JOSHUA, SONE OF NONE :

Dispute arises over body of Ted Williams : Estranged daughter says son wants to freeze Hall of Fame father for cloning (NBCSPORTS.COM NEWS SERVICES, July 6, 2002)

A day after the death of baseball great Ted Williams, a dispute has already arisen over what to do with his body, as Williams' estranged daughter says her half-brother plans to freeze the Hall of Famer's body - possibly in hopes of selling his DNA in the future for cloning purposes.

"My father's body was put on a plane yesterday with people from Alcor," Ferrell said, referring to Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a provider of cryonics services.

This is the primrose path down which fans of biotechnology are leading us--with visions of immortality and duplicability dancing in our heads. But John Henry Williams might want to watch The Boys from Brazil before he clones his dad. Those old enough to remember the film and Ira Levin's novel will recall that it was not sufficient merely to clone Hitler; it was also necessary to have the resulting boys raised in an environment as similar as possible to that which produced the Fuhrer.

As best we can determine, biology is not destiny--men are still a product of their own will and of their upbringing. In Ted Williams's case, he was driven to excel, to be the "best hitter that ever was" and his drive led him to the playgrounds of his childhood home in San Diego, where he hit and hit and hit some more. Crank out a billion clones of Ted Williams and unless you raise the boy in San Pedro de Macoris, or some other setting where baseball excellence is the be all and end all of existence, you aren't likely to end up with any more than an eerily hollow version of the man, a seeming Ted Williams but one who isn't a terribly good hitter. And that would be an abomination.

MORE :
*Our Greatest Hitter Ever (George F. Will, July 7, 2002, Washington Post)

Late in life Williams said that often he fell asleep hearing in his head three songs -- "The Star-Spangled Banner," "The Marines' Hymn" and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." An American life.

The most amazing statistic from his amazing career is that he hit for a higher average than Joe DiMaggio during Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak.

*'Can you smell the bat burning?' (Peter Gammons, 7/05/02, ESPN.com)

When I was driving Ted and Wade Boggs to Clearwater for a dinner of hitting talk with Don Mattingly in spring training of 1986, Ted asked Boggs, "Have you ever smelled the bat burning?"

"What are you talking about?" Boggs replied.

Ted didn't reply.

At dinner, Ted repeated the question to Mattingly.

"People think I'm crazy, but yes," replied Mattingly. "It takes a perfect rising, four-seam fastball, a perfect swing, a foul straight back ... and you can smell the burn of the seams and the bat."

"Only the guys who whip that lumber have smelled it," said Ted.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 7, 2002 6:23 AM