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Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams

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"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" is John Updike's loving tribute to the character and craft of Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams. First published in The New Yorker magazine a few weeks after Updike sat in the stands of Fenway Park watching Williams' final at bat on September 28, 1960, the essay has over the years attracted the highest praise from trustworthy observers. Some of these accolades appear in the Editorial Reviews section above. The praise is accurate and deserved.

If you follow baseball and care about its storied past, or admire the writing of John Updike, then you will enjoy reading this piece. If you happen to belong to both camps -- if you're an Updike fan AND a baseball fan -- then put this at the top of your list of must-reads.

The question is whether you should spend your money on this particular setting of "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." The article is available online where it can be read for free on several websites, including that of The New Yorker. In book form the piece has been much anthologized. It appears alongside contributions from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Don DeLillo, and Stephen King, in the elegant 721-page hardcover volume, "Baseball: A Literary Anthology." It can be found in "The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond" (paperback), edited by Jeff Silverman, where it hides amongst 30 fiction and nonfiction pieces from a motley crew of writers such as Doris Kearns Godwin, Pete Hamill, Ring Lardner, P.G. Wodehouse, Vin Scully (on Sandy Koufax), and Abbott and Costello (whose "Who's on First" comic routine is gloriously reprinted in its entirety). The essay joins a broader array of sports pieces recently assembled in "The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker," where Updike shares space with Malcolm Gladwell (who writes about failure in sports), Martin Amis (on tennis personalities), and John McPhee (on Bill Bradley's basketball career).

The answer to why you might choose to buy this latest issuance of John Updike on Ted Williams comes down to personal preference, convenience, sentimentality, maybe even aesthetics. The essay has a special-ness to it. Its pages offer a sharp character study, a lyrical capturing of a moment of grace, and an essential moral lesson. It is, to use the corny metaphor, a small gem. Think of Duke Ellington's description of Ella Fitzgerald: "beyond category." The quality-conscious publishers at The Library of America respect good writing and have taken care to design the book, simply as a physical object, to be a pleasing product to hold in your hands.

Three photos of Ted Williams grace the book: one is in color on the jacket (you see it pictured here on Amazon, above). The second, in black and white, is used as the frontispiece and shows the slugger ascending to the Fenway field on his final day. The third photo is near-sepia in color and is spread horizontally across the front and back boards, freezing in time his celebrated swing -- and making this hardback look just as fine with or without its jacket. Inside, the main essay from 1960 (with a dozen fact-laden footnotes Updike added a few years later) is, of course, the big draw. This text (33 pages in this wide-margined edition) is flanked by a three-page Preface, written only weeks before Updike died in 2009, and a meandering nine-page Afterword that served as an obituary for the ballplayer who died in 2002. The preface and afterward may strike you as workmanlike exercises -- common stones wildly outshone by the diamond at the center of the book.

Bottom line: if you're looking for a gift for someone open to the call of baseball and its emotional and intellectual appeal, this is a good choice. The book would also be a classy gift for a reader who's read Updike's novels and short stories but is unaware that the author penned, at the start of his career, one of the best nonfiction essays ever written.

Addendum: A 34-second video of Ted Williams' last at bat at Fenway Park on September 28, 1960 is available online (Google the words, YouTube last at bat). If you watch it, pay special heed as Williams rounds third and heads for home. At that moment the cameraman pans up to show the crowd in the stands behind third base, the very section where John Updike was on his feet joining in the stadium-wide "beseeching screaming." The tape is too pixilated for us to spot him. But Updike's there, absorbing the moment -- and starting work on his own piece for the ages.

(Mike Ettner)

For any baseball aficionado, but especially for Boston Red Sox fans, the Library of America has just published a sacred tomb: a reprint of John Updike's famous New Yorker article on Ted Williams' last game for the Boston Red Sox.

Updike's reporting on Williams and his love-hate relationship with Boston, its sportswriters and Red Sox fans is a classic.

Even better, this edition also includes some nifty footnotes by the late Updike, written only months before his death last year, as well as excerpts from an article Updike wrote on Williams for Sport Magazine in 1986 and the obituary Updike wrote for the New York Times Magazine, marking Williams' death in 2002.

Updike's writing on Williams is a treasure trove for baseball fans that could be reasonably described as a holy grail on one of the greatest baseball players of all time. This is a book that should sit on every fan's bedside table to be read and reread even as baseball battles its drug addictions and overpays its current stars. It restores one's faith in the national past-time. Williams was, quite simply a classic. As is this book.

I heard Updike's famous essay read before I read it myself. I listened to it again on the day Updike died. Thank God he was there at Fenway that day when Williams exited the stage of baseball. His account of the game is sheer poetry; a simultaneous dissection of the psyches of Williams and his fans. And now at last it is bound and covered as it should have been long ago. I already regard my copy as an heirloom, a memorable summary of the day when the paths of an MVP and a Pulitzer Prize winner crossed forever.

No one could write better about any subject. Like EB White's best essays, there's no limit to the number of times this one can be reread with joy.

I'm a NY Yankee fan since 1947, but Updike's essay about Boston's Williams is, in my mind, the best essay ever written about baseball ... I keep buying and giving away these exceptionally well-done editions.

I have read Updike's essay many times. It is as all agree, a masterwork. For many it is the beginning of a new kind of sportswriting , more personal, literary, metaphoric. Updike went to bat only one time as a sportswriter and hit the homerun of homeruns.

I have some reservations however about the piece, and the whole take on Ted Williams. For Updike Williams was a consummate, dedicated artist, a man of singular devotion and ability. But Baseball is different from Writing. Baseball is a Team Game.

For Williams whose team was in eighth place in an eight- team league when he hit the homerun in his last time at bat the accomplisments were often solely for himself . For his rival Dimaggio the accomplishments were for a team on the way to winning the pennant. Moreover in the commonplace comparison of the time Willimas went six for six when the Red Sox won 14-3 but Dimaggio went one for four when that one was the winning hit in a key game. There was always the comparison of Williams who did not hit in the clutch the way Dimaggio did.

In other words ,Updike's essay focuses not on the whole story of Williams but rather on his singular accomplishments and virtuoso greatness.

That said it is still a wonderful read done with that Updikean metaphorical precision, that style which seemed to cram each sentence with detailed perception and often beauty.