He’s as sharp at 99 as most wish to be at half his age. Let’s have another MLB season ticket with Roger Angell’s literary companionship.By Yours Truly
https://calltothepen.com/2020/02/26/mlb-will-roger-angell-take-us-once-more-around-the-park/For so many years, so many decades, spring meant two things: training, and Roger Angell. A spring training that wasn't covered by Angell's gimlet eye and lyrical hand just didn't seem like spring training at all. I haven't seen anything from Angell this spring training, thus far, and perhaps it's asking too much for him to take us once more around the park at 99.
Or is it?
Willing Davidson, another writer at
The New Yorker, Angell's literary home since around the last Brooklyn Dodgers pennant, visited Angell at home for the magazine's recent anniversary issue. Davidson
muses that, where it's "tempting" to consider Angell as "a plaque on the wall reading, 'This was
The New Yorker," Angell is more likely to say in reply, "I learned something truly amazing today!"
You could figure that reply just by reading Angell from spring training or any other time during baseball season or postseason. If you get nothing else out of an Angell essay, you should learn or re-learn something amazing that he learned, on the day he wrote or the day you read or re-read.
It began when a legendary
New Yorker editor, William Shawn, sent Angell to spring training 1962 with one instruction: "See what you find." That'd teach Shawn. Among other things, the son of a
New Yorker editor (Katharine S. White) and stepson of a
New Yorker legend (E.B. White) found the embryonic New York Mets and their equally surrealistic fans.
Concurrently, America found a baseball writer who was neither a rough-and-tumble newspaper or wire service barfly nor a dilettante deigning to step down from the tower to slum and snark.
"[T]hat was very lucky for me when I thought it out,†Angell once told
One Day in Fenway author and
Salon writer Steve Kettmann. “It occurred to me fairly early on that nobody was writing about the fans. I was a fan, and I felt more like a fan than a sportswriter. I spent a lot of time in the stands, and I was sort of nervous in the clubhouse or the press box. And that was a great fan story, the first year of the Mets. They were these terrific losers that New York took to its heart."
It's not that daily beat writing hasn't produced its lyricists and true wits, of course. They occupy places on my bookshelves: Ira Berkow, Thomas Boswell, Alison Gordon, Ring Lardner, Jim Murray (if you can imagine the offspring of Lord Byron and James Thurber, Murray was he), Shirley Povich, Damon Runyon, Claire Smith, and Red Smith. My life's blessings have included reading Berkow, Boswell, Gordon, Murray, Povich, and the two Smiths in my newspapers for more mornings than I have time to count.
And, picking up the occasional
New Yorker to read the latest Angell exegesis, or buying his remarkable anthologies
The Summer Game,
Five Seasons,
Late Innings,
Season Ticket,
Once More Around the Park, and
Game Time. You could own those six books and, examining as they do baseball from 1962 through 2003, have the game's answer to Edward Gibbons's
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Except that no Caesar had to try hitting Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, or Greg Madduz, or getting something past Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, or Ken Griffey, Jr.
"It happened without any plan at all from me," Angell told Davidson about that first assignment to spring training. "I didn’t see it as a career move, I mean. And the long trail of those pieces and books happened one by one and grew only out of my own pleasure and excitement over the endless complexities and beauties of the game."
I'd like to think that's why
San Francisco Chronicle writer Susan Slusser, when she was president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, launched the movement that finally conferred upon Angell what no writer not tied to a daily baseball beat had ever earned, the Hall of Fame's J.G. Spink Award, in 2014. She knew an often-forgotten parallel between baseball and its writing: A solid team must have at least one man who hits for distance.
Which, I asked writing on Angell's 99th birthday last September, would you prefer—the customary clanking strain of sound-biting, or living, breathing prose (and wisdom) such as that in which Angell once concluded a remarkable study of the delightful but ill-fated relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry?
We want our favorites to be great out there, and when that stops we feel betrayed a little. They have not only failed but failed us. Maybe this is the real dividing line between pros and bystanders, between the players and the fans. All the players know that at any moment things can go horribly wrong for them in their line of work — they’ll stop hitting, or, if they’re pitchers, suddenly find that for some reason they can no longer fling the ball through that invisible sliver of air where it will do their best work for them — and they will have to live with that diminishment, that failure, for a time or even for good. It’s part of the game. They are prepared to lose out there in plain sight, while the rest of us do it in private and then pretend it hasn’t happened.
Angell has appreciated and written much and well of the baseball ties that bind generations without caring to flog them with nostalgia's buggy whip. But that hasn't stopped him from flogging the contemporary game's dubious acoutrements with the whip they deserve so often.
"The modern game is all bangs and effects: it’s summer-movie fare, awesome and forgettable—and extremely popular with the ticket-buyers," he wrote around the turn of this century. Making himself kindred with the too-short-lived commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, likewise a man who feared for his game when he pondered the ballpark's graduation to a cacophonous video arcade.
But Angell has also been an empath obeying particular boundaries of reason with assorted fans of assorted teams, even if he reaches further. He's appreciated the paradoxic hysteria of early Mets fans and the protracted sufferings of fans in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, and Philadelphia. When those fans experienced the sweet liberation of triumph, Angell rejected romanticism but understood deeper, as when the Red Sox finally ended their actual or alleged curse sixteen years ago:
The Redbird collapse can probably be laid to weak pitching, unless you decide that the baseball gods, a little surfeited by the cruel jokes and disappointments they have inflicted on the Boston team and its followers down the years, and perhaps as sick of the Curse of the Bambino as the rest of us, decided to try a little tenderness.
It would be priceless to behold Angell's observations and insights into the bitter coming-to-terms Houston Astros fans now undergo as they strain to sustain their love of their team in the explosion and aftermath of the Astrogate electronic cheating scandal. They are learning the hard way what once had to be learned by Chicago White Sox fans battered by the Black Sox scandal, and they deserve nothing less than our compassion and Angell's succor.
Angell has come to terms with his mortality better than his readers might come to terms with a baseball season lacking the pleasure of seeing the spring or the season through his eye and pen. Several months before his windup of the 2004 Red Sox's return to the Promised Land, he wrote a prize-winner that became the title of a charming collection of appreciations (
This Old Man: All in Pieces) and a deeper insight into the man himself, a mere 93 when he wrote:
“Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up†was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.
For myself, I expect nothing, but I merely hope for one more Angellic spring training dispatch, one more season of Angellic game observations, one more postseason of Angellic reason, rhyme, and reflection. He becomes a centenarian come September 19 and once more around the park would be more than welcome, if his remarkable constitution allows.
I've said it before, but I'll say it once more. The baseball historian Peter Golenbock was wrong to call him baseball's Homer. Homer was really ancient Greece's Roger Angell.
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