Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game; Plus, Remembering the Composer of “Annie”
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This year is the centennial of The New Yorker, and our staff writers and other friends of the magazine have been pulling out some classics from the long history of The New Yorker. It's a series we call Takes, and you can find them all gathered at newyorker.com slash takes. Newyorker.com slash takes. Louisa Thomas is our sports correspondent, and she naturally gravitated to a piece about baseball.

a piece with a title that is comprehensible only if you're a baseball nut or a reader of Variety magazine. And the title is Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. The kid in question, of course, was Ted Williams, the great hitter who spent 19 years on the Red Sox, torturing us Yankee fans. And it's by no less a writer than John Updike. Updike describes Ted Williams' last game on the Red Sox, his very last game before he retired in 1960.

Louisa Thomas lives in Boston, just a few miles from Fenway Park. I actually was teaching this piece by John Updike about Ted Williams to a nonfiction creative writing class that I teach at Harvard. And, you know, this is one of those pieces that I refer to sometimes when I need to enter the right voice, when I sort of need to remember how to start, when I need to sort of

Fenway Park in Boston is a lyric little band box of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934 and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between man's Euclidean determinations and nature's beguiling irregularities.

What I know about the genesis of the story is what he told us. In 1977, he published a reprint of this in a slender little volume, and he wrote an introduction. And he said in the introduction that his plan had been to go visit a paramour on Beacon Hill. He was married, but his marriage was canceled.

And he knocked on the door and his paramour was not there. So he went to the game instead, to Fenway Park, to watch Ted Williams play in his last game. And he was so moved by what he saw that he felt compelled to write about it.

I and 10,453 others had shown up, primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder known to the headlines as Ted, Kid, Splinter, Thumper, T.W., and most cloyingly, Mr. Wonderful, would play in Boston.

Ted Williams was this boyhood hero. Sometimes, you know, we can go back and find all the great reasons that Updike loved him. But I think some of them were, you know, born out of a child's imagination. There's a lovely passage, actually, in the piece that he wrote about how Ted Williams was originally always this line in a box score. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania with two last place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company.

For me, Williams' LF was a figment of the box scores, who always seemed to be going three for five. He radiated from afar the hard blue glow of high purpose. He felt a sort of sympathy with him because Updike was this great practitioner of his craft as a

as Williams was. And they both cared tremendously about these details. And there was something so pure about the way they took their swings. Whenever Williams appeared at the plate, pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity, it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday evening postcovers.

This man, you realized, and here perhaps was the difference greater than the difference in gifts, really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it. He smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone. But the deep right field and Fenway and the heavy air and casual east wind defeated him. The ball died.

Al Palarcik leaned his back against the big .380 painted on the right field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone.

I had the chance, actually, the other day to go back and look at his draft. And there's this passage, and it's one of the passages that Updike actually worked over most, both in the original process of writing it with the typewriter. You can see all these Xs out. And also with his pencil after, he's really...

Really trying to get it exactly right so that, you know, there's this line, it went over the first baseman's head and rose along a straight line.

Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.

And when you see, when you look at the draft, you know, it went over the first baseman's head and rose. Originally, it was just, and rose along a straight line. And then he made it rose slowly along a straight line. But then it's not slowly, it's meticulously along a straight line. And I mean, there's just kind of constant emendation, refining, you know, getting it right because things,

These marginal differences really matter, and it's those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, between a long fly, and between a home run. And Updike really understood that, and so did Williams. The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning, the arc lights were turned on. Always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning lights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh inning.

He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering as we had his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause, no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of hand claps minute after minute, burst after burst,

crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a somber and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will. The right pitch must be perfectly met, and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy, the season was exhausted. Nevertheless,

There will always lurk around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope. And this is one of the times which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future. Fisher, after his unsettling weight, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed.

The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time. Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field.

From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass. The ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran out the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs. Hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of, he didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted, we want Ted for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back.

Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish. A wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is non-transferable. The paper said that the other players and even the umpires on the field begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way. He never had, and he did not now. Gods do not answer letters. I just love that line, gods do not answer letters.

His editor on this piece was William Shaw. He said it was the best thing that they'd ever published in the magazine about baseball, although Updike sort of made a quip that that wasn't saying much because they didn't really, the previous editor, Harold Ross, had not liked baseball among many other things. So, but William Shaw did. And, you know, there weren't a lot of sports writers writing like this. In some ways, he really kind of

set the bar for great writing about sports. It's not really sports writing, right? It's great writing that happens to be about sports. It happens to be about a great human being who is playing a great game. On the car radio as I drove home, I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York, so he knew how to do even that. The hardest thing, quit.

Excerpts from Hub Fan's Bid Kid Ado by John Updike were read for us by Brian Morabito. And we heard from staff writer Louisa Thomas, who writes our column, The Sporting Scene. You can find Updike's story at newyorker.com, and you can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Odyssey.

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But he'll be best remembered for the musical Annie, the gateway drug to Broadway for generations of kids. Hello, hello, hello. You're a new face. I am Jeffrey. Charles Strauss died this month at the age of 96. One of the last interviews he gave was to our producer Jeffrey Masters, who went to see Strauss at his home in Manhattan back in 2023.

I'm going to record if that's okay? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, I'm going to suck my stomach in. The scene in his apartment, you know, it was a lot. It was tegotic. He's currently going through his archives, just the boxes and boxes completely covering the floors, and he's doing this in order to donate them to the Library of Congress.

Yeah, I guess the Library of Congress, which collects life itself. Yeah, they asked me. I mean, I wasn't asked to do this. But in this box, here, tell me, we found... Oh my God, it's so heavy. But there's this record from All in the Family. I wrote it. Oh, right, the theme song for the show. Norman Lear...

wanted to have a theme, but he couldn't afford a big orchestra. And I brought up the fact that when I was a kid, we all used to sit around and my mother used to play. And so that's how I wrote it. But boy, the tunes Glenn Miller played, songs that made the hit parade. Guys like us, we had it made.

Those were the days, and you knew where you were. That she made up herself. Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a Herbert Hooper again. But the song itself, as did the program, became very successful.

Yeah. You know, there's this huge framed picture of Jay-Z in the frame to CD and cassette tape from the album that says, Volume 2, Hard Knock Life. Oh, it says from 1998. From standing on the corners bopping To driving some of the hottest cars New York has ever seen For driving some of the hottest verses rappers ever heard From the dope spot with the smoke lock Hanging the murder scene

Well, what was it like working with Jay-Z? There he is. He was surrounded by...

bodyguards and all kinds of people. There was finally one point in my life where we got together and sat and talked. Oh, because he also produced the most recent Annie movie remake from 2014. I do remember I kind of won his heart.

in a way, when I said, you've got to bring your wife with you. You know, I was being kind of snotty, and he must have told her that. Beyonce? Yeah, it was a nice relationship. But most of the time, he was...

He was beyond such a small person as me. You know, in one of the boxes, where is it? We found a letter from Stephen Sondheim. And there's a funny part to it. Do you mind if I read it? Yeah? Okay. So this is dated July 22nd, 2008. And he says, congratulations on your memoir that was just published. And then he says, quote,

I bought a copy yesterday and naturally immediately looked up references to myself. And then he supplies two corrections for you in case there are any future reprintings, he says. Was that kind of thing in character for him? Stephen and I were friendly enemies. He didn't like me much. I didn't like him less. But on the other hand, I respected him a lot. Stephen...

Stephen and I knew each other so long that I stood danger of invading his territory. But even that was not... We came into two different worlds. But we were very old friends. He was my oldest friend in the theatre. Maybe for maybe reasons

I mean, right now, Annie is surrounding us, right? There's posters on the walls and pillows, but also in this box, it's Annie stationary and letterheads. Also, there's the Annie cookie jar on the shelf and there's Annie piggy bank with her big, big song, Tomorrow. When you originally wrote it, did you think that you'd struck gold? I didn't think. I thought that was a disposable item

that we needed, necessary to keep the curtain up or down. But so many songs in musicals go through that motion, you know. If a guy is a good theater composer, he learns to kind of think with two hands

voices, so to speak. One is, "I love you, my darling." The other is, "I love you, my darling, but keep it going, this song, because we have to bring in the detective soon."

I would say tomorrow falls into that category. I needed some time. It's usually always that way when you're writing for the theater. The book writer most usually says he needs a song there, or you yourself, rather than here's my symphony to the stars. And so you originally thought that that song was disposable, as you said,

Now, in hindsight now, what do you think it is that makes that song so great? I don't know. I mean, maybe I do know. Maybe I'm being modest. I do think I'm talented. I think I write a song and I wanted to please the audience. I didn't know that it was going to be so big. And so I'm very proud if it

made it smart. I think that tomorrow, with it, there's this beautiful simplicity to it, where you can hear it and then almost sing along with it during each reprise. That's what a popular song should do. It should sound as though it was always there.

But it never was until you thought of it. And I think Tomorrow came to me that way. It's a complicated melody. I'm looking at posters on my... And there are a lot of songs I've written that have not been...

classics like that. I mean, I think that like fortunately and unfortunately, when a song gets as big as Tomorrow's gotten and has remained, it gets bigger than you, right?

Your name, in many ways, is no longer associated with it. Has that bothered you in your career? Not if I hear this song, no, not really. I mean, I never got what Lenny himself did, Irving Berlin did. No, I never had that luxury.

And here's another Charles Stroud song. I never had that kind of reputation. It's a funny thing about composing. It comes from your heart in a way, but it really comes from nowhere. It's God-given. I would think that's a God-given gift that I've been fortunate enough to get. I'm getting old, you know. Look how I'm walking.

I don't play it too well now. The sun will come out tomorrow Bet you bought a dollar that tomorrow There'll be sun Just thinking about tomorrow Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow

Till there's none When I'm stuck with a day That's grey and lonely I just stick out my chin And grin and say "Woo!" The sun will come out tomorrow

So you've got to hang on till tomorrow. Come what may. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. The late Charles Strauss, who died earlier this month. He spoke with Jeffrey Masters in 2023. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. Hope you had a great holiday.

See you next time. I mastered that pretty well. That was fantastic. Thank you. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin. And we had additional production this week from Jonathan Mitchell. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.

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