Updike bids Hub adieu...
1932-2009.
"Fenway
Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. 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.
Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its
left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and
fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its
surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday,
September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed
groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking
batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer
seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was
overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in
twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging
competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because
the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were
scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May
and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before
by the insatiable Yankees. 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, TW,
and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL
WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being
read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement
had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for
years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely
accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had
redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced
age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had
grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today...."