The immortal Ted Williams, a temperamental left fielder who spent 21 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, retired from major-league baseball 57 years ago today with a home run in his final at bat, which occurred at Fenway Park on Sept. 28, 1960, in a game against the Baltimore Orioles.
There weren't a lot of fans in the stands that day, but among them was a 28-year-old John Updike, who later wrote an essay entitled Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, which The New York Times once described as “probably the most celebrated baseball essay ever.” Here’s a snippet from that essay, which appeared in the Oct. 22, 1960, issue of The New Yorker.
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around 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, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
