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The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

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Fifty years ago today, September 28, 1960, Ted Williams played his last game of baseball. He wasn't the greatest baseball player ever. But he was really good at hitting a baseball.

When Ted Williams died, on July 5, 2002, at the age of 83, President George Bush eulogized him this way, "Ted gave baseball some of its best seasons … and he gave his own best seasons to his country."

Ted Williams certainly did give baseball some of its best seasons. In the nineteen seasons he played for the Boston Red Sox between 1939 and 1960 Williams hit 521 home runs. He got 2,654 hits and led the league in walks eight times.

Williams won the Most Valuable Player Award twice. He won the Triple Crown (for leading the league in average, home runs and runs batted in) twice. Only a dozen other players in the history of baseball have done that. Only one other, player, Rogers Hornsby, has done it twice.

That's big stuff, but mostly it's of interest only to baseball fans. So, look at those career stats again.

Nineteen seasons. 1939 to 1960. The math doesn't work. It doesn't work because for all of three seasons and the better part of two others, Ted Williams was off fighting America's wars.

He set rookie records in 1939 that still stand. 1941 was the year he was the last player to hit over .400. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Originally that wasn't going to interrupt things. Williams planned to keep playing during the war.

He originally had a 3A deferment because he was the sole support of his mother. In January, 1942 the draft board re-classified him 1A, eligible for the draft. Williams appealed the decision and won.

That set off a furor. It was not to be the last furor a Ted Williams decision created. People called him unpatriotic. Some called him a coward. One newspaper sent a private investigator to the Williams home in San Diego to see if he really was supporting his mother. Quaker Oats cancelled an endorsement contract.

Williams played baseball in 1942 and won his first Triple Crown. Then he decided that going into the service was the right thing to do. Once he reached that decision, he also decided to do it the right way.

Some major league ballplayers were playing in special exhibition leagues in the service. Williams joined the Marines. He became a Naval Aviator and flight instructor. And he never ate another bite of Quaker Oats.

When the war was over he went back to baseball and picked up where he had left off. He won his second Triple Crown in 1947. He was the American League's Most Valuable Player in 1946 and 1949.

He was in his baseball prime and his career was taking off. Then came the Korean War.

Williams put on his Marine uniform and went to Korea to fly jets in combat. He was the wingman for a Marine pilot named John Glenn. Later on, Glenn set airplane speed records, was the first American to orbit the earth, and a US Senator.

Williams never talked about Glenn. Most folks never heard about their connection until Glenn showed up to help Williams raise money for the Jimmy Fund, a Boston charity that helps young cancer victims.

In 1953, Williams flew a ground support mission over Kyomipo, near Pyongyang in Korea. His plane was hit by ground fire that cut the hydraulic lines, fouled up his landing gear, and set the plane ablaze. Williams brought the plane in for an emergency landing that resulted in a 2000 foot skid down the runway and left the plane a blackened wreck. It was a close call.

What happened next tells you a lot about Ted Williams. In his words: "They don't like to put pilots right back into the air after a close call like I had after bombing Kyomipo. They like to give you two or three days off, to settle down. But they were short of men, so I went up again the next day."

Wow. Super star baseball player and war hero. You begin to think this guy could do anything. Well, no. As a matter of fact, he was pretty bad at a lot of things. Start with relationships.

Williams was married and divorced three times. Even after his death, parts of his families are fighting about what to do with his remains. His feuds with Boston sportswriters and fans are legendary.

He made obscene gestures to the fans who booed him. Once he carefully spat, in three different directions, toward the stands. The sportswriters, in that cutesy style so many of them have, named the incident the "Great Expectorations."

Ted Williams kept getting into trouble and getting bad press because he insisted on doing things his way. He insisted on being himself and adhering to the values that he thought mattered. He was loud and profane and absolutely certain that his way was the right way.

But he was never jealous. He was too big-spirited and too self-confident for that. Williams' primary rival during his early career was the New York Yankee great, Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio even beat him out for the Most Valuable Player award in 1941, the year Williams hit .406. Williams' reaction: "If I had a vote," he said, "I would've voted for Joe, too."

He'd acknowledge DiMaggio as a better all around ballplayer, but not as a hitter. "In my heart," he said, "I always felt I was a better hitter than Joe."

If he wasn't good at relationships, or public relations, and if he wasn't the best player of his era, he was supremely good at one thing. For Ted Williams, that thing was mastering the very difficult art of hitting a baseball.

Williams has often been described as a great natural hitter, and to some extent he was. God gave him gifts for it, including legendary eyesight and wrists that can generate bat speed. But that wasn't enough for him. He wasn't content with being good, or even great. He wanted to be the best.

"A man has to have goals," he said. "That was mine: to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the best hitter who ever lived.'" So he worked at it with his analytical, perfectionist mind and a boiling, volcanic energy.

He was known to wake his roommates by practicing his swing in the middle of the night. He would not drive in the left lane on multi-lane roads at night, to prevent the lights from damaging his eyesight.

Ted Williams made a science of hitting. He wrote a book about it with that title. The same brain that could tease out a single boo from a cascade of cheers was put to work finding tiny flaws in his swing and technique.

He concentrated so much on hitting that other things suffered. When he was playing it was his fielding. Later when he was a manager it was the overall performance of his team.

Williams took the job of managing the dismally bad Washington Senators (who later became the Texas Rangers) from 1969 to 1972. He was very proud that his teams improved their hitting. The problem was they didn't seem to improve much of anything else, and Williams, frustrated, went on to other things.

After his retirement he founded the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame in Citrus Hills, Florida. He indulged himself in his other great love, fishing, giving it the same attention and energy he once gave to baseball and to hitting.

Then the energy ebbed. Strokes and heart problems took their toll. But the internal fire was still there. It was there when he visited his Museum. It was there when he visited the 1999 All Star game.

He had to use a golf cart to get out to the center of the playing field where he was surrounded by today's players. They wanted to extend the moment, to talk to him, to be near him. The game was delayed for several minutes. Then, leaning on Tony Gwynn, Williams threw the ceremonial first pitch to start the game.

He went out of baseball with style and with power on September 28, 1960 in Fenway Park in Boston. That day Ted Williams hit a home run in the last at-bat of his baseball career. He rounded the bases with his head down. After he went into the dugout the fans kept cheering. But he never came out again.

He probably wanted to go out of life the same way. Instead, he went quietly after a long slide into illness and infirmity.

But we can remember his life of energy and passion devoted to doing one single thing as well as it had ever been done. Williams took his God-given natural abilities and used them to their fullest. He knew what he thought was right and stuck to it, even in the face of consequences.

That's why I've got one thought, whether it's about Ted Williams leaving the game of baseball or leaving this life: "There goes Ted Williams, the best hitter who ever lived."

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.