The 14-Year-Old Who Fixed Ted Williams's Bats

Ted Williams could feel half an ounce. J.A. Hillerich Jr. of Hillerich & Bradsby, the company that made Louisville Slugger bats, once laid six bats on a motel bed, five of them identical in weight and one a half-ounce heavier. He asked Williams to close his eyes and find the heavy one. Williams picked it out, Hillerich shuffled the bats, and Williams picked it out again.

He demanded handle specifications precise to five-thousandths of an inch. When a shipment from the Louisville Slugger factory arrived with handles that felt wrong, Williams sent the bats back with a note. When the factory measured them, the handles were five-thousandths of an inch thinner than what he had ordered.

He cleaned his bats with alcohol every night because they picked up condensation and dirt lying on the ground, and he knew that an untended bat could gain an ounce or more in a few hours. He never let them touch the ground in the dugout, stored them upright, and treated them the way a watchmaker treats the instruments on his bench.

And the reason he did all of this, the reason he understood what moisture did to wood and why the weight of a bat could change between afternoon and evening, was because a 14-year-old boy told him.

In 1948, David Pressman was a kid who loved baseball and had a scientific bent. One night he left his wooden bat outside. In the morning it felt heavier and had less pop. Instead of shrugging it off, Pressman took the bat to his local post office, borrowed their scale, and confirmed his hunch. The bat had gained about two ounces from overnight moisture.

Pressman dried the bat over coal embers, and the weight returned to normal. He had stumbled onto something real, and he understood why it worked. Wood is porous, absorbing water from the air, from grass, from dew, and the added weight slows the swing enough to reduce force at contact. Pressman described the principle as a problem of restitution, the compression and expansion of bat and ball at the moment of impact. Two extra ounces changed the equation.

He wrote a letter on his father's stationery to the biggest baseball star in the world. Williams read it, called the Pressman household, and learned David was at school. He called back later, spoke to the boy, and invited him to Fenway Park.

The two developed a system. Williams put his bats in the clubhouse clothes dryer. Every 15 minutes, he pulled them out and weighed them on a scale Pressman had arranged to be brought from the post office. When a bat stopped losing weight, it was dry. Williams did this for the rest of his career.

The experiments confirmed what Pressman had found at home. After a single game, an individual bat could absorb two to three ounces of moisture. For a hitter who could detect half an ounce by feel, that was enormous. It was the difference between the bat he ordered and a bat he would have sent back to the factory.

Williams also asked Pressman to explain the theory to Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio listened, looked unconvinced, and walked away.

Williams and Pressman met several times to discuss hitting theory. Williams kept the bat-drying method secret. He did not discuss it publicly during his playing career, and he insisted Pressman do the same. Whatever edge it gave him, he intended to keep.

In 1957, at the age of 38, Williams hit .388. He had experimented that season with a slightly heavier bat, moving from his standard 32.5 ounces to 34.5 ounces, confident that he could maintain his swing speed with a precisely controlled piece of lumber. He led the American League in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage that year. At 39 the following season, he led the league in batting average and on-base percentage again.

Whether Pressman's moisture insight was the reason Williams sustained his performance into his late thirties is impossible to isolate. Williams was already the most disciplined hitter in baseball before Pressman wrote his letter. But the letter confirmed something Williams already suspected, and it gave him a method for acting on it. From 1948 onward, no bat Williams swung carried invisible weight.

Pressman graduated from Harvard and became a cardiologist. He and Williams remained friends for the rest of Williams's life. Their correspondence, spanning from 1948 to 1969, is archived in an academic collection. The friendship lasted longer than most baseball careers.

The obsession Williams brought to bat weight did not die with him. Ichiro Suzuki carried his bats in a custom humidor case with a chemical rod inside to regulate moisture. He had a larger case locked in the Mariners' clubhouse and a smaller one for road trips. After every at-bat, he wiped the dirt and grass stains off the barrel before returning the bat to the case. Teammates told stories of Ichiro swinging a bat alone in the dark from 1 to 4 in the morning. Rod Carew stored his bats in a box full of sawdust in the warmest room of his house.

All of them were chasing the same insight. A bat is a living variable, gaining weight overnight, between innings, between at-bats, and a hitter who understood this in 1948 had an edge that almost nobody else recognized.

A 14-year-old figured it out with a post office scale and a pile of coal embers. The greatest hitter who ever lived picked up the phone and listened. That second part is the stranger of the two.