R.I.P John Updike

The Batter Who Mattered by John Updike

Ted took his time leaving this world, and he's not quite out of it yet. He is cryonically frozen in Arizona, drained of blood and upside down but pretty much intact, waiting for what resurrection technology can eventually produce. This bizarre turn in the Williams saga, which two of his three children claim to be his own wish, accords with a general perception among his admirers that there was something about him extremely precious, something worth preserving.

To those of us who saw him at the plate, he seemed the concentrated essence of baseball: a tall, long-necked man wringing the bat handle and snapping the slender implement of Kentucky ash back and forth, back and forth, in his impatience to hit the ball, to win the battle of wits and eye-hand coordination that, inning after inning, pits the solitary batter against the nine opposing men on the field.

For most of two decades -- 1939 to 1960, with time out for service in two wars -- he was the leading reason that people went to Red Sox games in Boston. In those decades he played on the American League All-Star team 18 times and had the highest overall batting average, .344. The decades since his retirement, full of careers uninterrupted by national service and bolstered by a livelier ball and new techniques of physical conditioning, have seen him slip lower in the record lists; his home run total of 521, third behind Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx in 1960, is now tied for 12th, with Willie McCovey. Just last season, the phenomenal Barry Bonds broke one of Williams's records -- his on-base percentage of .551, set in 1941. Bonds also, in each of his last two years, exceeded by a good margin a total in which Williams for many years had ranked second only to Ruth, that of walks drawn in a single season.

One Williams statistic, however, gathers luster rather than dust as the years go by -- his 1941 season average, .406. For more than 60 years he has remained the last of the .400 hitters, his final average nailed down in a doubleheader in Philadelphia that he could have sat out; he was batting .39955, which rounds up to .400, but elected to play and went six-for-eight in the two games. In fact, he hit .400 or higher in three seasons, counting the truncated bits of 1952 and '53, when he was drafted into the Korean War. In 1957 he hit .388, including three home runs in five official at-bats when he came off a sickbed to pinch-hit. That year and the next, he twice became the oldest man to win a batting title. These latter seasons, when he was playing with an accumulated, underpublicized burden of aches and pains for indifferent teams, cemented his claim as the greatest hitter of his era, an era that included Joe DiMaggio and Stan Musial.

When an athlete or opera singer or exhilarating personality dies, it is the live performance we remember, the unduplicable presence, the shimmer and sparkle and poignancy, perceived from however far back a row in the audience. The swing -- the coiled wait, the popped hip, the long and graceful follow-through that left his body yearning toward first base -- was a grand motion, never a lunge or a hasty fending or a minimalist Ruthian swat; it took up a lot of space and seemed fully serious in its sweep. At 6-foot-3, he was one of the taller men on the field, and we in the crowd brought with us an awareness of his dangerous rage to excel; of his on-field tantrums; of his spats with the press, his struggles with marriage and his failure, as the years ground on, to make it back to a World Series and redeem his weak performance in 1946. We knew he never tipped his hat to the crowd when he hit a home run, and many of us loved him more for it, not less. He was focusing on his task. Success and failure in baseball are right out there for all to see. We could read in his body language that he wanted to be the best, that this was more than a game or a livelihood for him. He was paid, toward the end of his career, a record $125,000 a season, and after his worst season, his only sub-.300 season, in 1959, he asked management for a pay cut.

In that long stretch after 1946, as the excellent Sox teams of the 40's yielded to the mediocre 50's teams, Ted kept up the show. The intensity, the handsome lankiness, the electric aura as the lineup worked around to his appearance were summer constants. Fenway Park, in those days, was not always full; the advance-ticket crowds from Maine and New Hampshire hadn't yet materialized in that thinner era. I bought in for a few dollars to his last game, and the park was more than half empty.

He hit a home run in his last time at bat, an event I wrote about, in part because his departure, which took with it the heart of Boston baseball, had been so poorly attended.

With retirement, slowly, he became what William Butler Yeats called ''a smiling public man.'' The stern, temperamental baseball perfectionist dropped his concentrated air of work in progress and joined us on the sidelines. He managed a team, the Washington Senators, with acumen and patience. He faithfully showed up at Red Sox spring training and was generous -- in a voice bellicose in part because flying jets in Korea had half-deafened him -- with advice and praise. He fished as obsessively as he had analyzed the geometry of the strike zone. He continued to be the symbol of the Jimmy Fund, which he had animated with a thousand personal encouragements of cancer-stricken children. He used his Hall of Fame acceptance speech to plead for the admission of the great players of the old Negro leagues; in an age when the major leagues brimmed with unreconstructed rednecks, he welcomed baseball's integration and befriended the Red Sox's belated black recruits.

He drew closer to his three children, and the public drew closer to him. The new journalism generated interviews in which his language, long held to the locker room, was revealed as bumptiously obscene and enthusiastic. Compared now with DiMaggio, he appeared more open, less wary, with nothing to hide and everything to share, as the darkness of failing eyesight, the helplessness of strokes and daily dialysis and the desperate operations that the wealthy and famous must endure closed in. On two occasions his aging body was hauled to Boston, and he made a show of tipping his cap to the crowd. But we didn't need that. The crowd and Ted had always shared what was important, a belief that this boy's game mattered terrifically.

A Darker Thing

Last week my co-worker asked me if I thought it was “a sign of trouble” that she was pre-self medicating herself with aspirin to avert the sugar-headache she was going to get from eating a plate of chocolate covered cookies.

Without missing a beat, I replied, “Gosh, I don’t know. Is it bad to take depressants to get to sleep after I’ve taken stimulants to stay awake? Judy Garland much?”

And then I giggled. Because, even though the subject matter was dicey, I was witty.

My co-worker looked at me with a blank face. I’m not certain she’s ever watched The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, or The Pirate. She does not know who Judy Garland is.

Sadly, she didn’t get the joke. Even sadder, she didn’t get the reference.

Yes, Virginia, it is bad to pre-self medicate oneself in order to compensate for the anticipated effects of indulgence.

Are You Paying Attention?

So familiar, so so painfully familiar!

Frozen Moment In Time

I Am Somebody

I Am Somebody
by Lisa Jenkins

Does it matter so much to you,
what shapes the words I speak?
The silences I show this world
tell more of who I am.

The why, the where, the when and how
are nothing more than sound.
The noise shatters and I am heard;
I am somebody, found.

Name That Rant

Yesterday, Adolf Hitler and his sisters, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie, were removed from the family's New Jersey home by the Division of Youth and Family Services. See more here.

Wow. Seriously? Are we to believe these people had their children's best interests in mind when they chose these names?

I recently was handed the spelling for a newborn boy: Jahzen Stiv (pronounced Jason Steve). Five years from now his parents will be lamenting, "Gosh, I don't know why Jahzen has such trouble with Reading and Spelling.".

There are twin girls from my parents' last town of residence named Ima and Ura. Not so bad, you think? Their last name: Pig. Go ahead, say the names out loud, I'll wait. Kids on the playground aren't cruel enough? These parents needed to provide a head start in berating their own children? It's just mean.

In this valley, there is a young girl named Djur'Majesty. Can you imagine her Freshman year in High School?

I'm all for individuality, creativity and honoring family names handed down through generations. I know boys, with the last name Wolf, named Blue and Grey. My own children are named Morganne Ashlei and Colton Briar. These are unique names with character and, here's an important component, accepted spellings that reflect our Celtic heritage.

Parents aren't marketing a new car when they christen a child, they are defining the first impressions of a lifetime. If they cannot show compassion and care when choosing the identifier their child will carry for eternity, I see very little encouragement that they will provide the nurturing and guidance needed to raise that child to be a kind, productive, contributing member of society.

Here's what I've thought for quite some time now: if you can't name a child responsibly, you don't deserve the gift and YOU DON'T GET ONE!