{"entity":{"id":"ted-williams","kind":"person","name":"Ted Williams","aka":[],"tldr":"From the 1940s until his last clinic visit in 1999 the greatest hitter in baseball raised money for Dana-Farber's Jimmy Fund and visited children on the wards on condition that no one wrote about it.","summary":"Ted Williams (1918-2002), the Boston Red Sox left fielder and last player to bat .400 in a season, attached himself to the Jimmy Fund soon after its 1948 founding and stayed with it for the rest of his life. The Jimmy Fund's own pages record his decades as its public champion, his insistence that his bedside visits to children with cancer go unreported, and his last visit to the clinic in July 1999. The Red Sox partnership he embodied, which began formally in 1953, has raised more than $172 million for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute according to the Jimmy Fund, and the WEEI/NESN Radio-Telethon started in his memory has raised more than $74 million since 2002. When the Fund began, nearly all children with cancer died; by his last visit, more than three in four survived.","asOf":"2026-09-10","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Williams","links":[{"label":"Jimmy Fund: Ted Williams","url":"https://www.jimmyfund.org/about-us/boston-red-sox/ted-williams/"},{"label":"Jimmy Fund: history of the Red Sox partnership","url":"https://www.jimmyfund.org/about/partnerships/boston-red-sox/history-of-partnership"}],"tags":["public-figure","donor"],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":["jimmy-fund","dana-farber"],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":["einar-gustafson","sidney-farber"],"bottlenecks":["b-funding-allocation","b-rare-cancers"],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"role":"Boston Red Sox star who was the Jimmy Fund's public champion for half a century","specialisms":["Cancer fundraising","Paediatric cancer","Sport and philanthropy"],"profiles":[],"papers":[]},"route":"/people/ted-williams/","neighbours":{"institution":[{"id":"dana-farber","kind":"institution","name":"Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center","route":"/institutions/dana-farber/"},{"id":"jimmy-fund","kind":"institution","name":"The Jimmy Fund","route":"/institutions/jimmy-fund/"}],"person":[{"id":"einar-gustafson","kind":"person","name":"Einar \"Jimmy\" Gustafson","route":"/people/einar-gustafson/"},{"id":"sidney-farber","kind":"person","name":"Sidney Farber","route":"/people/sidney-farber/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-funding-allocation","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Funding follows fashion, not burden","route":"/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/"},{"id":"b-rare-cancers","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Rare and paediatric cancers without markets","route":"/bottlenecks/b-rare-cancers/"}]}}