By Beaker

In “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” John Updike begins,

“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 Euclidian 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.”

I first came across this article years ago in “The Best American Sports Writing Of The Century.” Updike masterfully wrote about Ted Williams and his final game for the Boston Red Sox.

Here’s another excerpt that may speak to some:

“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 concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, so assiduously refined his natural skills, so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.”

Baseball is tailor made for the lonely - or at least for those not afraid of solitude. I’ve spent many comfortable and painful lonely days and nights listening to the sound of baseball on the radio.

I know. Odd for a sports that’s produced many jerks and assholes who aren’t exactly interested in such things. Life. She’s so contradictory.

Nonetheless, between each pitch the beat and mood of life plays on. Each ball player on the field and person in the stand takes a brief moment to think of what may come next. What was just missed. How a loved one slipped away. Some may look at the sky and breathe in God’s complex air. For the chatty, conversation resumes. But not all are as abstract. They simply chew peanuts, gum and hot dogs and accept existence for what it is. Then another pitch comes in, anticipation is built and then quelled with a ball, strike or hit and the whole process starts again. The permutations of baseball are synonymous with how lives unfold.

An American literary giant, John Updike died this past week. He was 76.