Ted Williams was born Theodore Samuel Williams (after former President Theodore Roosevelt and his father, Samuel Stuart Williams) in San Diego, California on 30 August 1918. At some later date he amended his birth certificate, removing his middle name, which he claimed originated from a maternal uncle (whose actual name was Daniel Venzor), who had been killed in World War I. His father was a soldier, sheriff, and photographer from New York, while his mother, May Venzor, a Mexican-American from El Paso, Texas, was an evangelist and lifelong soldier in the Salvation Army. Williams resented his mother's long hours working in the Salvation Army, and Williams and his brother cringed when she took them to the Army's street-corner revivals.

On July 17, 1956, Williams became the fifth player to hit 400 home runs, following Mel Ott in 1941, Jimmie Foxx in 1938, Lou Gehrig in 1936, and Babe Ruth in 1927. On August 7, 1956, after Williams was booed for dropping a fly ball from Mickey Mantle, Williams spat at one of the fans that was taunting him on the top of the dugout. Williams was fined $5,000 for the incident. The next day against Baltimore, Williams was greeted by a large ovation, and received an even larger ovation when he hit a home run in the sixth inning to break a 2 - 2 tie. In The Boston Globe, the publishers ran a "What Globe Readers Say About Ted" section made out of letters about Williams, which were either the sportswriters or the "loud mouths" in the stands. Williams explained years later, "From '56 on, I realized that people were for me. The writers had written that the fans should show me they didn't want me, and I got the biggest ovation yet". Williams lost the batting title to Mickey Mantle in 1956, batting .345 to Mantle's .353, with Mantle on his way to winning the Triple Crown.  In 1957, Williams batted .388 to lead the Major Leagues, and remarkably at the age of 40 in 1958, he led the American League with a .328 batting average.  When Pumpsie Green became the first black player on the Boston Red Sox in 1959--the last major league team to integrate its team--Williams openly welcomed Green.  Williams ended his career dramatically, hitting a home run in his very last at-bat on September 28, 1960. A classic essay written by John Updike the following month for The New Yorker, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", chronicles this event and is often mentioned among the greatest pieces of sports writing in American journalism.  Williams is one of only 29 players in baseball history to date to have appeared in Major League games in four decades. He is also one of only four players to hit a home run in each of four different decades, the others being Willie McCovey (who, like Williams, also retired with 521 career home runs), Rickey Henderson and Omar Vizquel.

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Williams spat at one of the fans that was taunting him on the top of the dugout.