On the Splendid Splinter and Writing

Today is the 50th anniversary of Ted Williams’ final game with the Boston Red Sox.  Williams, who always had a contentious relationship with the fans and media, left in perhaps the most poetic way possible: a solo home run in his final at bat. The seat that the ball hit has been immortalized at Fenway; it stands as the lone red seat in a sea of navy, wooden chairs in the bleachers.

The game was perfectly encapsulated in a beautiful essay by John Updike in the New Yorker – his only true entry into the sports writing genre (one could argue that Rabbit, Run was sports related, but we prefer to think of it as a story that had a tint of sports – a light shade of the sports literature spectrum).  For those with any interest in baseball or even just writing, we can’t recommend enough taking 20 minutes out of your day to read the essay.  A few of our favorite pullouts:

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams’ head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams’ conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.

And also:

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.

And the closer:

One of the scholasticists behind me said, “Let’s go. We’ve seen everything. I don’t want to spoil it.” This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams’ last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams’ homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4–3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinchhitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5–4. 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.

And finally, we highly recommend a few more minutes to read this weekend’s New York Times for some perspective on what makes the essay a masterpiece:

It’s not too much to say that “Hub Fans” changed sportswriting. Affectionately mocking the tradition of sports clichés (as in the title, which didn’t actually appear in any of Boston’s seven dailies at the time, but easily could have), the essay demonstrated that you could write about baseball, of all things, in a way that was personal, intelligent, even lyrical.

We’ve always had a fondness for this essay and the story of Williams’ final home run because our dad’s first game at Fenway was Williams’ final.  For our family, today marks he 50th year of Red Sox fandom.

On Reviews of Scott Pilgrim

We finished the Scott Pilgrim book series this week.  We’ve been increasingly reading graphic novels (suggestions welcome!) and once we started Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, we were hooked on the series.  The books invoked video-game playing nostalgia, sarcastic slacker humor, an endearing protagonist and the incongruous juxtaposition of a superhero life with the humdrum of regular life.

We were pleasantly surprised when the New York Times book review wrote about the series today.  (Two things: We found the review from Bryan O’Malley’s Twitter feed rather than the paper, for what that’s worth. Also, the book came out a few months ago and they take an hour or so to read, so we’re not sure what the timeliness angle was for reviewing it.)  The below quote perfectly summed up the series and even included one of our favorite lines:

The comic, like a good game, is partly about storytelling, but it’s also about the small pleasures of game-play, those constituent units of hedonic currency that any gamer viscerally understands, like the feel and timing of pulling off the Shoryuken move in Street Fighter, or the sound of Mario’s fist exploding a brick in the Nintendo classic Super Mario Bros. In the “Scott Pilgrim” comics, the unit of pleasure, the pellet that keeps you reading, is the sly aside, the mumbled afterthought, the bits of knowing, self-conscious meta-commentary sprinkled throughout. Pleasure comes, too, in the form of worthwhile diversions (a recipe for vegan shepherd’s pie, chords that show you how to play along with a Sex Bob-omb song) and an abundance of zingers, usually aimed at Scott. (Kim Pine: “Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face.”)

Well said.  Much better than we ever could.