Late Bloomers: Ken Williams

As a person with a fairly common name, one I share with a much more prominent person who also wrote about baseball, I empathize with Ken Williams.

That’s a perfectly fine name, but there’s nothing particularly memorable about it. Dozens of big leaguers have been named Williams, including four members of the Hall of Fame. Dozens more have been named Ken, including a Hall of Famer named Griffey that you may have heard of, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who went by Ken among the folks who passed for friends in his life.

There’s even been a more prominent Ken Williams in the game. As a player, the Ken Williams who was a third-round pick of the White Sox in 1982, and went on to play six years as a big league outfielder, was known more as Kenny and was pretty disappointing. But then he moved into management, first as a scout but then in progressively more important roles that culminated with him being General Manager of the White Sox for 13 years. They won the 2005 World Series during his tenure there. Then one of his kids became an NFL player. Since all of that happened within our somewhat recent memories, he’s probably the guy you were thinking this edition was about.

He’s not, and that’s why I empathize with the Ken Williams I’m actually writing about today. He played a long time ago, and his name doesn’t lend itself to being remembered all these years later, but he was a helluva ballplayer who got a very late start to his major league career.