Tough Spring for Sox Legend

Johnny Pesky’s smile always lit up spring training. Well into his 80s, he still hit grounders to infielders. He shouted encouragement to young players and talked baseball with anyone who would listen.

Now, he says, he cries a lot.

The Boston Red Sox began spring training without Ted Williams’ old teammate because of someone he loves even more than the game. His 82-year-old wife, Ruthie, had a heart attack last month and spent two weeks in the hospital before returning home.

“If something ever happened to her, it would destroy me,” Pesky said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press this week.

So he stayed back in the cold and snow outside his front door in Swampscott, Mass., with part of his broken heart beating under the warmth and sun of Fort Myers.

“It gave me an empty feeling not to be there,” Pesky said Tuesday. “But my wife and I, we’ve been married 60 years and we always had a great relationship. I know when I was sick she was here for me, so now she’s sick and I’m here for her.”

He’s 85 now, old enough to be the great-grandfather of many of the players in camp. But he’s still young enough to put his arm around a 10-year-old fan wearing a Red Sox cap and eagerly pose for a picture.

Last October, tears of joy glistened in his eyes when Boston won its first World Series championship since 1918, the year before he was born. A few months later, his wife woke up at about 2 a.m. with chest pains. The tears came back.

“It tests your patience,” he said. “I sit here thinking about things and start crying.”

When the Red Sox held their first official spring training workout on Feb. 18, the annual sight of Pesky sitting in a folding chair outside the clubhouse with his fungo bat between his legs and signing autographs was just a memory.

Fans missed him. So did the players.

“I noticed it immediately. Where’s Pesky?” Red Sox captain Jason Varitek said. “He’s an inspiration. It’s just joy. It’s joy to see him. It’s a joy to talk to him. He’s just a joy to be around.”

On Monday, he will be.

His wife is well enough for him to go to spring training, and encouraged him to return to his beloved Red Sox even though she can’t go as she usually does. Nurses stay with her around the clock, and their adopted son David “has been great,” Pesky said.

“She had her breakfast this morning,” he said Thursday in another telephone interview. “Everything’s under control, but she’s weak.”

A moment later, he asked, “Are they playing today?”

They were -- a 2-1 Red Sox loss to the Dodgers.

Pesky knows the trip will be good for him. He needs a break and will be with people who have missed him and are ready to cheer him up -- and be cheered up.

“He draws attention without saying a word,” said reliever Alan Embree, a fellow Oregonian. “You want to go up and say to him, ‘How you doing Johnny,’ because you know something good is generally going to come out. Then you also want to be there for him when he is going through a time like this.”

A humble man, Pesky is grateful that John Henry’s ownership group kept him on when it took over in 2002. He pokes fun at himself -- often at his large nose -- and takes others’ jabs well.

“The team will want to fine him for reporting late,” Red Sox vice president Mike Port joked. “I’m sure it will be quickly forgiven.”

Pesky’s official title is special assignment instructor. He is in his 36th straight year with the Red Sox and his 53rd in all with the team as player, manager, coach, broadcaster, advertising salesman and icon.

As a rookie in 1942, he hit leadoff in front of Dom DiMaggio and Williams. He spent the next three years in the service, even going to Pearl Harbor, and resumed his baseball career in 1946. That was the season he had career highs of a .335 batting average and 208 hits.

He left the Red Sox early in the 1952 season for Detroit and ended his career in 1954 with Washington. He has been with Boston since joining the broadcast team in 1969.

“I’ve had an interesting life,” he said. “I have no complaints.”

It’s rare that Pesky complains about anything. He’s more likely to pump up a young player worrying about a bad day on the field. There’s always tomorrow.

“He’ll say, ‘You’ll be OK, kid.’ It means a lot,” Port said.

Kevin Youkilis was a 22-year-old minor league third baseman when he first met Pesky in 2001.

“He’d always say, ‘Come on, get a hit, here,’ little things like that,” Youkilis said. “He’s an ambassador of the game. He still loves it. How many guys have a foul pole named after them?”

That would be Pesky’s Pole, the nickname for the right-field foul pole at Fenway Park. It got that name from Boston pitcher Mel Parnell after Pesky hit a ball just by it, one of his six homers at Fenway.

He’s also a living link with Red Sox tradition -- a reminder of all the great players who helped build it and an example to current Boston players who enjoy his stories.

“I love hearing about Joe DiMaggio taking him out at second base,” first baseman Kevin Millar said. “He reminds me of my grandfather. I know I wish I could be like him.”

Pesky did make it to the White House on March 2 when President Bush honored the Red Sox as champions. The formal photo hanging in the Red Sox clubhouse shows Bush and Red Sox players wearing dark suits. At the right end of the first row, next to Varitek, a short man with carefully combed gray hair stands with his hands jammed in the pockets of his beige trenchcoat.

For one day, Pesky was back with his team.

“He said, ‘Hey, I’m hoping to be down there soon,’ and he seemed down,” Embree said. “Every time I’d seen him he’s been upbeat about the game. It makes him feel young to be out here with us and we make him feel like one of the guys.”

On Monday, Pesky will be back with those guys.

He’ll shake hands and maybe even get another bear hug from Boston’s best hitter, who lifted him off the ground several springs ago -- the elderly Polish infielder born John M. Paveskovich and the young Dominican slugger named Manuel Aristides Ramirez, both of them Red Sox, both of them laughing.

Back home, Ruthie Pesky will be in good hands, surrounded by nurses, friends, relatives and the loving thoughts of the man she met in 1944 when both were based at the Atlanta Naval Air Station.

He was an assistant operations officer. She was an aviation machinist’s mate, assigned to start engines for the pilots.

“I was having breakfast with a major friend of mine and he said, ‘Why don’t you take a walk around the tarmac?”’ Pesky said. “I did, and I saw Ruthie, and one thing led to another.

“The next day the major asked, ‘You going to see that little blonde again?’ And I said, ‘Oh, probably.”’

On Jan. 10, 1945, they were married. By March, he was in Pearl Harbor. They were apart for less than a year and have been inseparable since.

“She’s hanging in there. She’s a tough little gal,” Pesky said. “I want to keep her here as long as I can.”