Carl Yastrzemski: Baseball's White Rabbit

Carl YastrzemskiBaseball's White Rabbit Zach Sanzone (bio) Watching Carl Yastrzemski walk past me was sobering. Anyone who has seen the massive statue of him outside the right field entrance at Fenway Park would think he is much bigger than he really is. Film footage of his playing days show off massive arms and hands swinging a heavy Louisville Slugger like it was a toothpick. While not a small man, his 5'11" and 175 pound frame paled in comparison to his predecessor Ted Williams, who stood at 6'3" and 205 pounds. He always looked majestic from the stands during pregame ceremonies when he stood on the field wearing one of his own replica jerseys while waving at the crowd. But when I saw the man everyone knows as "Yaz" walk through the front doors of the Boston Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts for an autograph show in November of 2016, I saw only a shadow of the 1967 Triple Crown winner. He walked with a slight hunch. His jaw hung open as his eyes fixated on the floor as if to avoid the hundreds of onlookers assembled in the lobby. He looked like he wanted to go home. Carl Yastrzemski found himself under tremendous pressure when he replaced arguably the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, Ted Williams, on the Boston Red Sox roster in 1961. Historians and writers alike have referenced this transition hundreds of times, but few, if any, have focused exclusively on the personal dynamics between the two through this passing of the position. Baseball fans had seen these transitions before, most notably when Mickey Mantle took Joe DiMaggio's place following the Yankee Clipper's retirement in 1951. What made this time more unique was that Yastrzemski debuted with a mediocre team. The 1961 Red Sox were nothing like the New York Yankees, who by then had won dozens of World Series Championships. Mantle had his own fair share of sins, but he could hide his flaws behind the dozens of World Series trophies the Yankees had collected since the Red Sox relinquished Babe Ruth, along with their dominance, to the Bronx Bombers. [End Page 68] Yastrzemski not only took the baton from the last man to hit .400, but did so in front of an impatient Fenway crowd that had little tolerance for inexperience. Despite this pressure, Yaz would go on to carry the Red Sox to two World Series births while collecting 3,419 hits, 452 home runs, seven Gold Gloves, and a Triple Crown during a twenty-three-year career. Like Williams before him, Yastrzemski played on a team that finished at the bottom of the standings more than it did at the top. Unlike Williams though, Yastrzemski had more to prove than most rookies did. When he came to the end of a long and distinguished career that few have since matched, Yastrzemski wanted nothing more than to be left alone. He did not want attention. He did not want fame. He had proven himself as Williams' worthy successor and he wanted to be left alone. My experience with the Carl Yastrzemski I met that day embodied a stanza from New England poet Robert Lowell's famous poem, "For the Union Dead": "He has an angry wrenlike vigilance/a greyhound's gentle tautness/he seems to wince at pleasure/and suffocate for privacy."1 Yastrzemski has kept a low profile since retiring in 1983, marking the end to a link that began in 1939 when Ted Williams started his rookie year as a confident twenty-year-old from southern California. After Williams retired in 1960, management selected Carl Yastrzemski as his replacement, no easy task for anyone, let alone a rookie. In his autobiography Yaz: Baseball, The Wall, and Me, Yastrzemski reflected on the pressure of replacing Williams after making his debut, "The next day's Globe ran a box headline YAZ VS. TED. It described what Williams did in his first game twenty-two years before … Yaz vs. Ted? Was I going to have to live with this?"2 Yes, he would. And how did Teddy Ballgame feel about this quiet young rookie taking his place? "He knew...

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