The major league baseball season is winding down, even if it feels like it just began (because it did). Youre excused, however, if you havent been paying attention.

It has been an abysmal couple of months in Boston. The Red Sox, who only two years ago won 119 games and the World Series, have managed a dubious double. Theyre boring and irrelevant, on their way to losing close to 40 games in an abbreviated 60-game season.

Heres a quickie quiz. What do Mike Kickham, Phillips Valdez, Robert Stock, Andrew Triggs, Austin Brice and Jeffrey Springs have in common? Ding-ding-ding. Youre a winner if you guessed theyve all pitched for the Red Sox in 2020.

Now be honest. You didnt have a clue. I didnt either. I cheated and looked it up.

Where have you gone, Drew Pomeranz? Or John Wasdin, for that matter.

So lets turn to a more enjoyable subject this morning. That would be the 60th anniversary of Ted Williams final game. It was September 28, 1960, a Wednesday afternoon at Fenway Park and those Red Sox were also dreadful, closing out a 65-89 campaign, a mere 32 games behind the Yankees.

Of course, all good Sox fans only remember that the great Splendid Splinter went out with a thunderous bang, smashing a towering home run in the final at bat of his Hall of Fame career. He circled the bases, crossed home plate and disappeared into the first base dugout.

Many of those fans and they would have to be about 70 years or older today might tell you they were there for the moment immortalized by John Updikes seminal New Yorker essay Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. In truth, Updikes lyric little bandbox of a ballpark, was sparsely filled with only 10,455 on hand, and who knows how many had left Fenway by the eighth inning when Teddy Ballgame connected off Baltimores Jack Fisher.

I was not there that day. I was just 6 years old when Williams retired in 1960 and never saw him play a game in his 21-year career.

Over 43 years at the Times, my bosses wallets provided me the privilege to witness many wonderful achievements. I covered Carlton Fisks epic homer (If it stays fair) in the 1975 World Series. I saw a Muhammad Ali title bout in New Orleans. I watched Seve Ballesteros win a Masters green jacket. I witnessed Marvin Hagler destroy Tommy Hearns in Las Vegas. I was at the finish line when Meb Keflezighi emotionally won the 2014 Boston Marathon the year after the bombing.

But never seeing Ted Williams at the plate is regret.

However, a suitable consolation prize came on a March day in the 1980s when the Red Sox still held spring training in Winter Haven, Florida. Williams was a special instructor and would arrive in camp each year, mostly to spend time with minor leaguers.

One morning I skipped those tedious drills of pitchers covering first base and wandered down to a back field at Chain OLakes Park. Williams was there in a golf cart, wearing baseball pants, a tattered blue nylon jacket and a Red Sox cap. He was in his mid-60s then, but still a man in full, animated and loud.

Williams sat close to the batting cage to observe young players hitting. He would bark, his language often laced with salty curses. Occasionally he would climb from his cart with a bat and, as Updike wrote, wring resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity.

Williams was dissecting the science of hitting. (He wrote the book with John Underwood with that title). He was teaching, his strong hands, like a surgeons, sliced through the air at imaginary fastballs, his eyes blazing as if Jack Fisher was again 60 feet, 6 inches away. Hed spit some tobacco juice and return to his golf cart. And resume cursing.

I spent most of the morning as close to Williams as possible, a fly on the wall or bug in the grass. It was as if watching Michelangelo at work on the Sistine Chapel or the sculpture of David. Who knows if the wide-eyed rookies understood the genius of the lessons? Updike again, writing after Williams final majestic swing in 1960:

The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. 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 didnt 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. Gods do not answer letters.

Williams was 83 when he died in 2002. He once famously said his goal was to walk down the street and have folks say there goes the greatest hitter who ever lived. For sure, he has a seat at the table. He won the batting title six times and had a career average of .344. In his final season, at 42 years old, he batted .316 with 29 home runs. And, of course, he hit .406 in 1941.

Sadly, in death, Williams is not remembered enough as a baseball legend or an American hero who served his country in two wars as a fighter pilot. Instead, there are those sordid stories of his head being severed and frozen, with his torso. They are stored at an Arizona cryonics company in a macabre, twilight zone hope he can be thawed out and resurrected.

But not here. I choose to see him still on that sun-splashed spring day. He was no longer The Kid, but he was every bit the one and only Ted Williams, and that fond memory endures.

Retired Cape Cod Times sports editor Bill Higgins can be contacted at bhiggins54@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillHigginsCCT

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Bill Higgins: Talking Ted, 60 years after his final, heroic swing - Cape Cod Times