Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game; Plus, Remembering the Composer of “Annie”

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Speaker 12 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 13 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 It's a series we call Takes, and you can find them all gathered at newyorker.com slash takes.

Speaker 11 New Yorker.com slash takes.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And the title is Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 14 I actually was teaching this piece by John Updike about Ted Williams to a nonfiction creative writing class that I teach at Harvard. And,

Speaker 14 you know, this is one of those pieces that I refer to sometimes when I need to enter the right voice,

Speaker 14 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,

Speaker 14 so good at beginnings.

Speaker 11 Fenway Park in Boston is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.

Speaker 14 I love that opening line.

Speaker 11 Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping type Easter egg.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And he said in the introduction that his plan had been to go visit a paramour on Beacon Hill.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And he was so moved by what he saw that he felt compelled to write about it.

Speaker 11 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, Mr.

Speaker 11 Wonderful, would play in Boston.

Speaker 14 Ted Williams was this boyhood hero. Sometimes, you know, we can go back and find all the great reasons that Update loved him, but I think some of them were

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 11 My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company.

Speaker 11 For me, Williams LF was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going three for five. He radiated from afar the hard blue glow of high purpose.

Speaker 14 He felt a sort of sympathy with him because Updike was this great practitioner of his craft as

Speaker 14 Williams was. And they both cared tremendously about these details.
And there was something so pure about the way they took their swings.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 This man, you you realized, and here perhaps was the difference greater than the difference in gifts, really intended to hit the ball.

Speaker 11 In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center.

Speaker 1 In the fifth, we thought he had it.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Al Polarsik leaned his back against the big 380 painted on the right field wall and caught it.

Speaker 11 On another day, in another park, it would have been gone.

Speaker 14 I had the chance actually the other day to go back and look at

Speaker 14 his draft. And there is this passage, and it's one of the passages that Updike actually worked over most,

Speaker 14 both in the original process of writing in with the typewriter. You can see all these X's out, and also with his pencil after.
He's, you know, he's really,

Speaker 14 really trying to get it exactly right so that, you know, there's this line. It went over the first baseman's head and rose.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit.

Speaker 11 For me, Williams is the classic ball player 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.

Speaker 14 And what you have, when you see, when you look at the draft, you know, it's the, it went over the first baseman's head and rose. Originally, it was just and rose along a straight line.

Speaker 14 And then he made it rose slowly along a straight line. But then it's not slowly, it's meticulously along a straight line.

Speaker 14 And I mean, 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.

Speaker 14 And Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Stood and applauded.

Speaker 11 Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause.

Speaker 11 No calling, no whistling, just an ocean of hand claps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand.

Speaker 11 It was a somber and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy, the season was exhausted.

Speaker 11 Nevertheless, there will always lurk around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 Fisher, after his unsettling weight, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed.

Speaker 11 The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long, smooth, quick, exposed naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time.
Williams swung again, and there it was.

Speaker 11 The ball climbed. on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field.

Speaker 11 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 Tappanzee Bridge.

Speaker 11 It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass.

Speaker 11 The ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpin met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Speaker 11 Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran out the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 16 He didn't tip his cap.

Speaker 11 Though we thumped, wept, and chanted, we want Ted for minutes after he hid in the the dugout.

Speaker 11 He did not come back.

Speaker 11 Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved.

Speaker 11 But immortality is non-transferable. The paper 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 know.

Speaker 11 Gods do not answer letters.

Speaker 14 I just love that line. Gods do not answer letters.

Speaker 14 His editor on this piece was William Sean.

Speaker 14 He said it was the best thing that they'd ever published in the magazine about baseball, although Updike sort of made a quip that that wasn't saying much because they didn't really.

Speaker 14 The previous editor, Harold Ross, had not liked baseball among many other things.

Speaker 14 But William Sean did. And,

Speaker 14 you know, there weren't a lot of

Speaker 14 sports writers writing like this.

Speaker 14 In some ways, he really kind of

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 It happens to be about a great human being who is playing a great game.

Speaker 11 On the car radio, as I drove home, I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York.

Speaker 11 So he knew how to do even that. The hardest thing.

Speaker 11 Quit.

Speaker 13 Excerpts from Hub Fans Bid Kid Ado by John Updike were read for us by Brian Moribito. And we heard from staff writer Louisa Thomas, who writes our column, The Sporting Scene.

Speaker 13 You can find Updike's story at newyorker.com, and you can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well.

Speaker 13 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come.

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Speaker 13 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we're going to close with a tribute to one of the great modern practitioners of the mysterious art of the earworm.

Speaker 13 Charles Strauss wrote for film and television, and he won Tony Awards for Broadway shows, including Bye-Bye Birdie.

Speaker 1 Gray skies are gonna clear up, but on a happy face.

Speaker 13 But he'll be best remembered for the musical Annie, the gateway drug to Broadway for generations of kids.

Speaker 1 Hello, what are you going to do?

Speaker 1 I am Jeffrey at Shigerh.

Speaker 13 Charles Strauss died this month at the age of 96. One of the last interviews he gave was to our producer Jeffrey Masters, who went to see Strauss at his home in Manhattan back in 2023.

Speaker 15 I'm going to record if that's okay.

Speaker 1 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm going to suck my flavor again.

Speaker 15 The scene in his apartment, you know, it was a lot. It was chaotic.
He's currently going through his archives, just the boxes and boxes completely covering the floors.

Speaker 15 And he's doing this in order to donate them to the Library of Congress.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess the Library of Congress, which collects life itself, yeah, they asked me. I mean, I wouldn't ask to do this.

Speaker 15 But in this box,

Speaker 15 here, tell me, we found, oh my God, so heavy.

Speaker 15 But there's this, the record from All in the Family.

Speaker 1 I wrote it.

Speaker 15 Oh, right, the theme song for the show.

Speaker 1 Norman Lear

Speaker 1 wanted to have a theme, but he couldn't afford a big orchestra.

Speaker 1 And I

Speaker 1 brought up the fact that when I was a kid, we all used to sit around, and my mother used to play.

Speaker 1 And so that's how I wrote it. But boy, the tunes Glen Geller play songs that make the hit parade.

Speaker 1 Guys like us, we had it made.

Speaker 1 Those were the days, and you knew when you looked at that she made up herself. Girls were girls, and men were men.
Mr. We could use

Speaker 1 Herbert Hooper again.

Speaker 1 But the song itself, as did the program, became very,

Speaker 1 very successful.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And you know, there's this huge framed picture of Jay-Z

Speaker 15 in the frame to see the in cassette tape from the album that says Volume 2, Hard Knock Life. Oh, it says from 1998.

Speaker 17 From standing on the corners ropping to driving some of the hottest cars New York has ever seen, for driving some of the hottest verses rappers ever heard.

Speaker 17 For the dope spot with the smoke blocks, pinging the murder scene. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 What was it like working with Jay-Z? There he is.

Speaker 1 He was surrounded by

Speaker 1 bodyguards and

Speaker 1 all kinds of

Speaker 1 people.

Speaker 1 There was finally one point in my life where

Speaker 1 we got together and sat and talked.

Speaker 15 Oh, because he also produced the most recent anime movie remake from 2014.

Speaker 1 I do remember I kind of won his heart. in a way

Speaker 1 when I said, you got to bring your wife with you. You know,

Speaker 1 I was being kind of snotty and

Speaker 1 he must have told her that.

Speaker 15 Beyonce?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a nice relationship.

Speaker 1 But most of the time,

Speaker 1 he was beyond such a small personage as me.

Speaker 15 You know, in one of the boxes,

Speaker 15 where is it? We found a letter from Stephen Sondheim. And there's a funny part to it.
Do you mind if I read it? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 15 So this is dated dated July 22nd, 2008. And he says, congratulations on your memoir that was just published.

Speaker 15 And then he says, quote, I bought a copy yesterday and naturally immediately looked up references to myself.

Speaker 15 And then he supplies two corrections for you in case there are any future reprintings, he says.

Speaker 15 Was that kind of thing in character for him?

Speaker 1 Stephen and I were friendly enemies. He didn't like me much.
I didn't like him less. But on the other hand,

Speaker 1 I respected him a lot. Stephen and I knew each other so long

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 I stood danger of invading his territory. But even that was not.

Speaker 1 We came into two different worlds. But we were very old friends.

Speaker 1 He was my oldest friend in the theater.

Speaker 1 Maybe far away

Speaker 1 or maybe real nearby.

Speaker 1 I mean, right now, she, Annie,

Speaker 15 is like surrounding us, right? There's posters on the walls and pillows, but also in this box, it's Annie stationery and letterheads.

Speaker 15 Also, there's the Annie cookie jar on the shelf and this Annie piggybank with her big, big song, Tomorrow. When you originally wrote it, did you think that you'd struck gold?

Speaker 1 That I didn't think.

Speaker 1 I thought that was a disposable

Speaker 1 item

Speaker 1 that we needed necessary to keep the curtain up or down.

Speaker 1 But so many songs in musicals go through that

Speaker 1 emotion, you know.

Speaker 1 If a guy is a good theater composer, he learns to kind of think

Speaker 1 with two

Speaker 1 voices, so to speak. One is, I love you, my darling.
The other is, I love you, my darling, but keep it going, this song, because we have to bring in the detective soon.

Speaker 1 I would say tomorrow falls into that category.

Speaker 1 I needed some time. It's usually always that way when you're writing for the theater.

Speaker 1 The book writer most usually says he needs a song there, or you yourself, rather than here's my symphony to the stars.

Speaker 15 And so, you originally thought that that song was disposable, as you said. Now, in hindsight, now, like, what do you think it is that makes that song so great?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I mean, maybe I do know.
Maybe I'm being modest.

Speaker 1 I do think I'm talented.

Speaker 1 I think I write a song and I wanted to please

Speaker 1 the audience. I didn't know that it was going to be so big and so I'm very proud if it made its mark.

Speaker 15 I think that tomorrow with it there's this like beautiful simplicity to it where you can hear it and then you know almost like sing along with it during each reprise.

Speaker 1 That's what a popular song should do. It should sound as though it was always there,

Speaker 1 but it never was until you thought of it. And I think Tomorrow came to me that way.
Ba-da-bitty, beep, ba-ba-da,

Speaker 1 beep, ba-da, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-da, bee-deep, bum. It's a complicated melody.

Speaker 1 I'm looking at posters on my

Speaker 1 and there are a lot of songs I've written that have not been

Speaker 1 classics like that.

Speaker 15 I mean, I think that like fortunately, and unfortunately, when a song gets as big as Tomorrow Has Gotten and has remained, it gets bigger than you, right?

Speaker 15 Your name in many ways is no longer associated with it. Has that bothered you in your career?

Speaker 1 Not if I hear this song, no, not really. I mean, I never got what

Speaker 1 Lenny himself did. Irving Berlin did.

Speaker 1 No, I never had that luxury. And here's another Charles Strauss song.
I never had that kind of reputation. It's a funny thing about composing, it comes from

Speaker 1 your heart in a way, but it really comes from

Speaker 1 nowhere. It's God-given.
I would think that's a God-given gift that I've been fortunate enough to

Speaker 1 get.

Speaker 11 I'm getting old, you know. Look how I'm walking.

Speaker 1 I don't play too well now.

Speaker 1 The sun will come out.

Speaker 1 Tomorrow,

Speaker 1 bet you bought a dollar that tomorrow

Speaker 1 there'll be sun

Speaker 1 just thinking about

Speaker 1 tomorrow

Speaker 1 clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow

Speaker 1 till there's none

Speaker 1 when I'm stuck with a day

Speaker 1 that's grave

Speaker 1 and lonely.

Speaker 1 I just stick out my chin

Speaker 1 and grin

Speaker 1 and say,

Speaker 1 Whoa,

Speaker 1 this is like a marvel

Speaker 1 Tomorrow.

Speaker 1 So you got to hang on till tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Come what may

Speaker 1 tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Tomorrow.

Speaker 13 The late Charles Strauss, who died earlier this month. He spoke with Jeffrey Masters in 2023.
That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening.
Hope you had a great holiday.

Speaker 11 See you next time.

Speaker 1 I master that pretty well.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 12 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 15 Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louie Mitchell.

Speaker 4 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine.

Speaker 13 And we had additional production this week from Jonathan Mitchell.

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Speaker 5 With vet recommended scientifically proven nutrition and high-quality ingredients and wellness recipes, every picky kitty can find a meal with taste, texture, and variety they adore.

Speaker 5 Wellness Pet Food: Feed well, Be Well.