Roger Angell

This week's New Yorker had an annual favorite of mine: Roger Angell year-end essay on the baseball season. This year's article is titled "Daddies Win," with its subhead, "Can we love the Yankees now?"

Angell is the long-time fiction editor of The New Yorker, but as a sideline has been writing stunning literary baseball pieces for almost fifty years. I discovered him quite by chance, and fortunately early in my life. Some relative got me a gift of his book The Summer Game, presumably because as a boy any book about baseball would have seemed a good bet. It was a collection of his pieces covering baseball from 1962 to somewhere in the late sixties or early seventies, mostly long, comprehensive season summations, and a game-by-game description of that year's Fall Classic. Most of these contests he covers as a sportswriter, in the press box, but not always: his essay on the 1964 World Series was covered in various New York City bars, where he watched with the hoi polloi.

I ate that book up, along with the follow-ups Late Innings and Season Ticket, and then it dawned me on I didn't have to wait for a compilation, I could simply read his articles as they appeared in the magazine, and began to scope the newsstands in late November/early December, when they usually appeared. Once the issue comes out, I put aside everything and settle in for a good read.

Unfortunately, Angell's pieces are not quite what they used to be. For one, they're much shorter. At his heyday, the essays may run over 5,000 words, maybe even 10,000. The piece in this week's issue is more like 2,500, and in a more breathless prose. He doesn't even mention any of the National League playoffs, for instance. Of course, this may be due to his age--he's 89 years old, and, not to be morbid, this is one annual pleasure that I can't imagine will last too much longer.

Baseball attracts the most literary of fans, and Angell is one of its more literary chroniclers. He's constantly throwing in classical and literary allusions. For instance, in describing the Tigers-Twins play-in game of this year: "Their manager, Jim Leyland, stood in the late going with one foot up on the step of the dugout and the same gaunt Dorothea Lange expression on his face that we saw back in 1991," or describing A.J. Burnett as a "Tom Joad with beads." This is all done with a cheerfulness, not pedantically. Angell also is a master of describing the mechanics of action, such as he does with Cliff Lee's delivery: "He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producing it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings back across his waist."

As I think back I remember some of my favorites of his. There was "Up at the Hall," his mid-summer visit to baseball's Hall of Fame. He had been reluctant to go, but ended loving it. His best season recap has to be "Not So, Boston," a deconstruction of the 1986 season. For Angell, this had a lot of personal resonance, as his two favorite teams, the Red Sox and the Mets, faced each other in the World Series. I remember much about the article, such as his recalling a reaction to a critical play in the Red Sox-Angels ALCS, shouting "oh no!" and disturbing a sleeping pooch at his feet, or when Dave Henderson hit a key home run in the Series writing "Hendu!" on his scorecard. The best was the title itself, a palindrome that struck deep in the heart and psyche of Red Sox Nation.