The New Yorker Radio Hour - Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game; Plus, Remembering the Composer of “Annie”

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

In honor of The New Yorker’s centennial this year, the magazine’s staff writers are pulling out some classics from the long history of the publication. Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker’s sports correspondent, naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updike, and the “Kid” of the title was Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame hitter who spent nineteen years on the Boston Red Sox. By happenstance, Updike joined the crowd at Fenway Park for Williams’s last game before his retirement, in 1960. Thomas, looking at subtle word changes that Updike made as he was working on the piece, reflects on the writer’s craft and the ballplayer’s. “Marginal differences really matter,” she says. “And it’s those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, a long fly, and a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.”Plus, a visit with one of the great modern practitioners of the earworm, Charles Strouse, who wrote music for “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Annie,” and the theme to “All in the Family.” Strouse died this month at ninety-six. In one of his last interviews he gave, in 2023, he spoke with the Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters about his rivalry with Stephen Sondheim. “Stephen and I were friendly enemies. He didn’t like me much. I didn’t like him less.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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 new yorker.com slash takes. New Yorker.com slash 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. And 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 lesser writer than John Updike.

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. I actually was teaching this piece by John Uptych about Ted Williams to a non-fiction creative writing class that I teach at Harvard. And, you know, this is one of those pieces that I refer to sometimes when I need to enter the right voice,

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, so good at beginnings. Fenway Park in Boston is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. I love that opening line. 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. 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. And he said in the introduction that his plan had been to go visit a paramouron, begin. 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. And he was so moved by what he saw that he felt compelled to write about it. 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, T.W., and, most cloyingly, Mr. Wonderful, would play in Boston. Ted Williams was this boyhood hero. Sometimes, you know, we can go back and find all the great reasons that Uptake loved him, but I think some of them were, you know, 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. 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, 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. 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. Whenever Williams appeared at the plate, pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, ringing 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 bright field in Fenway and the heavy air and casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Palarsik 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. 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 Uptake actually worked over most, both in the original process of writing in with the typewriter. You can see all these Xs out and also with his pencil after. He's really, 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 along the first basement'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 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. And when you see when you look at the draft, you know, 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. 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. And Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.

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 socks rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the day. 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 weight, 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, smooth, 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 Tappenzie 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 bullpin 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 hit 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 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 now. Gods do not answer letters. I just love that line. God's do not answer letters. His editor on this piece was William Sean. 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, the previous senator, Harold Ross had not liked baseball among many other things.

But William Sean did, and, you know, there weren't a lot of sports writers writing like this. In some ways, he really kind of 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. It happens to be about a great human being who is playing a great game. 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. Excerpts from HubFans Bid Kid A-Doo 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. You can find Updike story at New Yorker.com and you can also subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour

and we're going to close with the tribute to one of the great modern practitioners of the mysterious art of the earworm. Charles Strauss wrote for film and television, and he won Tony Awards for Broadway shows, including Bye Bye Birdie. Gray skies are going to clear up, but on a happy face. But he'll be best remembered for the musical Annie,

the gateway drug to Broadway for generations of kids. Hello, we're going to do it. You're a new face. 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. I'm going to record if that's okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, I'm going to suck my slum again.

The scene in his apartment, you know, it was a lot. It was tegotic. He's currently going through his archives, just the boxes and boxes, completely covering the floors, and he's doing this in order to donate them to the Library of Congress. Yeah, I guess the Library of Congress, which collects life itself, yeah, they asked me. I mean, I wouldn't ask to do this. But in this box, here tell me, we found, oh, my God, so heavy. But there's this, the record from All in the Family? I wrote it.

Oh, right, the theme song for the show. Norman Lear wanted to have a theme, but he couldn't afford a big orchestra. and I brought up the fact that when I was a kid, we all used to sit around and my mother used to play, and so that's how I wrote it. But boy, the tunes glenneler play songs that made the hit parade. Nyes like us we had it made. Those were the days, and you knew where you wanted,

that she made up herself. Grants were girls and men were men. Mr. We could use the Herbert Hooper again. But the song itself, as did the program, became very successful. Yeah. You know, there's this huge framed picture of Jay-Z and the framed CD and cassette tape from the album that says, Volume 2, Hard Knock Life.

Oh, it says from 1998. It's the hard knock. From standing on the corners popping, to driving some of the hottest cars New Yorkers ever seen for dropping some of the hottest verses rapists ever heard from the dope spot with the smokelock King in the murder scene.

Well, what was it like working with Jay-Z? There he is. He was surrounded by bodyguards and all kinds of people there was finally one point in my life where we got together and sat and talked. Oh, because he also produced the most recent Annie movie remake from 2014. I do remember I kind of won his heart in a way when I said, you've got to bring your wife with you.

You know, I was being kind of snotty, and he must have told her. that. Beyonce? Yeah, it was a nice relationship. Yeah. But most of the time, he was beyond such a small person as me. You know, in one of the boxes, 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. So this is dated July 22nd, 2008. And he says, congratulations on your memoir that was just published. And then he says, quote, I bought a copy yesterday and naturally immediately looked up references to myself. And then he supplies two corrections for you in case there are any future reprintings, he says. Was that kind of thing in character for him?

Stephen and I were friendly enemies. He didn't like me much. I didn't like him less but on the other hand I respected him a lot Stephen and I knew each other so long that

I stood danger of invading his territory but even that was not we went we came into two different worlds but we were very old friends he was the

he was my oldest friend in the theater. I mean, right now, Annie, is like surrounding us, right? There's posters on the walls and pillows, but also in this box, it's

Annie stationary and letterheads. Also, there's the Andy cookie jar in the shelf and this Andy piggy bank with her big song tomorrow. When you originally wrote it, did you think that you'd struck gold? I didn't think. I thought

that was a disposable. item that we needed necessary to keep the curtain up or down. But so many songs in musicals go through that emotion, you know. If a guy is a good theater composer, he learns to kind of think with two voices, so to speak. One is, I love who, my darling. The other is, I love who my darling, but keep it going going this song because we have to bring in the detective soon.

I would say tomorrow falls into that category. I needed some time. It's usually always that way. When you're writing for the theater, the book writer most usually says he needs a song there or you yourself, rather than here's my symphony to the stars. And so you originally thought that that song was disposable, as you said.

In hindsight now, what do you think it is that makes that song so great? I don't know. I mean, maybe I do know. Maybe I'm being modest. I do think I'm talented. I think I write a song and I wanted to please the audience. I didn't know that it was going to be so big. And so I'm very proud if it made it tomorrow.

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. That's what a popular song should do. It should sound as though it was always there, but it never was until you thought of it. And I think tomorrow came to me that way. It's a complicated melody. I'm looking at posters on my, and a lot of songs I've written that have not been classics like that.

I mean, I think that fortunately and unfortunately, But a song gets as big as tomorrow has gotten and has remained, it gets bigger than you, right? Your name in many ways is no longer associated with it. Has that bothered you in your career? Not if I hear this long, no, not really. I mean, I never got what Lenny himself did. Irving Berlin did.

No, I never had that luxury. And here's another Charles Stroud's song. I never had that kind of reputation. It's a funny thing about composing. It comes from your heart in a way, but it really comes from nowhere. It's God-given. I would think that's a God-given gift

that I've been fortunate enough to get... I'm getting old, you know. Look how I'm walking. I don't play it too well now. This is an old come out. Tomorrow, bet you bought a dollar that tomorrow. There'll be some just thinking about tomorrow.

Tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow. till there's none when i'm stuck with a day that's great and lonely i just stick out my chin and grin and say whoa oh this is i'll come about tomorrow so you've got to hang on Till tomorrow Come what may Tomorrow Tomorrow, tomorrow Tomorrow, tomorrow

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. See you next time. They did that pretty well. That's fantastic.

Thank you. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boteen. And we had additional production this week from Jonathan,

Mitchell. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.