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Then McCraw could think some more as he doubled back to the exit he just missed.
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"I just could not believe it was that simple," he says.
From that day on, first as a player and now as a coach, hitting to McGraw has been like literature to a professor. He studies it. He reads into it. He takes it to heart.
Williams? Were he still around today, the legend might not even recognize some things people will see Thursday night in RFK Stadium. For one thing, the Nationals have a batting coach. McCraw. Back then, the Senators had no batting coach. Who needed one? They had Williams.
A year before McCraw was dealt from the White Sox, Williams was presiding over the Senators' 1970 spring training camp in Pompano Beach, Fla., when a couple of his coaches, Nellie Fox and Joe Camacho, became entangled in a heated argument during fundamentals drills while practicing rundown plays.
Williams, who had been on a different part of the field working with the outfielders, came rushing over.
"What's up? What's up?" he demanded.
Camacho wanted to run the rundown play one way; Fox argued that they should do it a different way. Williams listened for a moment. He looked at them.
Then he boomed: "F--- it! Let's hit!"
To Williams, it usually was that simple. Was it his problem few others could figure things out?
McCraw only drifted into Williams' constellation for one season. The Senators left Washington following the summer of '71, and by 1972, the Texas Rangers traded McCraw to the Cleveland Indians, along with Roy Foster, for Ted Ford.
He went on to play only four more seasons, retiring following the '75 campaign at the age of 34. McCraw never did make any All-Star teams, never played in the postseason. He was more Mike Lum than Frank Howard.
Yet, like Williams, McCraw's fingerprints on baseball in Washington, D.C., are unmistakable. And looking back Thursday as the Nationals place their link inside that of the last Senators link and another generation makes the connection, it is eminently visible.
In the bottom of the eighth inning in that final game against the New York Yankees on Sept. 30, 1971, McCraw delivered an RBI single to give the Senators a 7-5 lead.
Then, in the top of the ninth, all hell broke loose.
The fans knew Senators owner Bob Short would move the team to Texas the following season, and though only 14,460 were in attendance, they became more boisterous as the game dragged on.
McCraw was playing first base in the ninth and, the way he tells it today, fans were throwing confetti onto the field -- ripped up copies of a Ted Williams book the Senators had given away that day, according to McCraw -- and the atmosphere became progressively uglier.
"The umpire behind me said, "Mac, if the fans come out of the stands, I'm out of here,'" McCraw says. "I said, 'If you leave, I'm with you -- I'll be in your back pocket!'"
Felipe Alou grounded out to start the ninth. Bobby Murcer bounced to pitcher Joe Grzenda for the second out. That's when some fans stormed onto the field, and that's when the players scooted and the umpires forfeited the game.
Draw a line from then to now, and it's McCraw who stretches from one end to the other, like the chalk that is laid from home plate to the right-field foul pole. Did he ever think? Hell, no, he didn't. Who would be that crazy?
Yet there it is, Williams touching McCraw at one end, McCraw reaching out and touching current Nationals such as Brad Wilkerson, Jose Vidro and Cristian Guzman at the other.
The gates of RFK Stadium swing open again. The baseball world will be watching, another president will throw out the first pitch and another crop of hopefuls will do what they can to make baseball history in a very special place.
And the beautiful thing is, all you need to do is glimpse at McCraw in the dugout at some point during the night for confirmation of what we always suspected anyway: The possibilities are endless.