By BRUCE WEBER
Published: February 1, 2013
Earl Williams, a slugging if ambivalent catcher and infielder — “My favorite position is batter,” he once said — who won the National League rookie of the year award in 1971 but whose promise went unfulfilled amid a welter of minor controversies, died early Tuesday at his home in Somerset, N.J. He was 64.
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An ad placed by Williams in The New York Times in 1978.
The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood, his wife, Linda, said.
Playing for the Atlanta Braves in his first two full seasons, Williams hit 61 home runs — including 33 in 1971, his rookie year — and drove in 174 runs, impressive numbers for a player still in his early 20s. He was only the second catcher, after Johnny Bench in 1968, to win the top rookie honor in the National League. (Four others have won the award since, most recently the Giants’ Buster Posey in 2010.)
But Williams was traded to the Baltimore Orioles of the American League before the 1973 season, and his career spiraled down so quickly that he was out of the big leagues for good by the time he was 29, an age when many players are entering their prime. Never a hitter for high average, he nonetheless reached double figures in home runs every year of his career on four different teams, averaging nearly 20 a year and hitting 13 in 100 games for the Oakland A’s in 1977.
But during spring training in 1978, he was waived by the A’s and not claimed by any other team — a surprising turn, especially to Williams. That June he took the remarkable step of placing a job-seeking advertisement in The New York Times.
“Employment wanted by baseball player,” the ad said, adding: “Excellent Health — No Police Record. HAVE BAT — WILL TRAVEL — WILL HUSTLE.”
“I don’t understand how I got in this position,” Williams said at the time. “How can I sit on the shelf? How did this happen to me? If you look at my statistics, you’d see I’m a proven hitter.”
The ad didn’t work. He never played in the big leagues again.
Earl Craig Williams Jr. was born on July 14, 1948, in Newark, and grew up in East Orange and Montclair in New Jersey. His father was a factory worker. His mother, Dolores Reilly, known as Bobbi, served for a time on the Montclair City Council. Earl was a star athlete in high school and spent three years at Ithaca College studying journalism, leaving just short of graduation to play ball. He was drafted by the Milwaukee Braves in 1965. (The franchise moved to Atlanta the next season.)
Williams began his minor league career as a pitcher but played mostly at first base and third base. The Braves saw him as a future catcher, and their trouble filling the position led them to rush Williams into action at the major league level. Williams said he never felt comfortable there — in 1972 he had 28 passed balls (though 21 of them came while catching the knuckleballs of Phil Niekro) — and he was not shy about expressing his discontent.
The Braves traded Williams to Baltimore, where he butted heads with the Orioles’ equally temperamental manager, Earl Weaver, who died last month. They clashed over Williams’s arriving late for games, resisting catching instruction, yelling at umpires and heckling fans. Still, Williams led the Orioles in home runs in 1973 with 22, but his production fell in 1974, and in 1975 he was shipped back to Atlanta, then sent to the Montreal Expos in 1976. In his last year, on a last-place Oakland team, Williams irritated management by criticizing the coaching staff.
Before the trade to the Orioles, Weaver had once said that if he had Earl Williams, the Orioles would win the pennant. Williams later acknowledged that the pressure on him to perform in Baltimore was enormous, and that he felt it especially because he was black. The fans he argued with, he said, were calling him offensive names. Asked by The New York Times in 1981 if race had been a factor in his becoming something of a pariah, he said, “Being a black person has to have an effect on everyone’s career.”
In addition to his mother and his wife, the former Linda Montgomery, Williams is survived by a sister, Pamela Reilly; a stepdaughter, Raquel M. West; and a step-granddaughter, Ruqayyah M. Williams.
Williams finished his career with a .247 batting average, 138 home runs and 457 runs batted in. He played two years in Mexico before leaving professional baseball for good, after which he worked for more than 20 years as a warehouse supervisor for a cosmetics and pharmaceutical company.
After the 1980 season, Williams wrote to 10 major league teams in a failed effort to find a spot on a roster.
“Time and experience have certainly taught me that baseball is more than a game of numbers,” he wrote. “But statistics do make an unbiased statement. Why, then, am I out of baseball? I think you know. In a word: controversy.”
Controversy “pinned the label ‘undesirable’ on Earl Williams,” he continued.
“That label, as baseball labels do,” he wrote, “haunted me to the end of my major league career.”
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