Word: gaming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...chill, leaden afternoon nine years ago, Ted Williams came to bat for the last time in the final Boston Red Sox home game. As he had done so often in 19 storied seasons, Williams stroked a towering home run. Preferring to leave baseball as he had played it-with unsurpassed style-he retired on the spot...
...Whole New Ball Game. Actually, he never left. One of the game's greatest technicians, he relived baseball with all the ardor of a stuffed-chair general hashing over the old battles. Even on those long, languid afternoons of bonefishing off the Florida Keys, Williams would start lecturing on the finer points of hitting, and would get so excited that he would jump up and start rocking his hips-and the boat-as he leaned into an imaginary fastball...
...American League last year. So Williams told them to forget the past, which was easy, considering that the Senators have not won a pennant in 36 years. He urged them to take up the team's new battle cry: "It's a whole new ball game...
Well, sort of. What Williams' tutelage comes down to is a brushup on the basics, a touch of inspiration and lots of positive thinking. "Nobody knows that little game between the pitcher and the batter better than I do," he says. At practice sessions, he stations himself behind the batting cage, shouting for Catcher Paul Casanova to choke up on the bat, commanding Shortstop Eddie Brinkman to "swing at strikes, dammit, strikes. Wait for the good pitch. And listen, the base on balls is a hell of a play." For the pitchers, there are lessons on what makes...
...meet the ball." In the season's opener he did, getting two hits. "I think that's significant as hell," says Williams. "Why? Because Brinkman thinks it is, that's why." "No. 9 told me to get more hip in my swing," says Casanova, recalling the game in which he swiveled into a pitch and belted a home run. "I ran the bases, and each step I asked myself if this really was happening...