games in four decades. Player profile Playing style Williams was an obsessive student of hitting. He famously used a lighter bat than most sluggers, because it generated a faster swing. In 1970, he wrote a book on the subject, The Science of Hitting (revised 1986), which is still read by many baseball players. The book describes his theory of swinging only at pitches that came into ideal areas of his strike zone, a strategy Williams credited with his success as a hitter. Pitchers apparently feared Williams; his bases-on-balls-to-plate-appearances ratio (.2065) is still the highest of any player in the Hall of Fame. Williams nearly always took the first pitch. He helped pass his expertise of playing left-field in front of the Green Monster to his successor on the Red Sox, Carl Yastrzemski. Relationship with Boston media and fans Williams was on uncomfortable terms with the Boston newspapers for nearly twenty years, as he felt they liked to discuss his personal life as much as his baseball performance. He maintained a career-long feud with Sport due to a 1948 feature article in which the reporter included a quote from Williams's mother. Insecure about his upbringing, and stubborn because of immense confidence in his own talent, Williams made up his mind that the "knights of the keyboard", as he derisively labeled the press, were against him. After having hit for the league's Triple Crown in 1947, Williams narrowly lost the MVP award in a vote where one Midwestern newspaper writer left Williams entirely off his ten-player ballot. During his career, some sportswriters also criticized aspects of Williams's baseball performance, including what they viewed as his lackadaisical fielding and lack of clutch hitting. Williams pushed back, saying: "They're always saying that I don't hit in the clutches. Well, there are a lot [of games] when I do." He also asserted that it made no sense crashing into an outfield wall to try to make a difficult catch because of the risk of injury or being out of position to make the play after missing the ball. Williams treated most of the press accordingly, as he described in his 1969 memoir My Turn at Bat. Williams also had an uneasy relationship with the Boston fans, though he could be very cordial one-to-one. He felt at times a good deal of gratitude for their passion and their knowledge of the game. On the other hand,