08:40 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Four hundred career home runs may not seem like that big a deal, but only 39 players in the 136-year history of professional baseball have hit that many. So when Manny Ramirez became the 39th Sunday in Seattle, it was worth all the hoopla and hoop-de-hoo it generated. That it came in a loss dampened some of the buzz, but certainly didn't diminish any of the accomplishment.

In their press notes, the Red Sox pointed out that four other players -- Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and Andre Dawson -- also hit their 400th career home runs in a Boston uniform, and many of New England's media outlets had that in their reports yesterday and today. I can't say I remember reading or hearing anything about Foxx's 400th, which was hit on June 27, 1938, at Cleveland against Bob Feller. Nor do I recall much of Dawson's 400th, which also came against the Indians, in Boston early in 1993.

Yaz, though . . . that I remember. He hit number 399 on June 30, 1979, at Yankee Stadium, then went into one of the longest home-run droughts of his career: 16 games, 56 at-bats. The watch had gone on for 23 days when he stepped to the plate at around 9:40 p.m. on July 23 in the bottom of the seventh inning of a tie game against Oakland.

This was before the days when every game was televised, so Channel 38 -- the Sox' broadcast partner at the time -- was cutting into its regular programming whenever Yaz came to the plate on nights when there was no TV. This was one of those nights. And when he finally did it -- a shot into the A's bullpen that put the Sox ahead, 5-3 -- the brilliantly minimalist Ned Martin merely told his audience: "Now, listen . . . and watch!"

All of which is interesting, but Foxx, Dawson, Yastrzemski . . . they're small potatoes. This morning, colleague M. Charles Bakst came in with a copy of the Fall River Herald News from July 18, 1956. There, bigger than life on a yellowed newspaper page, is Ted Williams crossing the plate after hitting his 400th home run.

Williams' face is contorted toward the press box and he looks like he's ready to spit. And, he admitted after the game, that's exactly what he was going to do: A little gesture to show the media exactly what he thought of them during what should have been one of the greatest moments of his career. "I would have, too," he was quoted as saying after the game by Bud Collins, then of the Boston Herald. "But I thought I would have hit Mickey Vernon." Vernon, a teammate, was coming up to congratulate him.

Ted was really into spitting in those days; two weeks later, he would be assessed an unprecedented $5,000 fine by the Red Sox for expectorating not once, but twice, at Fenway fans who booed him for dropping a fly ball. (Typically, the laissez-faire Sox never made him pay up. "Aw, Ted, I don't want your money," owner Tom Yawkey said.)

That's the incident that everyone remembers, but it had its genesis on a night when the focus should have been on a great career achievement. Leave it to Williams to steal the spotlight from himself.

But that was Ted. No one -- not even Manny Ramirez -- has that flair for, well, the dramatic.

Art Martone is sports editor of the Providence Journal. This is a print version of an audio blog, Art's Audio Notebook, that can be found daily at www.projo.com/redsox