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: