By Bob Gaydos

 June 20, 2110, BOSTON HERALD — With their season already on the road to nowhere and with the Fenway Faithful looking for blood after not being able to celebrate a World Series championship in more than a century, the Boston Red Sox yesterday shocked the baseball world by revealing they had signed the thawed head of Ted Williams to a one-year contract worth a rumored $617 million.

 Williams, as Boston baseball legend has it, was the greatest hitter of the 20th century, even greater than the traitorous Babe Ruth. The Red Sox hope Williams’ celebrated batting eye will revive a moribund lineup, even though the head in which it rests will be sitting atop someone else’s body.

 The reason for that, according to Internet archives, is that when the slugger’s body was presented by his son and daughter for cryonic preservation in 2002, the head was mistakenly separated from the body. This so-called “neuro-preservation” was significantly cheaper than full cryo-preservation, for obvious reasons. Simply put, the Splendid Splinter’s head was frozen at super-cool temperatures and stored in a cooler to be defrosted when and if science figured out how to bring it back to lead a full and meaningful life — such as hitting cleanup for the Red Sox.

 For several decades in the 21st century, the Red Sox hoped that onetime star David Ortiz would choose suspended animation in the hope of returning at a future date when the American League had outlawed left-handed pitchers. But the ever-hot Ortiz chose cremation instead.

 In fact, so did Williams. At least that’s what his will said. Various stories at the time of his death said his children opted for the cryonic preservation, some say in the hopes they would be able to sell his DNA for those interested in cloning a future .400 hitter. (Williams, by the way, is still regarded as the last man to hit .400 in the major leagues since MLB officials threw out all records of players found to have used Gator-Aid, a once popular sports drink discovered to significantly boost hand-eye coordination.)

 There were numerous unanswered questions yesterday regarding the signing of Williams’ head, not the least of which being how, or who, signed the deal for Williams. Also, as of yesterday, Red Sox officials were remaining mum on whose body it was seen running around their Pawtucket minor league stadium carting Williams’ head. Sources close to the team would only say that the body was younger and faster than Williams appeared to be in old movies. Spectators said the famously lead-footed slugger seemed almost shocked at his new fleet-footedness.

 Some baseball historians swore that the thawed Williams bore a strong resemblance to a onetime New York Mets phenom, Jose Reyes. Reyes, a shortstop with dazzling speed, disappeared in the mid 2020’s after spending 14 years on the disabled list. No one apparently knows what happened to him, but baseball experts agreed that if he were frozen, it would be his legs, not his head, that would be most valuable when defrosted.

 Team officials were also discounting the significance of early reports that the new Williams, now a  speedy switch hitter instead of a pure southpaw, had fallen in love with drag bunting when batting left-handed, rather than swinging for the fences. And they said a slight left hamstring pull did not appear to be serious.

 However, they did not acknowledge concern over two changes in the Williams head, apparently the result of problems that arose in the freezing process. In 2009, Larry Johnson, who ran the Alcor facility that froze Williams, wrote a book, “Frozen,” which purported to detail the botched effort to decapitate and freeze the head of the baseball immortal who became an immortalist. Among other things, Johnson said, in order to keep the head upright and stable in a container while it attained a sufficiently cold temperature, staff at Alcor placed the head upside down on a Bumblebee tuna fish can. When the time came to move the head, the can was frozen to it, Johnson wrote, prompting a volunteer to grab a monkey wrench and take a Williams-like swing at the head. Lacking the famed Williams batting eye, the volunteer missed and smacked Ted upside the head. The can was apparently freed on the second swing.

 Unfortunately, that first swing took out the left eye, which is the front one when Williams would be batting right-handed for the first time, finally aiming at Fenway’s inviting Green Monster, if he could see it. The Red Sox hitting coach is trying to figure out a way to overcome this, while refusing to acknowledge that the team thought it was getting both keen batting eyes when it signed Williams‘s head. Williams’ agent, Scott Boras, denied any deception in attaining the record contract.

 On a more mundane note, the team equipment manager said he was having a difficult time finding a batting helmet that did not slide down Williams’ head because of an odd, circular formation sliced into the top. But he said Ted was handling these minor setbacks with unusual grace and was, in fact, a joy to work with.
 
Bob can be reached at bob@zestoforange.com.

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