Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey oversaw the last team to add a black player to his roster.
As many writers and family members of Ted Williams mention in an interview with PBS, “The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived,” Williams was also acutely aware of the damage Mexicans faced in Southern California as a child.
The “impersonating” problem
In response, he posed as white, even though he was not the first Latino or even the first Mexican to compete in the big league. That honor went to Mel Almada, who made his debut for Williams’ Red Sox in 1933, six years before “The Kid” began his own career.
Williams’ passing has been a point of contention for many as he is considered one of the best Latinos to ever grace a baseball field. The Hispanic Heritage Hall of Fame inducted him as part of their class of 2002, but Major League Baseball dropped him off their own list of 60 “Latino Legends” in 2005.
Illinois Sports History professor Adrian Burgos Jr. has also spoken out against “retroactively inserting Williams” into the history of Latinos in baseball because he did not identify himself as such.
In search of support, Burgos Jr. described the particular experiences of Latinos who competed before Robinson in MLB, which Williams avoided with his passing.
“These Latinos got in, for the most part, not because they were white but because they were definitely not black,” he wrote for Sporting News.
“These Latinos got in, for the most part, not because they were white but because they were definitely not black,” he wrote for Sporting News.
He singled out players like Cuban-born Miguel Ángel González, whose name was not only anglicized as “Mike,” but his accent also became an object of ridicule.
Mention should also be made of the experiences of Latinos in the agricultural system applied by the Washington senators in the south of the country during the 1930s and 1940s.
“Their encounters in Jim Crow cities and around the Major League circuit taught them that while they weren’t black, they certainly didn’t see them as their ‘Caucasian’ or white teammates,” Burgos Jr. wrote.
Support for black prayers
The only thing that Williams gives credit to is having publicly supported the induction of black players into the MLB Hall of Fame during his 1966 Hall of Fame speech.
“I hope that one day, the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson can … be added to the symbol of the great Negro League players who are not here just because they weren’t given a chance,” Williams told the crowd on the 25th. July 1966.
Five years later, Paige joined Williams in the Hall as the first player in the Negro League.
While “The Kid” cannot be given full credit for the fact that MLB finally inducted black players into its Hall, his speech was the trigger for the discussion. In the same way, Williams’ biographers have started the debate over his own secret Latino identity.
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