Raised on Ted Williams
An Origin Story
Before baseball became ritual, refuge, or religion, it was an education.
And my first teacher was my father.
Billy Harrington: the man, the myth, the legend.
A tall, lanky man whose cantankerous nature made Archie Bunker look like Mister Rogers, my father’s political leanings were somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. He was not known for being a proponent of women. He came of age in a world where men explained things and women listened, where expectations were narrow, and tradition ruled.
But there was one thing he would not permit.
He was not going to let his firstborn daughter grow up without a baseball education.
My baseball education was the exception that proved the rule — and everyone in the room knew it. Especially me.
So one day — I was ten — he sat me down and handed me a book.
He handed that book to me with the kind of solemnity reserved for passing along something powerful — the sort of moment that feels less like a favor and more like a charge, as if the object itself carried consequence.
My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life by Ted Williams, as told to John Underwood.
This was not a casual offering.
This was the curriculum.
The book itself already had a story. My mother had stood in line for three hours to have Ted Williams sign it, a gift for my father that mattered enough to wait for. By the time it reached me, it was well-worn and well-loved — dog-eared pages, cracked spine, the unmistakable look of something that had been read, and reread, and then read again.
My father had done his homework.
Now it was my turn.
He told me, very plainly, that if I wanted to understand baseball, I had to start with the greatest hitter who ever lived.
Read it, he said.
Pay attention.
Be prepared for a quiz.
He was not kidding.
And when that was done, he handed me The Science of Hitting — also by Ted Williams.
This was not lighter reading, nor was it memoir.
This was mechanics.
Angles.
Vision.
Discipline.
Obsession.
The point where baseball stopped being a game and became a way of thinking.
And that’s when I realized something:
I was reading Ted Williams the way other ten-year-olds read Judy Blume.
Not for escape.
For instruction.
For answers.
Ted Williams was more than a ballplayer in those pages — he was a philosopher. He talked about preparation and precision. About seeing the ball longer than anyone else. About refusing to leave outcomes to chance.
This wasn’t about batting averages.
This was about thinking.
And somewhere between swing mechanics and relentless focus, baseball became my first intellectual love.
It taught me how to pay attention. How to respect craft. How to believe that mastery was something you earned, not something you stumbled into.
My father watched all of this quietly.
He didn’t soften. He didn’t praise. He didn’t explain what it meant that he’d handed this education to his daughter instead of his son.
He expected me to rise to it.
And I did.
We watched baseball together the same way we did most things — in silence.
Our television was small and black-and-white, the picture fuzzy around the edges, the sound never quite right. It didn’t matter. We sat close, riveted, as if color or commentary might only get in the way.
We didn’t talk.
The only sounds in the room were the game itself — the crack of the bat, the rise and fall of the crowd — and the quiet rituals that belonged to my father.
The sharp pssst of a Schlitz can opening.
The soft flick of a lighter.
The inhale.
The exhale.
On that tiny screen, Carlton Fisk crouched behind the plate like a coiled spring.
Carl Yastrzemski moved through the outfield with the calm certainty of someone who belonged exactly where he was. Jim Rice stepped into the batter’s box carrying a kind of contained violence that made the room feel smaller.
Wisps of cigarette smoke drifted through the beams of sunlight that slanted across the room on late Saturday summer afternoons, catching the dust in the air and turning it into something almost holy.
This was how we shared things.
No explanations.
No commentary.
Just attention.
Baseball didn’t need to be discussed.
It needed to be watched.
Charlie entered this story sideways.
Not into the living room.
Into the faith.
My brother was a born antagonist — a role he took to early and refined with commitment. And for reasons none of us have ever fully understood, he announced one night at the dinner table that he was going to become a Yankees fan.
He was eight.
I was eleven.
The room went still.
My father slammed his hand down on the table.
“What did you say?”
Charlie, undeterred and possibly delighted, repeated it.
“I’m going to be a Yankees fan.”
What followed was an eruption.
My father unleashed a stream of curse words none of us had ever heard before — or since — a linguistically ambitious tirade fueled by betrayal, disbelief, and something bordering on personal injury.
And then he landed it.
“You could be a Republican,” he said, “but a YANKEES fan? You are out of the will!”
Never mind that the only thing we stood to inherit from this man was secondhand smoke.
He was mad as hell.
And what mattered more than the threat — more than the volume, more than the language — was this:
He never forgot it.
About five years later, my father — a man no one would have ever mistaken for a picture of health — was on his last legs.
He preferred a steady diet of beer and cigarettes to anything resembling actual sustenance, and it was finally catching up with him. We knew his days were numbered, though we didn’t really talk about it. In true Gen X style, we just kept showing up and carrying on.
But one day, Daddy pulled me aside.
No ceremony.
No announcement.
He handed me the Ted Williams autobiography.
And then he said this:
“Jude, you were always faithful to the Sox — unlike that no-good traitor of a brother of yours. So you deserve this book. I want you to keep it.”
Then he leaned in.
“But you have to promise me you’ll never let your brother near it.”
He paused.
“Because if you do,” he said, fixing me with a look that would’ve made a Mafia boss proud, “I will know.”
I nodded.
Because this wasn’t a joke.
This was a final instruction.
A benediction.
A warning.
A line of succession.
Charlie might have chosen the Yankees.
But I had chosen correctly.
And in my father’s economy, that mattered.
I have lived in no fewer than twenty apartments and homes since that day in 1986.
The book has moved with me every time.
Boxes have been lost.
Furniture replaced.
Lives upended.
But my brother has never been near that Ted Williams autobiography.
Not once.
I have even given my children explicit instructions: if I predecease him, they are to carry on the tradition.
Some legacies are sentimental.
This one is sacred.
Billy Harrington once impersonated God on talk radio in defense of the Red Sox.
That story — along with many others I probably shouldn’t admit to in writing — lives in my memoir, Fuckery: The Life and Times of A Legend (In Her Own Mind).
You can get an autographed copy here:
www.judi411.com/books
Frickin' Charlie! Ha ha!!