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.

Uptych 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 Updike about Ted Williams to a nonfiction

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. It's 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.

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