Christ, Ted only drove in as many as 159 runs in a 154 game season when he was young and playing most every game and had a good offense around him. What kind of shit head (who betrayed no particular knowledge of hitting in the course of his own career) would have the fucking nerve to criticize the philosophy of hitting of Ted Williams? I'm not saying that no one can ever criticize Ted. But bring something to the table not just a caricature of what you think Ted was doing. When he was a part of big offenses, he had huge rbi totals. He had guys like Joe Cronin, Bobby Doerr, Vern Stephens and Jackie Jensen batting behind him. He wasn't batting 8th and leaving it up to the pitcher.
The other thing is that dopes like Harold Reynolds probably want you to believe that every time Ted walked with men on base he was watching a pitch just an inch out of the strike zone that he could have swung at and mashed. But perfect pitcher's pitches like that are pretty rare. More likely, Vic Raschi threw a slider in the dirt or Billy Pierce bounced a curve off the plate or Herb Score threw a fastball neck high. And a fair number of any pitches juuuust off the plate that Ted saw would've been thrown further off the plate if pitchers thought that Ted would swing at them. There were two parties making choices there. Yes, pitchers do not have perfect control but come on. The Harold Reynolds thesis ignores the fact that pitchers likely knew they could try to dot the outside corner and hope for a call from the ump and if they just missed Ted wasn't going for it. Ted's walking wasn't entirely Ted's choice. A lot of those times the pitchers semi intentionally walked him to face Cronin or Doerr or Stephens or Jensen instead. If Ted had started going for some pitches juuuust off the plate, pitchers would have recognized that and their target would have gone from an inch off the black to four inches off. Would Harold still want him to expand the zone?