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Thanks for the post. I'm a Sox fan and can't get the game on TV down here in SC. Here is something I posted about Ted on another thread:

I had the opportunity to go to Ted William's Baseball Camp in Lakeville, MA during the magical summer of '67 (Impossible Dream Red Sox). I was there for three weeks, played baseball for 8 hours a day. Ted came for a visit during the end of my first week there. He would stand behind the backstop while we hit, a constant flow of comments, critcisms, and suggestions. I'm sure that he imagined himself being in our place and this was a carbon copy of the way he talked to himself while at bat.

The next day it rained all day. Here we were, a couple hundred baseball junkies aged 9-18 with nothing to do. We even tried playing catch indoors. After lunch, (Ted ate with us although he sat a table with the counselors/coaches) Ted started talking about hitting a baseball. He talked for almost three hours. Nobody moved, everyone (even the 8 year olds) sat in awe, listening intently. He talked with a passion, an excitement that you rarely see anymore. He would get up with a bat in hand, demonstrating the proper angle of a swing, explaining adjustments that you needed to make in an at bat, etc.

He did all this using the Socratic method (that Boswell referred to in his article), asking questions in that big voice of his and then excitedly barking out the answer. All the while a couple hundred kids that loved baseball sat under the tent on picnic tables in awe of a man bigger than life. Bless you Teddy Ballgame...

:) It was the Impossible Dream season of 1967 that made a Red Sox fan out of me in the first place. I lived on Long Island then (in Long Beach; we'd moved from the Bronx a few years earlier), and I could pick up Red Sox games on a UHF (remember UHF?!) transmission of a Boston station (I remember Mel Parnell, the former fine Red Sox pitcher, being one of the announcers) and, weak though it often was, I'd be watching the games and get hooked. Being a Met fan already, it was no great shake to take the Red Sox on, too, though it sure did cause me brain pains in 1986! I remember going out with saved allowance and buying a Red Sox cap to go with my Mets cap - I found out later this cap had the 1949 cap logo on it! (The red-on-white B in the 1949 cap was slightly wider in the letter line than the B in use since the mid-1950s and still on the cap today.) I wish to God I had saved those two caps, even though they wouldn't fit me today. I'm waiting until pay day to order a new 1949 replica Red Sox cap in my size, unfortunately, because I'm busted until then! But I remember watching both the pennant clincher game and the 1967 World Series.

Alas, as you might expect, I have known only too much heartache, endemic and unnecessary alike, at the hands of my Mets and my Red Sox. (I still say John McNamara was the real goat of the 1986 World Series, even if either team's win would have satisfied me.) But I did love it when I spotted Ted Williams at the Fenway games for the 1986 Series with Tom Yawkey's widow. To this day I believe that if more of his fellow owners had been like Tom Yawkey, baseball wouldn't be facing even a tenth of the labour and money troubles it faces today.

I also attended Ted Williams Baseball Camp in 1967. I was 11 years old at that time. My memories of the experience closely mirror yours; Ted making appearances, standing behind the batting cage, always wearing a white shirt (right?), having his meals with the coaches. These were among the best days of my life. My name is Neil Kozarsky. How old were you in '67? Did you know me? I played by day and was the bat boy for the big guys at night. That love for the game got me into the Hall of Fame.