The recent baseball cover of The New Yorker reminded me that it’s been a while since we last saw a piece by the venerable Roger Angell, one of the people I would dearly love to have as a guest for a Bookshelf Conversation.
But give the man a break, as Wendy Parker, host of the wonderful Sports Biblio Digest noted in her latest report, Angell turned 99 last month. (I recommend subscribing to her weekly newsletter.)
Rather than reinvent the wheel in writing about his legacy, Wendy has graciously consented to let me post that portion of the newsletter, which came out before the start of the World Series, in it’s entirety.
Roger Angell turned 99 years old in September, and as I’m writing this, the New York Yankees are playing the Houston Astros in the American League Championship Series.
Those were the teams playing in Angell’s last published baseball piece for The New Yorker, in May 2018. Like much of his work in recent years, geared more for online consumption rather than print, it’s a sparkling gem, taut and enlightening, with a deft touch of the pen that’s been widely envied for more than 60 years.
Since publishing his first baseball story for The New Yorker and the magazine’s “The Sporting Scene” column in 1962, Angell has compiled an erudite, memorable and graceful body of work, baseball and beyond, that anyone appreciative of good English should savor.
While he’s been the magazine’s fiction editor and has written two memoirs and many short fiction pieces, Angell’s baseball writing has earned him most of his fame.
He’s been honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame with the J.G. Spink Award and is a recipient of the PEN America/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing.
He started hanging around Major League parks as baseball was moving away from being a writers’ game, ushered into the television age.
His baseball writings are stuffed with observances of how the game and American society were changing, and not always for the better, in his estimation.
As he notes in “Let Me Finish,” his marvelous memoir published in 2006:
“Sports were different in my youth—a series of events to look forward to and then to turn over in memory, rather than a huge, omnipresent industry, with its own economics and politics and crushing public relations.”
Elsewhere, in a 1992 article entitled “Early Innings,” he is clearly wistful:
“Most of American life, including baseball, no longer feels feasible. We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it.”
Yet Angell is a master at navigating through the modern maze of the business of baseball, and the social mores that also changed the game. In the last of his six baseball collections, “Game Time,” published in 2003, Angell’s long takeout of Bob Gibson is a sterling example of a genre of its own.
Published as “Distance” in 1980, Angell does plenty of reporting before he visits Gibson at his home in Omaha, meeting a deeply introspective and fiercely intelligent retired pitcher, wtith memories of his days with the St. Louis Cardinals sharply resonant. Gibson was often aloof to the press, and as Angell notes:
“I have considerable sympathy for any writer who had to ask Bob Gibson some sharp, news-producing questions two or three times a week over the span of a decade or more, but wanting Gibson with a sunny, less obdurate temperament would be to want him a less difficult, less dangerous man on the mound—not quite Bob Gibson, not quite a great pitcher. The man is indivisible, and it is the wonder of him.”
For Angell admirers, taking in his work is a great revelry, and like Gibson, the writer also is indivisible. Tackling his work, even in collected form, can be a good bit of work even for dedicated readers.
For those wanting a single-volume summary, or introduction, to Angell, a new biography is a welcome addition. Joe Bonomo’s “No Place I Would Rather Be,” published earlier this year by the University of Nebraska Press, is a 173-page account of Angell’s baseball writing, for the most part.
Angell’s early years are discussed, growing up as the stepson of famed writer and stylist E.B. Wright, his boyhood in New York City and summers in Maine and on a grandparents’ farm in the Midwest, as well as service as a military unit publication editor while serving stateside in World War II.
Bonomo, who teaches English at Northern Illinois University, introduces readers to other baseball stories Angell wrote before The New Yorker, including a 1954 article for Holiday magazine, “Baseball–The Perfect Game.” This is “prime Angell,” Bonomo writes:
“Angell outlines for himself and his readers what about the game might deserve his, and our, sustained, thoughtful attention, beginning by observing that the game binds us in its community-making rituals, inspiring self-identification, hometown pride and fierce loyalties. After sharing fond memories of watching Joe DiMaggio and others play, Angell explores what will become one of the central themes in his baseball writing: the paradox of the supreme difficulty of the game and the apparent ease with which its players play.”
It’s an astute observation that carries so much of the rest of the book, as Bonomo explores the maturation of Angell as a writer. He learned much from Red Smith, Arnold Hano and John Updike, whose most famous sports story, in The New Yorker, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” chronicles Ted Williams’ last game in 1960.
Bonomo, who had access to the writer’s notes, acknowledges the “fortune and good timing” that guided Angell’s long career. He started to find his baseball writer’s voice while excitedly covering a Braves-Yankees spring training game in 1962, as aging hurlers Whitey Ford and Warren Spahn caught his eye:
“Struck by the paradox of aloneness while surrounded by a community of like-spirits, Angell’s joy blends with bitter sweetness, without a drop of treacle.”
As Angell eased into his new role, baseball was changing rapidly, first with expansion in the late 1960s, and then free agency with monster salaries for superstars in the 1970s, made possible by television deals that endangered the fiscal health of the minor leagues.
Bonomo writes that during this time, Angell’s moodiness, about baseball and American society, was obvious, and led him to write “as close to purple as he’ll get in his writing.”
The nearly church-like act of attending a game at a ballpark, how Angell first experienced the game, had been replaced not only by the noise of TV, but the “vulgarity” of futuristic venues like the Astrodome, where for many fans the game is secondary to socializing and luxuriating in modern conveniences.
But it was the ballplayers, managers, owners and people of baseball that intrigued Angell the most. In examining his Gibson story, Bonomo writes that Angell sees Gibson “as emblematic of the price of fame, to both the athlete basking in praise and the fan lofting it.”
That mutual tension has escalated since Gibson’s time, of course, staggeringly so, with labor issues, including strikes and the walkout that ended the 1994 season without a World Series.
It’s the games, especially in the post-season, where Angell also excels, as Bonomo revels in the writer at work during the 1975 World Series between the Reds and Red Sox, unafraid of admitting to a certain sense of fandom.
When the Mets rallied to beat the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series. Bonomo writes that Angell’s story notes were flooded with rooting observations: “I think that I’m a METS FAN,” and there are references to the Mets as “we” in the margins.
As his fame increased, Angell bristled at being called baseball’s “poet laureate.” Nor did he accept descriptions as a baseball historian or essayist, as he tried to explain in the late 1980s:
“It seems to me what I have been putting down for a quarter century now is autobiography: the story of myself as a fan.”
The World Series starts Tuesday, and it appears it will be the second fall classic in a row without Angell’s byline. But’ we’re eternally enriched by all the words he’s put on paper, and in the ether, as a writer and fan extraordinaire.
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