In December 1937 the Padres sold him to the Boston Red Sox. "The Red Sox didn't mean a thing to me," Williams wrote in his autobiography. "A fifth-, sixth-place club, the fartherest [sic] from San Diego I could go." Yet Williams would become synonymous with Red Sox baseball.
When he first came to spring training with the Red Sox in 1938, he was 19 and extremely cocky. The legend is that someone told him "Wait'll you see Jimmie Foxx hit" and Williams replied "Wait till Foxx sees me hit." In his autobiography Williams debunked the myth: "I never said that, but I suppose it wouldn't have been unlike me."
For all his bombast, Williams was a driven, obsessed young man. "I thought the weight of the damn world was always on my neck, grinding on me," he recalled. "I wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived.... Certainly nobody ever worked harder at it. It was the center of my heart, hitting a baseball."
A Smashing Debut
In 1938, at the Red Sox's farm club in Minneapolis, Williams led the league in hitting but almost ended his career when he smashed his fist into a water cooler.
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