For Roger Angell

As antithetical as it may sound, once someone reaches their early to mid 90s, I begin to believe that they will live forever. I’d be surprised if these nonagenarians feel this way, but from my vantage point, once someone reaches 94, 95, 96, they have surpassed a benchmark of which few achieved and now occupy an almost ageless space. They have already seemingly lived forever, so they will obviously continue to do so. When the American composer Elliott Carter began suddenly churning out pieces at rapid speed in his early 90s, musicologists and biographers deemed this to be his late-late style, having surpassed what was presumed to be the final phase in his career. We place folks in their early to mid 80s to be in their own “late style,” but for those who make it another decade or two with more than enough gas left in the tank, they seem to be set for invincibility. I felt that way about Stephen Sondheim who pasted away in November of last year at 91 (Of course he will finish this long awaited Buñuel musical, how could he not?) and I felt the same about the writer Roger Angell who died yesterday at 101.

When I surprisingly descended into a baseball wormhole at the start of the pandemic, Angell and his insightful, infectious, spirited essays on the game were one of my companions. His analysis is not one of a baseball beat reporter relaying facts and figures (there is plenty of that to be sure), but one of an eloquent and articulate fan who invites the reader to participate in his excitement, disappointment, and astonishment. Like Carter, who met or sat next to or chatted with the likes of Charles Ives, Maurice Ravel, George Gershwin, and so on, Roger Angell had a number of just jaw dropping recollections at his disposal. He saw Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at Yankee Stadium, witnessed Joe DiMaggio’s rookie year, detailed the stadiums of yesteryear which are long gone: The Polo Grounds, Ebbett’s Field, Crosley, Riverfront, Forbes. Even putting baseball history aside, as a fiction editor at The New Yorker, he worked with everyone from Nabokov, Updike, and Thurber (who apparently Angell played Ping Pong with according to David Remnick’s obit this morning). But with all of this, he was never one for the overly sappy nostalgia of the game (“Field of Dreams…I could hardly stand it, it was so sentimental. Those were the good old days in baseball? And the world was good? Give me a break!”). Rather, he made the game itself a thing to be admired for its beauty, as he did in the final essay of his first collection The Summer Game (1972):

“Sit quietly in the upper stand and look at the field. Half close your eyes against the sun, so that the players recede a little, and watch the movements of baseball. The pitcher, immobile on the mound, holds the inert white ball, his little lump of physics. Now, with abrupt gestures, he gives it enormous speed and direction,converting it suddenly into a line, a moving line. …In time, these and other lines are drawn on the field; the batter and the fielders are also transformed into fludity, moving and converging, and we see now that all movement in baseball is a convergence toward fixed points.”

And so began a series of pieces in The New Yorker which would later be collected in more volumes of baseball essays over the course of nearly half a century. He ushered in his own “late style” with collections entitled Late Innings in 1982 and Once More Around The Park in 1991…there were still another thirty baseball seasons still to come.

During the spectacle that was the 1975 World Series between Angell’s long suffering Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds, he detailed the absurd joy of a being a fan, after Carlton Fisk willed a ball into fair territory on the first baseline in order to clench Game 6 in the bottom of the 12th inning, writing:

“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
— Agincourt and After from Five Seasons

It would be wrong to consider Angell solely a great baseball writer. Rather, he is an infectious writer who happened to pick baseball as his subject of choice. He is a joy to read simply due to his masterful wit and style (his stepfather, the equally masterful essayist E.B. White quite literally co-wrote the book on literary style.)

I just recently picked up a copy of Late Innings at a bookstore earlier this week and, due to a No-iPhone-For-A-Month reset, I was toying around with the idea of sending him a snail mail letter, in thanks and appreciation. But now, I send off a simple farewell and thanks into the ether.