The New Yorker Radio Hour
Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game; Plus, Remembering the Composer of “Annie”
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.”
Full Episode
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. 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 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.
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.
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