One Piece of Ground

Ted Williams homered in his final at-bat, ran the bases with his head down, and went into the dugout without tipping his cap. Six months later a 21-year-old off a Long Island potato farm was standing in left field at Fenway Park, and the Red Sox had pointedly issued him uniform number 8.

Carl Yastrzemski hit .266 as a rookie in 1961 and heard about it from a crowd that had spent two decades watching the best hitter who ever lived work that exact patch of grass. He said later that the comparison almost broke him. At one point the club brought Williams in to settle him down. Williams told him never to let anybody monkey with his swing.

Six years after that, Yaz hit .326 with 44 home runs and 121 RBIs and won the Triple Crown. Nobody else would win one for 45 years. With the pennant hanging on every game, he batted .523 over Boston's final twelve, then went 7-for-8 in the last two against Minnesota with the season on the line. He got 19 of 20 first-place votes for MVP.

He stayed 23 years. All of them in Boston. 3,419 hits, 452 home runs, the first player in American League history to reach 3,000 hits and 400 homers.

Nobody replaces Ted Williams. That was never on the table. What Yastrzemski did instead was stand in that spot long enough, and play well enough for long enough, that Boston stopped measuring him against a ghost and started measuring everybody else against him. Fenway's left field went Williams, then Yaz, then Jim Rice. Three men, three plaques in Cooperstown, one piece of ground.