Our memories of him are frozen forever, back in baseball's golden age.

"Literally a handful: Finnegan was talking about nine games, plus a Red Sox flop"

King -

Your attempt to add emphasis through the ever-so-popular misuse of "literally" (a literal "handful" of an event, do explain?) would cause many late authors to roll over in their graves (although, not literally, of course).

Cheers.

Thanks for the link to a wonderful piece of writing.

A tear came to my eye, as I read your encomium to Updike's encomium to Williams.

It was greatness meeting greatness, as improbable a meeting of Titans as Williams serving with John Glenn.

Nine can be a handful, but you can't hold games in your hand.

My favorite baseball writing was a short story, I think it was by Robert Coover. "The National Pastime". It was about a klutz who feared playing baseball, and how he suffered every time he was forced to play it. He finds redemption through baseball in the eyes of his child in a most wonderful way. A great story. If you've ever been the last guy picked for a team you'll appreciate this story.

That was nice. I haven't been a reader of John Updike, but will keep him in mind. Ted Williams is my second-favorite baseball player. I wonder if Updike ever wrote about Sandy Koufax.

In "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," Updike mistakenly identified Willie Tasby, the Bosox's African-American outfielder, as the player Williams warmed up with before his final game. It was actually Pumpsie Green, the Bosox's African-American infield, with whom Williams had made a point of warming up ever since Green had been the first African-American to play on the last team to integrate.

Updike was apparently seated on the left side of Fenway. A writer for Sport Magazine who also wrote an account of the game, one that sometimes is coupled with Updike's in anthologies, was situated much closer to Williams during the pre-game period warmup, and was also far more familiar than Updike with the players, correctly identified Pumpsie as the Splinter's partner.

Nevertheless, Updike has my eternal gratitude for capturing the essence of Williams and also the atmosphere at Fenway in the years when there was no upper deck and no advertising visible except for a Jimmy Fund sign on top of the right field roof, when you could walk up to the box office just before the game and end up in a great seat. And he wrote this tribute when the Sox stunk, many years before they became the darling of literary types and intellectuals.

In "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," Updike mistakenly identified Willie Tasby, the Bosox's African-American outfielder, as the player Williams warmed up with before his final game. It was actually Pumpsie Green, the Bosox's African-American infield, with whom Williams had made a point of warming up ever since Green had been the first African-American to play on the last team to integrate.

Updike was apparently seated on the left side of Fenway. A writer for Sport Magazine who also wrote an account of the game, one that sometimes is coupled with Updike's in anthologies, was situated much closer to Williams during the pre-game period warmup, and was also far more familiar than Updike with the players, correctly identified Pumpsie as the Splinter's partner.

Nevertheless, Updike has my eternal gratitude for capturing the essence of Williams and also the atmosphere at Fenway in the years when there was no upper deck and no advertising visible except for a Jimmy Fund sign on top of the right field roof, when you could walk up to the box office just before the game and end up in a great seat. And he wrote this tribute when the Sox stunk, many years before they became the darling of literary types and intellectuals.

Forty-plus years ago when I was a new Teaching Assistant at the University of Washington that essay was the first thing I taught. It was also probably the most successful thing I taught all term. It's brilliant, of course, but I would have thought that, far from being obscure, it was in every anthology of American sports writing. If I ever see such a collection that does not include it, I'll know it's not worth buying.

I'm a lifelong White Sox fan.

My all time favorite ballplayer is the Mick.

Right behind him(close behind) is Teddy Ballgame.

I went to my first Sox game, yes the Right Sox;-) in the 40's.

If you think the red ones were bad, you should have gotten a whiff of the white ones.

The union stockyards used to be a little west of Sox park.

We could never tell if it was the stockyards or the Whit Sox that stunk so bad.

There were times when I absolutely couldn't wait to get to the park.Those times were when Teddy Bgame was there.

Then, in the 50's, it was when the Mick came to town.

For those of you who weren't as fortunate to see these terrific hitters, you really missed something.

In the case of the Mick, it was so much more than just a hitter.

He was one totally all around ballplayer.

I just had to sit here and read UpD's entire story.

It was a really nice read.

For me it was the Yankees of Joe Dimaggio and Phil Rizzuto and Mickey Mantle and Joe Gordon and Whitey Ford. In the fifties a kid could be forgiven for thinking they could never die ... a few years later the same kid could be forgiven for thinking the same thing about rock and roll ... a few years after that, the same kid could be forgiven for believing the 49ers who promised they would three-peat in the Super Bowl ... before LT put that hit on Joe in the NFL championship game.

A kid growing up in Boston in the fifties could be forgiven for thinking that one day eternity would break into time and the Red Sox would win the pennant - and in 1967 it actually happened.

But sometimes a day comes when a kid understands that eternity is for the gods and that his team can't hang on to that gold ring. Call it childhood's end.

It's true, it's human, you can blame Ted Williams - the finest hitter the game ever saw - but John Updike takes the longer view.

So does Bart Giamatti, writing about one October 2 now long ago, when Rice came to the plate, "Rice the Hammer of God", needing only one more Rice HR - and ended Boston's pennant drive - ended summer in Boston that year - with a fly to center.

Giamatti doesn't blame anyone. Williams and Rice both made more outs than hits, and so would you and I. He writes, "It broke my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion."

His words appear in a beautiful essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind," online and also reprinted in Phil Coustineau's fine collection "Soul - an archaeology".

You could look it up.

Stephen Voss