I've long thought that Ted Williams was the greatest hitter in baseball history. If you compute, even conservatively, the stats he might have compiled during the five years he missed for military service, the results are phenomenal.

Having said that, he wasn't the greatest baseball player in history. During his lifetime, reporters said that he wasn't a team player, that he didn't care if the Red Sox won or lost as long as he got his stats. I think there is some truth to that.

As a person, he was profane, selfish, inconsiderate and a profligate. He was an awful husband to his three wives and an awful father to his three kids. He got away with stuff that others couldn't because he was "Ted Williams, the baseball star."

He could be kind to the common man, often striking up friendships with regular guys he just happened upon, and he usually took time to be nice to other people's kids.

There's a short paragraph in the book in which one of his nurses states that she led him to the Lord not long before his death.

William's baseball career only took up the first half of the book. After that it was all about fishing and his friendships and his dysfunctional family. This part dragged on and on and on and pretty much ruined the book for me.