At Fenway Park on September 28, 1960, Ted Williams hit a home run in his last at bat, an event memorialized by John Updike in "Kid Bids Hub Fans Adieu," a superb article in The New Yorker. Read the full piece here or whet your appetite with this brief excerpt:
<<
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.
>>
Did you know that Williams lost the MVP in 1941, the year he hit .400, and in 1947, when he won the triple crown?
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Is it his head that's been frozen?
Posted by: Laura Orem | September 28, 2009 at 05:48 PM