Wild Card

Sox are in the playoffs! Great. Now we just need to stay healthy, especially Beckett, Lester, and Lowell. My preferred lineup for the Angels series:

1 Ellsbury (CF)
2 Pedroia (2B)
3 Martinez (C)
4 Youkilis (1B)
5 Ortiz (DH)
6 Bay (LF)
7 Lowell (3B)
8 Drew (RF)
9 Gonzalez (SS)

Leave Varitek out. Its obvious he doesn't have the swing he once did, and he can't throw runners out stealing 2nd. The Angels are the most small-ball style team in the American League, so they WILL be stealing bases. Let Martinez take care of it. Varitek can PH if necessary, or get pitchers ready in the bullpen. My suspicion is that Francona will have him catch Game 2 anyway, with Beckett on the mound. Hopefully Beckett has good enough stuff that stealing base runners won't be a huge problem.

Gotta love tonight's lineup - all benchwarmers except for Ortiz.

.406

Today, September 28th, was the final day of Major League Baseball season in 1941, a double-header for the Boston Red Sox. At the end of the previous day's game, Ted "The Kid" Williams had a batting average of .39955 - a number that would have been rounded up to .400 for statistical purposes. Williams, despite the advice of manager Joe Cronin, elected to play both games of the double header, going 6 for 8 with a home run, raising his average to .406 - the last player to hit .400+ in baseball history.

Props, the Big Trip, & Upstate NY

Marching band props have occupied my life this week. Hopefully they'll be done today or tomorrow. Big show on Saturday at Hershey.

Went to see our travel agent (Mike's mom) about our Italy/Greece trip next year. We'll be gone for about 2 weeks, around Labor Day 2010... 4 days in Tuscany, 3 in Rome, 3 in Athens, and 4 in Santorini. Can't wait.

Also decided to make a trip to the Finger Lakes in NY this year, after we initially thought we wouldn't have time to go. Andy and Alison are coming along so we can celebrate Alison's 29th birthday while we go to wine tastings all day Saturday & Sunday.

Fenway

I found this account of attending a Red Sox game at Fenway Park in 2002 on deadspin.com... Hilarious:

The summer before my first year at college my Dad scored tickets for the Red Sox / Yankees at Fenway, something we had always wanted to go to. Believe me when I say that the real action wasn't on the field, but was spread throughout the bleachers. This was the summer of 2002... Fenway was still a place of unabashed debauchery, racist Southies, and DRUNK B.U. students; Not a pink hat to be seen. A quick overview of the stands during the game revealed numerous amounts of fights and no small amount of hot dogs, beers, and plastic ice cream helmets flying back and forth between Red Sox and Yankee fans. Behind my Dad and I sat the biggest stereotypical South Boston resident I had ever encountered; He spent the whole game yelling at the middle aged women in front of us who had unwisely decided to wear their Bernie Williams' jerseys to the game. "Ber-knee! Beeeer-knee! Why are't you in da ghame Berrrr-knee?"

At one point a Yankee fan in front of us was escorted out by security and decided to flip off the crowd as a parting gift; As he was being showered with garbage, boos, and cries of "FAGGOT", I took the remains of my half-eaten hot dog and hit him square in the head with it. My Dad, a lawyer, and usually a model of restraint, turned to me and said, "Nice shot." Never have I felt so close to my Dad.

Weekend

Friday - drove down to West Chester for a party. Got there about 5, met some new people, had some great imported beer. Left between 8:30 and 9, decided to grab food at Burrito Loco. Closed at 9. WTF?! That place was open til 3 AM when I went to WCU. Not cool.

Saturday - EP rehearsal at 10. Got a LOT accomplished. We took the kids to the New Oxford show (Cavalcade) just to get them out for an early season performance. Good way for the newbies to get all the jitters out before our first TOB show at Hersheypark Stadium 9/26/09. Weather was crap all day, off and on mist/drizzle during rehearsal and again during warmup. Stopped for our performance, which was actually quite good for the first time out. Took 1st place out of 7 bands in our division. Stayed for a (mostly) lame judges meeting, got home, crashed.

Sunday - Woke up earlier than I wanted to. I hate that. Went to Giant to get donuts for breakfast, then ended up going to brunch with Williams/Washburn clan at Cracker Barrel. Yum. Came home, cut grass, watched some football, put newly sharpened chain back on the chain saw, trimmed back one bush, cut down 3 others (one left to cut). Had grilled pizza for dinner about 8:30. Watched some more football, Entourage, crashed.

All in all a good, productive weekend. Looking forward to this coming Saturday's 2nd party on the new patio.

9/11

I can remember the exact moment I heard about what was going on in NYC on 9/11.

2001 was my freshman year in college. I had the worst class schedule of all time. Mon, Wed, and Fri I didn't have a class until 2:00 in the afternoon. Tues. and Thurs. I had classes at 8 AM. Basically, I never got into any sleep routine because I always wanted to sleep in M/W/F and had to get up at the crack of dawn on T/Th. 9/11 was a Tuesday, so I had gone to my 8 AM class (I think it was a Geography course), and I remember coming back to my dorm afterward and hearing someone talk about a fire in one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York. I didn't think much of it until I got upstairs to my room - 721 Sanderson Hall - and turned the TV on.

It was pretty crazy to live through those days after 9/11... experiencing college for the first time as a freshman, while this huge crisis was occurring... basically watching the news all day on TV while still going to classes and, slowly, life moving on. Not a day I'll soon forget.

Patio = Finished

As promised, here are a few pictures of the new patio. We finished it on Saturday, just in time to throw a surprise engagement party for Sam and Mike.

Sox

Forgot to post about the Sox last night. Great game... another good outing from Buchholz. Ahead of Texas by 3 in the AL Wild Card.

Oh, and here's out latest Red Sox addition, a new grill cover!

Patio Project Progress

Here are a few pics of the patio so far... I think it should be done today or tomorrow morning:

All the stones we bought and had delivered:














About 2/3 of the way done:





















I'll post more pictures after it's finished!

Quick post

Good rehearsal last night with EP. Kids continue to work really hard. First performance on Friday.

Sox beat the Rays 8-4 last night. Great outing by Lester, Billy Wagner continues to dominate in relief, 6-out save by Papelbon. Youk, Drew, Bay all homered. Moment of the Game:

Amazing catch by Ellsbury with the bases loaded. Saved the win.

Working on the patio tonight, maybe leaving work early tomorrow to hopefully get all of the stones down. Anybody wanna help??

Been awhile...

I haven't updated this blog nearly as much as I originally intended, but hopefully I'll get into the habit of blogging more frequently. Anyway, an update on things...

1. PATIO PROJECT
Most recently, Jo and I finally decided to do the backyard paver stone patio project ourselves, and we started it this past weekend. Unfortunately we picked a rainy weekend. I was off work Friday to get started, so in between rain showers in the afternoon I was able to get most of the sod pulled up. Saturday I finished the sod and tamped the dirt down between (more) rain showers. Finally a nice day on Sunday, where Jo, Sam, and I were able to get a few inches of gravel base put down, as well as the leveling sand. Hopefully I'll get to put the paver stones down this week. Also, we planted a garden this year which had mixed results. Plants grew like crazy, but the tomato plants got some sort of blight before we got much off them. We did, however, get TONS of cucumbers, zucchini, squash, green beans, lettuce, and green peppers. Let us know if you need any.

2. ANNIVERSARY
Jo and I celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary last weekend. Went out to dinner at Devon Seafood Grille in Hershey on Friday; had a band rehearsal, donated blood, and had dinner with Andy and Alison on Saturday; had brunch with Sam and Mike on Sunday, then dinner (more like a feast) at Jo's parents house Sunday evening. Great weekend all around. Oh, and our gift to each other - a new grill!

3. RED SOX
We've had a pretty good stretch lately. Won 10 of the last 14 games, including sweeping the Blue Jays twice, and taking 3 or 4 from the White Sox, despite losing 2 of 3 to the Yankees. Even though we're 6 games behind New York, we are now 3-1/2 games ahead of Texas in the AL Wild Card race. Next series: @ Tampa Bay.

4. NEW CAR
I got a new 2009 Jeep Patriot. The Explorer died, was revived with a used junkyard transmission, limped onto the dealer lot for a $4500 Cash-For-Clunkers rebate, plus another $3500 rebate from Chrysler. Pictures:


5. SUMMER TRIPS
No big summer vacations this year, in saving up for next year's Italy/Greece trip. We did get to Sea Isle City for a weekend for the now-famous (or infamous) George Family Beach Extravaganza, and went out to Pittsburgh for Papa and Dad's birthdays. Next trip, probably to the beach the first weekend in October (after we can take Sydney on the beaches).

I'll post pictures of the patio once we're done.

People Are Dumb

You know what really annoys the hell out of me? People who encounter a little bit of frustration, then spend an hour talking about how frustrated they are. How about, instead of TALKING about your frustration, you WORK ON A GOD DAMN SOLUTION. Get over it and move on. People who dwell on stuff has to be up there on the list of top reasons for violence.

Belligerent Bill is in full force today.

Summer Begins

Well, the Washburn Wedding went off without a hitch. Andy and I killed with our best man speech, there was not much dancing (which saved me from embarrassment), great food, all at a really nice place - The Stone Mill Inn. See Facebook for pictures.

Finally got to give the Stockards the Red Sox History kid book for their baby coming in August. Easily the best possible baby gift the world has ever seen.

I think after much debate, Jo and I have decided to put the paver stone patio in ourselves rather than pay thousands of dollars to have it done by someone else. We've done everything else ourselves so why stop now? Step 1: Demolishing the ancient "pavillion" in our backyard. Maybe I'll just push that damn thing over this weekend when Jolene is in Philly.

R.I.P. Dominic Dimaggio

One of the four Teammates, Dominic Dimaggio, died last night while watching a replay of Thursday's Sox game, a game which we won 13-3 after the Sox scored 12 runs in one inning before recording one out. Always played in the shadow of Joe, but was a better fielder with a stronger arm; and a far better, kinder person. Of the 4, Bobby "The Silent Captain" Doerr and Johnny "Needlenose" Pesky are still with us. Ted "The Kid" Williams died in 2002.

A lifetime .298 hitter, Dimaggio was called "The Little Professor" for his small size and bespectacled eyes, at a time when eyeglasses were rarely worn by professional baseball players. He also holds the Red Sox hitting streak record at 34 games. During his playing years, center field bleacher fans would chant: "He's better than his brother Joe - Dominic Dimaggio." It became a popular phrase in Boston during the 50s. His prowess in the outfield was legendary, so much so that even Ted Williams would yell "You get it, Dom, you get it!" when fly balls were launched toward left-center field at Fenway Park. After retirement, as the years passed on, Williams lobbied fiercly for Dominic's acceptance into the Hall of Fame, without success. In his autobiography, Williams said it was one of the game's biggest tragedies.

Dominic Paul DiMaggio, 1917-2009

Renovation Realities

So recently, my wife decided it would be a good idea to re-do the sunroom. We had done nothing to it since we moved in last Summer. It was dark brown wood paneling; bright green indoor/outdoor carpet; with a table, chairs, and a big buffet kinda thing all painted an odd peach-ish color. Basically, so ugly you could compare it to the worst parts of the Bible. It has been (and continues to be) transformed. Pictures will be forthcoming, but here are the steps that were taken so far:

1. Deciding on paint color. Perhaps the most unnecissarily cumbersome part of the project. Many colors were considered, especially the miriad of colors between light brown and light tan. Eventually, we considered several shades of yellow, finally chosing "Reading Glory." No clue why they gave it that gay name.

2. Priming the walls. Given that the paneling was a dark brown, and we were going to paint it yellow, we primed everything first. A few hours after we finished, I was in the kitchen and looked out to the sunroom, and it was really, really weird to see the room looking so bright.

3. Considering carpet. All I'll say is, after looking at Lowe's, the only one we liked was the only one they didn't have in stock. Ended up being a good thing I guess, because it was burber, and Sydney's paws/nails would've ripped it pretty easily. We're still working on this part.

4. Painting the walls. Two coats, looks pretty good now. Jo and Alison repainted the window frame/trim as well (white).

5. Furniture paint. First it was white, then black, then part black / part white... we eventually went with all black, and I think it was the best choice. We originally tried using a "hammered" look spraypaint, which didn't really have good results. After that, we decided to spraypaint the chairs and table legs, and use rollers to do the top of the table and the entire buffet. They look pretty nice now. The jury's still out on whether we are going to put a varnish or polyurethane over the paint.

6. Yet To Do: get the carpet, put new molding around the bottom of the walls, and hang up some blinds. Should be a really nice room in another week or so. Stay tuned for pictures.

Next Project: The Backyard Patio To End All Backyard Patios.

Mobile Blogging Test

Just checking this out to see if it works... I wasn't aware you could post via e-mail.

Creek Log Jams

After Jolene and I moved into our house this past Summer, we realized that the Yellow Breeches Creek, which was supposed to be flowing along our backyard, was blocked by a logjam, and the creek bed was dry. We also learned that the land across the creek bed from our yard is actually a big island in the creek, with almost all of the water currently going around to the other side. This Spring, our goal is to get water flowing again through the creek bed on our side of the island.   Here are some pictures:

Logjam #1, from the front facing upstream.  Taken from the back corner of our yard.

Logjam #1, taken from the side.

Logjam #1, again from the front looking upstream.

Logjam #1, looking from the back of the jam, facing downstream.

After we discovered this logjam, we noticed that water wasn't even flowing up to it.  After looking around I found a second logjam, about 25 yards upstream from the first.  At that spot, the creek splits and should go around both sides of an island.  The second logjam is right at that split, preventing water from flowing on our side.  Here are some pictures of the second jam:

Logjam #2, facing upstream at a wider angle.  You can see stagnant water at the left.

Logjam #2, again facing upstream.  Water in the foreground is stagnant.  Water in the background is the flowing water of the creek.  It flows straight toward the logjam, but then gets diverted toward the right and goes around the far side of the island.

Logjam #2, from the side.  The water you see was flowing straight toward me when I was taking this picture.  The branch of the creek that flows on the far side of the island is directly behind me.  Our side is to the left.

Logjam #2

Lots of work to do this Spring... waders, chainsaws, and manual labor needed.  Let me know if you wanna help out.

Long Weekend

Jo and I hate going out to dinner on Valentine's Day. We like going places where can order of the regular menu, and on February 14th, there is usually a "special" Valentine's Day menu, featuring fewer options at higher prices. This year we went out for our dinner on Friday. Went to Rillo's in Carlisle, a place we haven't been in probably 6 or 7 years. Had a great bottle of Shiraz, Wishing Tree 2006, from Western Australia. Smooth, not very heavy tannins, would be great to drink anytime, with or without food. Jo had a salmon & crab dish, I had the pasta-variety dish called Daddy's Choice (lasagna, chicken parm, and broccoli fetuccini alfredo). They were out of cannoli, so I had creme brulee for desert, Jo had tiramisu. Jo's desert was better.

Saturday, Jo ran some errands with her mom, stopped at the farmer's market in Lemoyne, then made us dinner. We had a beer/garlic cheese fondue, strip steaks with red-skinned potatoes and asparagus, and pecan pie for desert. Awesome food. Sunday, Jo went in to work for a few hours, while I did some laundry. Had dinner at Jo's parents and Cuff had made homemade ice cream for dessert (which I had never had before). Really good stuff.

Monday we cleaned the house, went to Jo Jo's dinner and had pizza, saw Dean Faulk there. Came home and watched Pitt de-throne #1 UConn!!!! Dejuan Blair had an awesome game... it's amazing how strong he is. Sam Young had a great game as well.

Annoying: Comcast. Awhile ago, our HD channels started coming in grainy or pixelated, then some stopped coming in at all. Last week, some of the non-HD channels started to not come in randomly. A guy came out to check things out on Saturday. He put a booster on, but said the cable line from the pole to our house needed to be replaced. He said they'd be out on Monday to fix it. In the meantime, our internet/phone has been on the fritz. Monday came and went, no Comcast. Called on Monday evening, apparently the time was changed to Tuesday (thanks for letting us know). Comcast = Evil.

STEELERS SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS!!!

STEELERS WIN SUPER BOWL FOR THE SIX-PACK!!!

Jo and I went over to Renee & Brian's last night for a great Super Bowl party. First, a recap of the refreshments (which, had the Steelers not been playing, would've been the most important thing to mention). Wings, perogies, kielbasa, chili, parmesan-artichoke dip, buffalo chicken dip, dream bars, Moosehead, Molson, IC Light (for those who can stand it), and our friend, John Powers Irish Whiskey (TO 'DA SWEED!).

Mike and Sam were there, along with Dom, the Jim Harris clan, Diane, and some other neighbors of Renee and Brian's. Great party, and an awesome game.

And now the two highlights of the game:

#1 - Harrison's 100 YD INT Return for TD

#2 - MVP Holmes' Endzone Corner Catch (Take Two)

All in all, a fantastic game capping a fantastic season. 'Da Stillers lived dangerously all season long - giving up the lead and making a late 4th quarter comeback happened so often it seemed to be part of the game plan. So it was only appropriate that we did it again in the Super Bowl.

SIX TIME SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS! THE SIX PACK! ONE FOR THE OTHER THUMB!

WOOHOOOO!!!

R. I. P. John Updike

Author John Updike passed away on Tuesday, January 27th. Updike was best known for his Rabbit series (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, and Rabbit Remembered) about a former high school basketball player named Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Rabbit Run was included on Time Magazine's list of Best Novels of the 20th Century.

Like me, Updike was born in Pennsylvania, a die-hard Red Sox fan, and worshipped Sox legend Ted Williams. The reason I mention him is not for his novels, but for an essay he wrote for The New Yorker in 1960 called "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," written about the last baseball game played by Ted "The Kid" Williams. I openly admit that I have read the essay multiple times - maybe 10 times in the last year - each time with as much joy as the previous read.

I wanted to put a few of my favorite lines in this space, and tried to, but found myself re-typing most of the essay. So I'll just post the whole thing. If you've never read it, its really a wonder. Many consider it the best sports essay ever written - and many, like me, consider the best essay (of any kind) ever written. It makes you smile, daydream, tugs at your heartstrings. I could go on and on about it, but see for yourself.

"Immortality is nontransferable... Gods do not answer letters."

Go Sox.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
The New Yorker, 1960

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. 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. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17-4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, "You maaaade me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it . . ."

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced "All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say 'There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.' " The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams' public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams' case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren't there. Seeking a perfectionist's vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams' valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

Williams' career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth's], has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O'Neill. It has always been Williams' records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that.

There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams' failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams' depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles' heel of Williams' record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.

Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, "W'ms, lf" was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell "blooper" pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman's head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter's myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers' dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport's poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average-minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

After a prime so harassed and hobbled, Williams was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him—a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, "There's the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you're not sure.") The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.

The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. "I feel terrible," he confessed, "but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park." He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the "leg hits" that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched ("rested," Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said.) Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams' neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams' shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars—Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline—served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy—in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer—gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to be a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair.

Humiliated by his '59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn't come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig's lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott's total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth's unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician's picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb's in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.

In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as "the greatest hitter who ever lived." Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O'Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams' .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth's season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway's, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable "if"—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams' daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors' dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Some day, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men—taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders—who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God's five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists—typical Boston College levity.

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.

A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody's brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words "pride" and "champion" as his text. It began, "Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . ." and ended, "I don't think we'll ever see another like him." Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams' distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.

Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into "In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . ." He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as "knights of the keyboard," but I heard it as "maestros" and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. ". . . And they were terrible things," Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. "I'd like to forget them, but I can't." He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, "I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life." The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, "Ted, you can play anywhere you like." Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate. The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams' retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired—the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams' eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber's control wasn't. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. "Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,'' the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello's David, the third-base bag being Goliath's head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine—flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles—all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh.

One of the collegiate voices behind me said, "He looks old, doesn't he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . ."

"Yeah," the other voice said, "but he looks like an old hawk, doesn't he?"

With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout "Steal home! Go, go!" Williams' speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.

"Boy, he was really loafing, wasn't he?" one of the boys 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."

The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn't budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams' recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4-2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins' string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big "380" painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, "I didn't think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren't good.")

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—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. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

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.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

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, pinch-hitting, 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.