Ted Williams, the last baseball player to hit better than .400 in a season, died [in July 2002] at the age of 83. "There is no joy in Red Sox nation, a.k.a. New England, or in any heart where baseball matters," George Will reported in a column memorializing the star hitter.

Mr. Will describes Mr. Williams as "an alloy of innocence and arrogance," an obsessive player who gave the local sports reporters lots to write about. "He used a postal scale to check that humidity had not added an ounce to the weight of his bats," he writes.

"Challenged to find from among six bats the one that was half an ounce heavier than the others, he quickly did. He once returned to the maker a batch of his Louisville Sluggers because he sensed that the handles were not quite right. The handles were off by five-thousandths of an inch."