Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

It was originally an essay in The New Yorker, but the Library of America has republished it in a beautiful little volume, complete with the footnotes Updike later added and an essay he later wrote.

The topic? Updike went to the last game Ted Williams ever played. What emerged was this beautiful paean to everything that is beautiful about baseball. I cannot even hope to explain how achingly gorgeous this essay is. You can read the essay online, but then you will be truly missing out on the full aesthetic experience of reading it in this volume. I’m not kidding—if you know someone who enjoys baseball, they will love this book. If you love baseball, just buy it now.

Indeed, if you don’t like baseball, you should still enjoy this book. This is not a prediction; it is an imperative. You should enjoy this book. The tale told here is larger than a report on a game. It is an evocation of an era, a city, and a country, and the people who built that land. This is the story of the time when Giants strode the earth. It is a fairy tale about a knight wearing a baseball uniform. A knight who hit .406 in 1941.

A note on the title: It is, when you first encounter it, a rather odd affair. For example, where is the verb in Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu? “Fans,” “Bid,” and “Kid” are all both verbs and nouns. Parsing it, “Bid” is the verb, “Adieu” is what is being bid. “Kid,” as we learn in the essay, was a common nickname for Ted Williams. So far, so good.

But what are “Hub Fans”? People who really like Hub, apparently. Perhaps you know to what “Hub” refers. I had no idea. The essay never says. If you Google “hub fans,” you get references to this essay. Not helpful. Wikipedia has a list of all the ways “Hub” can be used; none of them are relevant to this essay.

At last, I found it. “The Hub” is an old nickname for Boston. As a typical New Englander, writing in The New Yorker, Updike and the editor just assumed the whole world knows about nicknames for East Coast cities.

Why is Boston “The Hub”? Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man, if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.” Of course. Bostonians really do believe they are the hub of the universe.

Here we have the tale of those Boston fans bidding the Kid Adieu. By the time the game starts in the essay, Updike has crafted an epic tale of those who belonged at the Round Table. The crowd at the game is deftly described.

Williams gets up to bat. And walks. Eventually, he rounds the bases, slides into home, narrowly beating the throw.

“Boy, he was really loafing, wasn’t he?” one of the collegiate voices behind me said.
“It’s cold,” the other explained. “He doesn’t play well when it’s cold. He likes heat. He’s a hedonist.”

That college boy, by the way, was presumably one of the “Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a sufficient quantity of insouciance is saturated with enough insecurity.” A “hedonist” indeed.

After that walk, the next two times Williams came to bat, he flied out.

Then Williams comes to the plate in the 8th inning. Williams was retiring at the end of the season. He would never bat again in the city in which he had built his legend. This was it. The Big Good-Bye. Never again would the crowd be able to cheer their hero. Updike: “I had never before heard pure applause in a ballpark. 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.”

Williams hit a home run.

You should buy this book.

Related Posts:
Fitzgerald, F Scott The Great Gatsby “Gatsby, Huck, and the American Dream”
Smith, Adam The Theory of Moral Sentiments “Imitating Captain Kirk”