Billy Williams Is Getting His Just Reward

One sunny Sunday in 1959, Frank Williams dialed the telephone operator in Whistler, Ala.--whom he probably knew on a first-name basis--and made a long-distance call to his baby brother, Billy.

Billy was on the road, playing baseball for a minor league club based in San Antonio, and, as usual, he was whaling the tar out of the ball just about every time he swung at it.

But Billy was homesick for sweet home Alabama, just as his brother figured.

“He told me how great the weather was down there, how good the fishing and swimming were,” Billy remembered. “I told him I’d be home the next day.”

Only trouble was, San Antonio’s season wasn’t over yet.

Billy belonged in the lineup the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. He was hitting .320. He was Manager Grady Hatton’s best stick.

But it didn’t matter any more. He missed the green, green grass of home. He missed Whistler.

So, when the Cub farm club got back to Texas from a trip, Billy Williams went up to a teammate, J.C. Hartman, and asked him for a ride to the train depot. Hartman asked, “Are you kidding?” Williams assured him he was not. But Hartman refused.

“I’ll take a cab, then,” Williams told him.

Hartman could see he was serious. So, he drove his buddy to the depot.

“He knew I’d made up my mind,” Williams said.

Billy Williams quit baseball.

Twenty-eight years later, he has left the big city again to travel to Cooperstown, N.Y., a town not much larger than Whistler. Small-town life still appeals to Billy Leo Williams--particularly this small town. He is being inducted today into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Williams has been waiting and waiting for this. It is the reward he so justly deserves, the gold watch he merits for a job well done. The poor guy got robbed out of the thrill of playing in a World Series, and got jobbed when the Hall of Fame ballots were first counted after he became eligible, so this is the least we can do for him.

“Being selected to the Hall is the crowning accomplishment for any professional ballplayer,” Williams said. “It’s like an Oscar to an actor, a Pulitzer Prize to a writer, a Nobel Prize to a scientist,” Williams said.

Now a batting coach for the Cubs--and who possibly could be better qualified?-- Williams had to miss this weekend’s series against the Dodgers because, at long last, he was going where he belonged. Williams was always ready for Cooperstown. Cooperstown just wasn’t ready for him.

There was a time, for instance, when Williams broke Stan Musial’s record of 895 consecutive games, making him the National League’s answer to Lou Gehrig. After Williams went on to play in his 1,000th straight game, the Hall of Fame confiscated the scorecard. It was to be placed in the shrine.

Williams was pleased. Because after he retired in 1976, it occurred to him that, “There was nothing else in there about me. That was it.”

Understandably, Billy was excited about seeing the scorecard in its place of honor when he paid his first visit to Cooperstown as a tourist. Much to his amazement, it wasn’t there. He looked everywhere and couldn’t find it.

After a while, he got tired of trying to locate the scorecard, so he contacted someone in authority and asked where it was kept. That’s when he got the news that he was no longer in the Hall, at all.

“They told me they lost it,” he said.

At this point, he began to wonder, good-naturedly, if there might be some conspiracy to keep him out. When he first became eligible in 1982, he fell short in the voting, but Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson were on the ballot that year, so Williams shrugged it off. Stiff competition.

Any guy with 426 home runs, 1,476 runs batted in, , six All-Star appearances, an ironman streak of 1,117 games and a career average of .290 cannot be ignored for too long, Williams assumed, so he sat back and waited. And waited. In 1985, he missed by 45 votes. Nobody else with 400 homers had ever been left out. He began to wonder: “Why me?”

“Every year,” said Shirley Williams, his wife, “the hurt was greater.”

Especially in 1986. Williams wanted to be elected with his old Alabama pal, Willie McCovey. That would have been swell. McCovey grew up in Mobile, barely five miles from Whistler. Of course, Aaron was from Mobile, too, but if Williams couldn’t go in with one ‘Bama bammer, he’d go in with another.

Except he wouldn’t. The ballots were counted, and he was four short.

Naturally, Williams was a little reluctant on Jan. 14 of this year when, once again, he was asked where he could be reached--you know, just in case. It had been kind of embarrassing the year before, when Billy and some of his off-season business associates waited in a Connecticut hotel lobby for the Call to the Hall. Instead, his wife in Chicago was phoned. Billy hadn’t made it.

This year, he waited in the privacy of his own home. Jack Brickhouse, the retired Cub broadcaster who is in a Cooperstown wing himself, said he would call for a Congressional investigation if Williams missed this time.

He didn’t. He was named on 86% of the ballots. “Gentlemen, we’ve made it,” Williams said at a press conference later. “I guess the smile on my face tells it all. ‘Wait till next year’ is now a phrase of the past.”

Billy Williams was one of the sweetest swingers ever to wear a little bear on his shirtsleeve. Ernie Banks is the Cub they remember, but Williams was a beauty. He may have been McCovey to Banks’ Mays, but never forget what high praise that is.

He was introduced to Chicago on Aug. 6, 1959, not long after rejoining the San Antonio team. Buck O’Neil, a Cub scout, had hustled over to Whistler to talk Billy out of quitting, taking time to listen to the homesick kid’s complaints. On the advice of his family, coaches, even his childhood sweetheart, whom he married, Williams went back.

By 1961, he was the National League’s Rookie of the Year. Nine years later, he played in his 1,117th straight game, the longest streak in the league’s 95-year history. That was the year, 1970, when all Williams did was get 42 home runs, 129 RBIs and 205 hits.

No wonder Ernie Banks later said: “I’m older than Billy, but he’s my idol.”

They still haven’t found that scorecard from his 1,000th straight game, but Billy Williams doesn’t mind as much as he once did. “They don’t lose plaques,” he said.

And now he has one.

The last time he visited Cooperstown, when he was looking around with envy, Williams got to thinking. “When you’re a kid, it all seems so distant, so far away,” he said, “There’s Babe Ruth, and there’s Jackie Robinson, and there’s Tris Speaker, and you say: ‘Who are these guys?’ Well, they’re Hall of Famers. And then one day, boom, you’re there. You’re in.”

That’s life in the big city.