The New Yorker Radio Hour
Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game; Plus, Remembering the Composer of “Annie”
Tue, 27 May 2025
In honor of The New Yorker’s centennial this year, the magazine’s staff writers are pulling out some classics from the long history of the publication. Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker’s sports correspondent, naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updike, and the “Kid” of the title was Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame hitter who spent nineteen years on the Boston Red Sox. By happenstance, Updike joined the crowd at Fenway Park for Williams’s last game before his retirement, in 1960. Thomas, looking at subtle word changes that Updike made as he was working on the piece, reflects on the writer’s craft and the ballplayer’s. “Marginal differences really matter,” she says. “And it’s those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, a long fly, and a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.”Plus, a visit with one of the great modern practitioners of the earworm, Charles Strouse, who wrote music for “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Annie,” and the theme to “All in the Family.” Strouse died this month at ninety-six. In one of his last interviews he gave, in 2023, he spoke with the Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters about his rivalry with Stephen Sondheim. “Stephen and I were friendly enemies. He didn’t like me much. I didn’t like him less.”
Chapter 1: What classic baseball story does Louisa Thomas discuss?
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 lesser 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 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 get in the mood. This piece is so good at mood, so good at beginnings.
Chapter 2: Who was John Updike and what is his connection to Ted Williams?
Fenway Park in Boston is a lyric little band box of a ballpark.
I love that opening line.
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 dissolving. 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.
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Chapter 3: What are the key themes in Updike's writing about Ted Williams?
Ted Williams was this boyhood hero. Sometimes, you know, we can go back and find all the great reasons that Updake 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 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 post covers.
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 in Fenway and the heavy air and casual east wind defeated him. The ball died.
Al Polarsik 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.
It went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and it was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit.
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Chapter 4: How did the crowd react to Ted Williams's final game?
He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long, smooth, 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 Shawn. 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 Shawn 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.
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Chapter 5: What does Louisa Thomas reveal about Updike's writing process?
At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.
But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs.
Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.
Chapter 6: Who was Charles Strouse and what is his legacy?
And hopefully make you see the world anew.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we're going to close with a tribute to one of the great modern practitioners of the mysterious art of the earworm. Charles Strauss wrote for film and television, and he won Tony Awards for Broadway shows, including Bye Bye Birdie. But he'll be best remembered for the musical Annie, the gateway drug to Broadway for generations of kids.
Chapter 7: What rivalry did Charles Strouse have with Stephen Sondheim?
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. Well, I'm going to suck my stomach in. The scene in his apartment, you know, it was a lot. It was chaotic. 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 going. That she made up herself.
Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use the 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 and the framed CD and cassette tape from the album that says, Volume 2, Hard Knock Life. Oh, it says from 1998. It's the hard knock life.
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 cleaning the murder scene.
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