This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, as you know,

which brings us to George Will,

the renowned political columnist, whose very best writing is about baseball. Here's George.

I was born in May 1941 in the nick of time. I had 11 days to get my bearings before it began.

The streak.

It was the greatest event of a baseball season that flared dazzlingly on the eve of darkness.

There were just 16 teams in 10 cities in St. Louis was baseball's westernmost outpost,

but the future, California California was present in San

Francisco's Joe DiMaggio and San Diego's Ted Williams Williams is so volatile as a

cult and is one-dimensional as a surgeon DiMaggio's cool elegance concealed a passion to

excel at every aspect of the game.

Williams used a postal scale in the clubhouse to make sure humidity had not increased the weight of his bats.

The officials of the Louisville Slugger Company once challenged Williams to pick the one bat among six that weighed half an ounce more than the other five.

He did.

He once sent back to the factory a shipment of bats because he sensed that the handles were too thick.

They were by five one-hundredths of an inch.

In 1941, Williams was hitting 39955 going into the season-ending

doubleheader in Philadelphia's Shib Park. Daylight savings had ended the night before, so

the autumn shadows that made hitting hard would be even worse. If Williams had not played, his

average would have been rounded up to 400. Instead, he went six for eight, including

a blazing double that broke a public address speaker. He finished at 406. Today, when a batter

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