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/takes, newyorker.com/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.

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 less a writer than John Updike. Updike describes Ted Williams's 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.

Louisa Thomas: I actually was teaching this piece by John Updike about Ted Williams to a nonfiction creative writing class that I teach at Harvard. This is one of those pieces that I refer to sometimes when I need to enter the right voice, when I need to remember how to start, when I need to get in the mood. This piece is so good at mood, so good at beginnings.

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Brian Morabito: Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.

Louisa Thomas: I love that opening line.

Brian Morabito: 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.

Louisa Thomas: 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. He said in the introduction, that is, 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. He was so moved by what he saw, that he felt compelled to write about it.

Brian Morabito: 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.

Louisa Thomas: Ted Williams was his boyhood hero. Sometimes, we can go back and find all the great reasons that Updike loved him, but I think some of them were 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.

Brian Morabito: 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, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose.

Louisa Thomas: 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.

Brian Morabito: 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 Pilarcik 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.

Louisa Thomas: I had the chance actually the other day to go back and look at his draft, and there is this passage, and it's one of the passages that Updike actually worked over most, both in the original process of writing, and with the typewriter, you can see all these X's out, and also with his pencil after, he's really trying to get it exactly right, so that there's this line. It went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line--

Brian Morabito: 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. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.

Louisa Thomas: When you look at the draft, it went over the first basement's head and rose. Originally, it was just, and rose along a straight line, and then he made it, rose slowly along a straight line, but then it's not slowly, it's meticulously along a straight line. There's just kind of constant emendation, refining, you know, getting it right, because these marginal differences really matter, and it's those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop up, between a long fly and between a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.

Brian Morabito: The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning lights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a somber and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will. The right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy. The season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and 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 nontransferable. The papers 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.

Louisa Thomas: 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 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, but William Shawn did. There weren't a lot of sports writers writing like this. In some ways, he really 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, happens to be about a great human being who is playing a great game.

Brian Morabito: 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.

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David Remnick: Excerpts from "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" 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 story at newyorker.com, and you can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well.

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