Williams's exuberance, color, and candor was music to the Boston press's ears, but a fundamental and irrevocable shift in Williams's mood towards the media occurred in his second season (1940). He got off to a slow start and was booed at Fenway Park ... In late May 1940, sportswriter Harold Kaese ended a column with the cheap shot that Williams had not visited his parents over the previous winter. "This was an unpardonable sin," Bradlee writes, "an unacceptable invasion of his privacy". Kaese's article turned "what had been a simmering feud with sportswriters into a vitriolic campaign that he chose to wage his entire career". Williams referred to the writers as jackals and more formally as the Knights of the Keyboard.
In August of that year, Williams vented to another writer for 20 minutes, listing all the things he couldn't stand about Boston: the fans, the press, the entire city. He said he had asked Yawkey - many times - to be traded. If free agency existed and every team made him the exact same offer, Williams said he would choose the Dodgers. "I know I'd be a hero in Brooklyn," he said. ...
Bradlee offers a detailed and fascinating history of the Boston media during this time and says the feud was "a conflict largely manufactured by Williams to fuel his drive to excel". Williams believed he hit better when he was angry, if he felt he had something to prove. ... [One] player noted that Williams read all of the city's dailies "just to find someone to get mad at". ...
In spring training one year, a reporter thought Williams seemed more approachable. "I'm always nice enough in the spring," Ted explained, "until I read what those shitheads write about me." ...
While the Boston sportswriters did their part to push Williams's buttons, Ted often created his own trouble with fans at Fenway. During the first game of a May 1950 doubleheader, Williams dropped a fly ball in left field and was booed. On his way back to the dugout, he gave fans two middle fingers. In the second game, he booted another ball and flipped the bird to all sections of the park. "I didn't mind the errors," he said afterwards, "but those goddamn fans, they can go fuck themselves."
