Baseball WI: Ted Williams killed in Korea

From his Wiki page:

"On February 16, 1953, Williams was part of a 35-plane strike package against a tank and infantry training school just south of Pyongyang, North Korea. During the mission a piece of flak knocked out his hydraulics and electrical systems, causing Williams to have to "limp" his plane back to K-13, an Air Force base close to the front lines. For his actions of this day he was awarded the Air Medal."

ITTL Wiliams's plane crashes and he is killed. How does baseball change and recover from the loss of such an major star? Do different teams win championships later on? Do the Red Sox start trading? Note that Boston did not win any championships with Williams in the lineup.
 
Not a lot of super obvious changes.

Williams won 2 batting titles after 1953. And finished as high as 2nd in the MVP voting. So some other players makes a slightly bigger name for themselves.

Williams is eulogized as a great hero. Possibly he is immediately enshrined in Cooperstown. His career batting average ends up two or three points higher. He would finish with 324 homers and 1264 RBIs. Hard as it is to imagine, perhaps due to his tragic death the aura of his baseball greatness becomes even larger than IOTL.

When he came back from Korea, the last eight years of his career were marred with quite a few injuries. He was still a great player, but he seldom ever could stay in the lineup for more than 130 games or 525 ABs. So while his batting average, on base percentage, and slugging rates were great, he never was in the lineup enough to score 100+ runs or get 100+ rbis again.

Boston never came close to winning the pennant in the 53 - 60 time period. The closest they ever came was once finishing 12 games back. They were a pretty old team, though the usually won more than they lost. But they peaked as a team in the late 40s, and did a poor job rebuilding back to a pennant level contender. Some of the better known Sox players in that time frame were Mel Parnell, Jim Piersall, George Kell, Jackie Jensen, Mickey Vernon, Pete Runnels. I don’t see Boston having the means to make trades that would make obvious impacts on pennant races, or improving their own team.

Boston management was pretty darn racist in that time period, it would be a nice fantasy to think that the loss of Williams might be enough to push them to look for “other” sources of baseball talent. But I don’t think that is too realistic.

The biggest changes, from least to most important, of an early Williams death are off the playing field itself.

1) A few more fish stay alive, as Williams was a veracious and talented angler.
2) Some players don’t get mentored in hitting by Williams in spring training.
3) A couple fewer jokes about cryonics.
4) In Williams Hall of Fame induction speech, he chastised the Hall for its failure to include or even acknowledge players from the Negro League. This act almost single handedly started the process for getting Negro League stars enshrined.
5) Less money is raised by the Jimmy Fund to combat children’s cancer. Williams, while a prickly, egotistical personality in many ways, did a lot for kids in general and specifically in raising funds for the Jimmy Fund.
 
The antagonism that the Boston media had towards Williams would disappear.

...

This is the opposite of the type of question that usually comes up when I think of Ted Williams. Usually I wonder how many home runs he could have gotten if he had his 5 seasons back from WWII and Korea - 700?
 
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