KEN WILLIAMS

By Robert Nishihara

Stats from www.baseball-reference.com

Grants Pass is the kind of small town you pass through without a second thought on the way to bigger, more recognizable places.  This sleepy logging town in Southern Oregon exists quietly, unknown to most but comforting and special to a select few.

I suppose in that way it is, indeed, fitting that Ken Williams was born in Grants Pass and, after his major league baseball career was over, that he returned there to spend the rest of his days.  Kenneth Roy Williams, the man with the generic name, born in a no-name town in the Northwest, seemed destined to fade into public oblivion despite the fact that he may be one of the greatest hitters no one has ever heard of.

That he played long before television and even before radio broadcasts of games were made popular likely has something to do with this lack of notoriety.  That he played for a long-time doormat franchise, the St. Louis Browns, likely has even more to do with it.  But whatever the reason, Ken Williams deserved better, and his accomplishments on the field bear that fact out.

Unfortunately, Williams' baseball legacy is now largely reduced to the pages of historical baseball data and the stacks of yellowed, long-ago box scores compiled by those who originally bore witness to his baseball-playing prowess.  However, in that jumble of numbers, a picture of Ken Williams, the slugging outfielder for the hapless St. Louis Browns, does emerge.  And it is a picture of a pretty damn good baseball player.

Williams was a late bloomer of sorts.  Certainly by baseball standards, his debut in 1915 with Cincinnati at the age of 25 was on the tardy side.  And it wasn't until 1920 (at the ripe old baseball age of 30) that Williams finally got a chance to play full-time.  By 1920, Williams was in his third season with the St. Louis Browns, and the Browns hadn't finished higher than 5th place since 1908.  In fact, the Browns had suffered through three consecutive 100-loss seasons during that stretch.

However, in 1915, then-manager Branch Rickey started to assemble a core of formidable players.  College star George Sisler began his Hall-of-Fame career that season, and he was joined by hard-hitting (but strangely nicknamed) "Baby Doll" Jacobson.  Though Rickey was gone from the club by the time Williams made his debut with the team in 1918, his presence, along with Sisler and Jacobson, set the table for one of the greatest seasons in franchise history.

In 1920, Williams hit a respectable .307 with 10 homers.  Jacobson and Sisler powered the team by driving in 122 runs apiece, with Sisler racking up a then-league record 257 hits and a remarkable .407 average.  The Browns rose to fourth place, their highest finish in 13 years.  In 1921, Williams found his groove and lead the team in homers (24) and RBI (117) as the team finished third.

And in 1922, the kid from Grants Pass, Oregon (if you can, in fact, call a 32-year-old man a "kid") lead his team to second place, fighting the newly powerful New York Yankees neck-and-neck to the wire.  The Browns would wind up a single game out of the money.  However, Williams had a spectacular season.  He won the AL home run title with 39 (though, in fairness the Bambino was limited to 110 games and finished the year only 4 homers behind Williams), the AL RBI title with 155, and managed to steal 37 bases to go along with a .332 batting average.  And with that impressive display of power and speed, Ken Williams became the first man in major league baseball history to hit 30 homers and steal 30 bases in the same season.  In fact, Williams would remain the only member of the newly established "30-30" club for 34 seasons until Willie Mays joined him in 1956.

And what recognition did Ken Williams receive for his unprecedented "30-30" performance and near triple-crown numbers?  Not only was Williams passed up for MVP honors (teammate George Sisler won the award with a spectacular season of his own - hitting .420 with 42 doubles 105 RBI, and 57 steals), but Williams did not even finish in the top 25 in the voting results!  It was a level of invisibility of which even Claude Rains would be jealous.

And so it was for Williams.  His baseball life was perpetually spent in the shadows.  If it wasn't Sisler's shadow that Williams had difficulty escaping, then it was surely the one cast by a former pitcher who started to hit so many home runs that his team eventually built a "house" for him and his homers.

In 1923, Williams answered his "career year" with another solid set numbers, hitting .357 with 29 homers and a .623 slugging percentage.  But the Browns started losing ground, falling back to 5th place, 24 games behind Babe Ruth and the front-running Yankees.

The small window of opportunity for Williams, Jacobson, and Sisler to power St. Louis' "other team" past the mighty New Yorkers seemed to be shutting.  However, in 1925, the Browns were offered one more opportunity to open that window, as Babe Ruth missed nearly the whole season with a variety of serious ailments.  Again, the three teammates lead the charge with each hitting better than .330.  Williams paced the club in homers with 25 and tied for the team lead (with Sisler) in RBI with 105.  But they finished short, in third place - 15 games behind the resurgent Washington Senators.

That last gasp seemed to take the wind out of the trio's collective sails, and the Browns sank to the 7th in 1926.  After the following season, 38-year old Ken Williams was sold to the Boston Red Sox despite the fact that, in 1927, he'd hit .322 and slugged .525 for the Browns.  No gold watch for one of the franchise's more gifted players, just a light pat on the back and a rather firm shove out the door.

In his final season, 1929, Williams still hit .345 and slugged .540 in part-time duty for a Red Sox team that finished 8th, 38 games below .500.

So, the man who spent much of his baseball life in the shadows was free to simply walk away from the sport into the rather larger shadow of an anonymous private existence.  And he returned to Grants Pass, his birthplace, with a lifetime batting average of .319, a career slugging mark of .530, over 1,500 hits, and 196 major league homers.

And like his hometown, Ken Williams is sadly passed over on the pages of history by people on their way to supposedly bigger and better places.  But it shouldn't be that way, especially for the man who was the first to stake his flag on the coveted spot marking the power-and-speed premium for all the players who would follow him.

Ken Williams, charter member of the 30-30 club.  Now, that's something worth taking out of the shadows and having a good look at.