As part of a grand centennial year celebration, an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour featured “Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game,” a remembrance that “naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updike, and the “Kid” of the title was Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame hitter who spent nineteen years on the Boston Red Sox. By happenstance, Updike joined the crowd at Fenway Park for Williams’s last game before his retirement, in 1960. Thomas, looking at subtle word changes that Updike made as he was working on the piece, reflects on the writer’s craft and the ballplayer’s. ‘Marginal differences really matter,’ she says. ‘And it’s those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, a long fly, and a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.’

Excerpts from ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ by John Updike, were read by Brian Morabito.”