The last at bat

For sustained brilliance in writing about baseball there is Roger Angell. But the greatest one-hit wonder is John Updike’s only venture into sports reporting. His 1960 essay about Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams’ final game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” is not just amazing writing, but a masterpiece of production against a hard deadline. While a good portion of the essay was likely thought-out in advance, Updike turned around 6000 words about a game played on September 28 in time for the October 20 edition of The New Yorker.   

Updike was a fan, offering no alibis for Williams’ behavior. Williams was a complex player, disliked by many fans and reporters alike. The product of a broken home, he was moody and quixotic in his belief that playing baseball might be much more enjoyable (for him) without those sports writers or fans watching. A view, Updike points out, that may have cost Williams not just plenty of goodwill, but two MVP trophies, which are voted on by the baseball writers. 

The author gets off a couple of wonderful and insightful lines: 

The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence. 

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. 

As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. 

(If the use of the word “color” in that last quite is a potshot at the American Leagues’ lack of urgency when it came to integration, it is subtle but well taken). 

Updike also got a storybook ending: Williams’ final plate appearance was a solo home run in the eighth inning: Williams etching in own career epitaph within the epitaph Updike had written. The Red Sox were scheduled for three final games, in New York versus the Yankees. Williams chose not to accompany the team. “So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit,” is how Updike ended the piece. 

Updike wrote frequently about sports in his fiction. His most famous character, Rabbit Angstrom, was a star high school basketball player who found everything in life sour and anti-climactic after graduation. There’s a lot of golf playing in the Rabbit books and in his novel about swinging suburbia, Couples. 

If he often found sports a useful metaphor, it’s fitting that Ted Williams hitting a home run in his final career at bat could serve as a comparison to Updike’s high-pressure delivery of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” one of the high points in a lifetime of writing, within 30 days.

Incredibly, footage of Ted Williams' final home run exists:

Jigsaw puzzles of the damned 

One of the cultural kid crazes of the sixties was the obsession with monsters. For a few years, I got caught up in it in a big way. Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Aurora monster models. Monster wallets. Monster figures. If it had anything to do with Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon or the Mummy, I was in. 

One Christmas, I received this: 

The box is a little rough now, something like 60 years later, but it’s complete, no missing pieces: 

The finished puzzle tells a pretty terrifying story, as the artist crammed as much as possible into a nightmarish scene: the sobbing woman, a hooded ghoul emerging from a coffin, the lizard and cat going after a corpse, a rattlesnake for some reason, prison bars and the mummy carrying some poor guy in the process of being mummified while still alive. 

The puzzle was made by the Jaymar Specialty Company of Brooklyn, started by Jacob Marx, father of famed toy manufacturer Louis Marx. Jaymar produced mostly wooden toys, including any number of puzzles based on licensed characters (Disney, Archie, Blondie). In 1963, Jaymar issued four monster puzzles: Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman and the Mummy. 

More coffins and dungeons. The guy lying on the operating table in the lower left has a hypodermic needle sticking out of his neck making a puddle of blood. Fun stuff when you're ten years old. 

According to one price guide, “parental objection to these gruesome puzzles soon led to Jaymar’s discontinuation of them.” I couldn’t find any other details, but if true, the puzzles belong in the same childhood limbo as Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” Chinese Cherry Funny Face drink mix and the Frito Bandito. Vanished, thanks to the whim of some supposedly well-meaning adults. 

The monster craze began to diminish for me with the discovery of Marvel Comics and the Beatles, and as I told myself that it was time to put childish things away, I donated the puzzle to a Cub Scout auction. A quarter burning a hole in my pocket, I realized I'd made a mistake. 

I was the only bidder. Reunited.

I don't care if I never get back 

My hometown of Hackensack is roughly ten miles from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium. That’s a relatively easy commute if you work there and during the 1960s, before baseball players became richer than God, several Yankees rented summer residences in the area. 

Elston Howard settled year-round in Teaneck, one town over. Mickey Mantle was said to be in nearby River Edge. Tom Tresh and Andy Kosco lived in my neighborhood. Tresh a couple of blocks over; Kosco, in his only season with New York, rented a place maybe fifteen houses up from mine. 

The more famous Tresh was American League Rookie of the Year in 1962 and one of the heroes of the 1962 World Series. He played nine seasons in the infield and outfield, and played in two All-Star Games. 

In a ten-year career, Kosco played for seven teams. He is also peripherally connected to two events that helped frame 1970s baseball: he was traded from the Yankees to the Dodgers for Mike Kekich, who is best remembered for swapping families with fellow Yankee Fritz Peterson in 1973. The Dodgers later traded Kosco to Milwaukee for Al Downing, who allowed Hank Aaron’s 715^th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s record. 

I can’t say that we ever saw either ballplayer out mowing the grass or holding a garden hose to the lawn. Their days were likely spent sleeping or watching television before heading out to work. We nodded in acknowledgement as we rode our bikes past their homes, although we never went knocking on their front doors looking for autographs. Possibly we saw them for what they were: ordinary guys roughly our parents’ age (maybe a little younger) who worked weird hours at a strange job. 

What we didn’t realize was that the best time to catch Tresh or Kosco was likely late at night, when much of the neighborhood was dark except for the occasional living room cast in the light from a television screen. Home from the game, sitting on a front step or in the backyard maybe with a beer and a cigarette. Out from the heat of the day, and from under the unblinking glare of the stadium’s high-intensity lights. Listening to the same crickets and far-off police sirens I heard while lying in my bed. 

Times change and summer nights pass quickly, along with childhood and the freedoms that came with it. What we’re left with are summer evenings that will never feel quite the same again.