Roger AngellReseñas

From 2022:
Roger Angell is, or rather was, a celebrated Baseball writer who did most of his writing from the fan’s perspective. This book had been on my reading list for probably 10 years or so and it took me this long to get to it. Which says something about how long my reading list is and why I haven’t read that one book you recommended to me a couple years ago yet. What made The Summer Game so surprisingly interesting to me was that a good portion of it deals with the first few seasons of the Baltimore Orioles as they try to patch together a contending team. For me, the book shadowed my experience of becoming a shiny new real fan of baseball and the Orioles this year. I picked them randomly based on a completely subjective set of criteria and what I accidentally got in return was a surprising club that looked to be on the rise at last. I knew none of this at the time, of course, but neither did Angell realize what Baltimore was going to do with their seasons at the time he wrote about them. So, in that way the book was a pleasing echo.

Summary: A collection of essays covering the 1982 to 1987 seasons, from spring training to the drama of the championships, and all the skills of players and managers and owners required to compete at the major league level.

“Don’t you know how hard this all is?”

TED WILLIAMS, ON BATTING IN PARTICULAR AND BASEBALL IN GENERAL
If there is a theme to this installment of Roger Angell’s articles on baseball, it is the conversations Angell has with different players and even an owner, all that illustrate what a challenge it is to do every aspect of Major League Baseball well. A number of the essays recount the answers of players and coaches to the question of “How do you do what you do?” What does it take to catch well for example. The biggest part is working with pitchers, yet the all stars are always the ones who hit. They may not be the best at their work with pitchers. We learn how a catcher must in a single motion catch, stand, and throw to have any hope of catching a base-stealing runner.

He takes us through the infield and the particular demands of each position. We learn what a mental game playing first base is. So much at every position is positioning for each batter, knowing your pitcher. He spends a good deal of his time with Dave Concepcion, a short stop star of the ’80s, learning about how he learned to make the long throw on a hop to first base on artificial turf because it was actually faster.

Included is an article on Dan Quisenberrry, a submarine ball relief pitcher for the Royals. We catch him at his peak in 1985 when he was nearly unhittable. We learn about everything from how he learned the motion, which is actually far easier on the pitching arm than throwing overhand to the aggressive mindset of relief pitchers. We learn about his repertoire of pitches and the attitude of flexibility of being prepared to pitch in any game that comes with relief pitching. In later articles, we also see Quisenberry’s decline, particularly after Dick Howser stepped down. The chemistry was never the same.

And then, of course, there is hitting and all the little things that go into hitting well, and as one of the best, Ted Williams says, how hard it is. We learn that basically batters want to hit a fastball. We get all the little nuances of bat weight, stance, grip on the bat, and swing, and how easy it is to get out of the groove.

Then there are the players. In this period he covers the last game of Carl Yastrzemski, the great Boston player, Jim Kaat, after a twenty year career as a pitcher, and Johnny Bench, all who played their last in 1983. We have the account of Pete Rose’s 4192nd hit, surpassing Ty Cobb, and the comparison showing how superior Cobb’s accomplishment was in far less games at a higher batting average. Rose just kept playing. Then there are the young pitchers of the era, Dwight Gooden and Bret Saberhagen in particularly.

As always, Angell seems at his best in recounting championships, in this case in particular, the 1986 Red Sox-Mets World Series and particularly the disappointing Red Sox loss that turned the tide in the fifth game. Then there is the amazing 1984 Tigers team with all their hitting, power, and speed, which finally buried the Padres.

Angell covers the rise of drug use among players, the advent of drug testing, and some of the great players who got ensnared in cocaine use. The sad thing was that apart from a few teams, the emphasis seemed less on rehabilitation and more on “gotcha.” He writes about all the pressures and temptations that came with the big money of this era.

The book ends at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown during a Hall of Fame induction. By the time Angell was done, I found myself mentally adding Cooperstown to my bucket list. He writes, “The artifacts and exhibits in the Hall remind us, vividly and with feeling, of our hopes for bygone seasons and players. Memories are jogged, even jolted; colors become brighter, and we laugh or sigh, remembering the good times gone by.”

Angell captures the fleeting wonder of the game and how amazing the players who perform at a high level for ten years or more. It is indeed hard to do so well, and hard on bodies, especially as they age. The arc from spring to autumn, both of seasons and careers in some way is a parable of the fleeting nature of our lives, as well as the glory of our existence.

I was looking for a light, fun, eminently readable summer book, and this one really fit the bill. This one contains fond, well-written portraits of Angell's parents, his famous stepfather, and his editors and his co-workers at the New Yorker. It's got digressions on some of his favorite things, which include baseball, martinis, the automobile, the movies, sailing, and golf. We hear about what it was like to travel in Europe before the airplane flooded the continent with tourists and what it was like to spend summers in Maine during the Depression. We hear about the author's creditable but bloodless military career in the Second World War and about how he went from being a wannabe writer to being a real-deal writer and how E.B. White went from being a real-deal writer to being a real-deal farmer. Although Angell's rolodex wasn't nearly as extensive as Truman Capote's, we hear about a lot of other notable twentieth century writers and personalities, many of whom got to know in their off-hours as they hung around or passed through New York and others that he personally published and edited. We hear, in short, about an pleasant, interesting, privileged, and extraordinarily lengthy life. Angell tells the stories he's got to tell very well. it's not for nothing that his mother's second husband was the man who gave us "The Elements of Style": his prose is economical, direct, precise, and elegant. I suspect that while writing these pieces he was becoming one of the last individuals in a generation that was slowly sliding out of view. When writing on cars, or going to the ballgame, or corresponding with his New Yorker colleagues, he seems to want to give the reader a sense of how certain things were done before a cascade of technological advances changed them irrevocably. Angell's hardly a nostalgist -- it's clear that he's given some thought to how memory can be, by turns, both true and tricky. But as I read "Let Me Finish," I sort of started to think of the author as a kind of last witness, and I wonder if he did, too. We're talking about a guy, after all, who saw the Giants play at the Polo Grounds and regularly went to lunch with William Shawn on the way to becoming a centenarian. Frankly, I'm just glad that he got it all down on paper, and that he did it so well.

I suppose I should warn readers that, if it wasn't already obvious, "Let Me Finish" is a book for a certain type of reader. Angell is responsible as anyone for the New Yorker's literary and cultural aesthetic, and readers who don't much cotton to that erudite, cosmopolitan, expensively educated, and left-leaning worldview should probably steer clear of this one altogether. To give the man some credit, Angell has no illusions about the role that money and privilege played in his life, and he doesn't dwell on it or get defensive. He was born something of a New York Brahmin and spent time as both a free-spirited a boho private school kid and an Ivy Leaguer. But it's hard to get away from the fact that many of the experiences he relates in "Let Me Finish" are fairly exclusive to the caste which the author belonged. Even so, Angell works to impress upon the reader that money and connections can only protect you from so much. This point is emphasized in the book's last, and perhaps best, essay, "Hard Lines," in which the author tells us about a good friend of his who died young, leaving behind two daughters. Nor is this an aberration, exactly: at other points, we hear about schoolmates lost in the War, friends lost to drink, and a surprising number of divorces and remarriages. "Hard lines," we learn was a college-kid phrase he once used to telegraph that it's usually best to just bear up and get on with it. The author wrote and edited, and, perhaps most importantly, just got on with it for a hundred years. This isn't exactly a heavy read, but it is, in its own small way, an intelligent and inspiring one.½

A random collection of letters, stories, and essays only a handful about baseball. It has that New York feel.

Compilation of Roger Angell’s essays about baseball, written for the New Yorker during the 1962 – 1971 seasons. He recaps each year’s World Series, but most of the highlights for me were the sections of local flavor, such as visiting Spring Training, describing the rollercoaster ride of a New York Mets fan, covering the early days of the Houston Astrodome, observing the arrival of “sports as entertainment” (which continues to this day), recounting the French terms used by the dual-language Montreal Expos, putting forth views on expansion and the attendant increase in playoffs (which was just beginning back then), and relating the sights and sounds of what it was like to attend games in various stadiums across the country. The last essay, The Inner Stadium, explores the timelessness of baseball, and how events and players can be clearly recalled from memory no matter how much time has passed. Angell’s prose is top notch, evoking the spirit of the period in a vivid manner. His love of the game shines through. Published in 1972, it is a product of its time, so there are a few references that may not sit well with women or other groups. Highly recommended to baseball fans, especially those interested in reading about the history of the game.

Published in 1977, covering the titular five seasons from 1972 to 1976, this book is a throwback to a prior era in baseball with top-notch writing. Angell wrote this series of essays for the New Yorker, so each is a standalone article with a particular topic and, taken as a whole, provides a striking picture of what the game was like at the time. The publication date of the article is shown at the top and the articles are not arranged in sequential order.

It highlights notable achievements in the sport at the time, such as:

• • Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record


• • Nolan Ryan completing his third and fourth no-hitters (which baseball fans know expanded to seven by the end of his career)


• • Lou Brock setting records for base stealing

Angell relates what he considered at the time to be an adulteration of the sport:

• • Initiation of the designated hitter in the American League, in part to shore up attendance
  
• • Obvious impact of corporate thinking in baseball
  
• • Beginning of free agency and player salaries rising to unprecedented levels (a harbinger of even higher salaries to come)
  
• • Increase in night games and related changes due to television coverage
  
• • Artificial turf, and its increase in wear and tear on the athletes
  

He also shares several human-interest stories, such as:

• • Steve Blass suddenly and mysteriously losing his effectiveness as a pitcher
  
• • The antics of Charles O. Finley and his colorful Oakland A’s
  
• • Conversations with old-style Giant’s owner Horace Stoneham
  
• • A group of three Tigers’ fans keeping stats and reacting to the ups and downs of the season
  
• • Inside look at traveling with a veteran baseball scout, Ray Scarborough, as he evaluates prospects for the Angels
  

Angell takes a look at just about every aspect of the game, including labor issues, owners, coaches, managers, the Commissioner’s Office, star players, fringe players, scouting, the draft, minor leagues, fans, umpires, rain delays, the baseball itself, teams of note (A’s, Reds, Mets, Tigers, Pirates, Yankees, and more), statistics, records, stadiums, and synopses of games. I particularly enjoyed the quaint descriptions of the Spring Training environment, prior to a time when fans flocked to Arizona and Florida to see their favorite teams get ready for the season. Baseball has changed significantly since the 1970’s but this was a time when many of the seeds of current trends were sown. Angell’s obvious love of the game shines through his vivid portrayal of the sights, sounds, emotions, and personalities involved. Avid baseball fans will enjoy this compilation, especially those interested in nostalgia and the history of the game.

Summary: Roger Angell essays covering the seasons of 1972 to 1976 that arguably transformed baseball into the sport it is today.

I’ve been discovering the marvelous baseball writing of the recently deceased Roger Angell, one of the great baseball writers. This book includes essays from the seasons of 1972 to 1976, my college years. One of the marvels of this collection was simply to relive in the reading the historic seven-game series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox in 1975. It was the era of the Big Red Machine, Yaz, Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Luis Tiant with the Red Sox (the latter yet another great player traded away by the Indians!).

Along the way, he reminded me of the Oakland A’s championship teams united by their love of winning and their shared resentments of Charlie Finley, the brilliant and flawed club owner. By contrast, Angell recounts an afternoon watching the Giants in the twilight years of Horace Stoneham’s ownership, a gracious host.

We read of the final games of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, as well as the years of Nolan Ryan’s greatness. He also writes of Steve Blass, who threw an amazing World Series game with the Pirates, and in subsequent years lost his control. He could pitch well in practice, his arm was sound, but he could not get his head sorted out. And finally he hung it up.

He takes us behind the scenes, at spring training games, the rebuilding of both Yankee Stadium and the Yankee team and Walter Alston’s brief playing career and the end of his managerial leadership of the Dodgers. We learn about the reserve clause that bound players to their teams, the fight to gain free agency, the owners lockout, and subsequent agreement that changed baseball as players won larger salaries and became more mobile. Angell tells the other side, about how many players want to remain in a community and hated trades.

One of the “behind-the-scenes” accounts in the book was Angell’s trip with Ray Scarborough, an Angel’s scout as he evaluated players. We learn what scouts looked for in pitchers (body, mechanics, and a good fastball with control) and hitters (good contact, whether they got hits or not) and the fraternity among them even though they scouted for rival clubs. It all came down to the draft and who chose who.

It was a time of change with the corporatization of the game, artificial turf, a changing of the guard of stars, and the power struggle between the Players Association and owners. But so much of this book just revels in the game, the ups and downs of each season, rain delays, and the quirks of each ball park, the contenders, the playoffs and the World Series. Angell reminded me of games I’d seen and players I remembered: Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente, Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson and Johnny Bench and Pete Rose (alias Charley Hustle).

For the young fan, the book tells us something of how we got to the present. For older fans, it is a time to remember. For all of us, Angell’s descriptions invite us to a special kind of fantasy baseball, reliving in our minds real games and personalities of the past.

Summary: A collection of Angell’s essays covering the ten seasons of Major League Baseball from 1962 to 1971.

This year we lost Roger Angell, the long time writer for The New Yorker, at the ripe old age of 101. He was a shaping force at the magazine as well as being considered by some, “The Poet Laureate of baseball.” I knew of Angell’s writing, but it was not until now that I discovered why he was so esteemed. Quite simply, he gave words to what any of us who love the game feel about its attraction. The final essay of this book, “The Interior Stadium” gets as close as anything I’ve read to describing the game’s mystique:

“Form is the imposition of a regular pattern upon varying and unpredictable circumstances, but the patterns of baseball, for all the game’s tautness and neatness, are never regular. Who can predict the winner and shape of today’s game? Will it be a brisk, neat two-hour shutout? A languid, error-filled 13-2 laugher, A riveting three hour, fourteen-inning deadlock? What other sport produces these manic swings?”

The Summer Game collects articles Angell wrote for The New Yorker from 1962 to 1971, which is quite wonderful because this was the time when I most avidly followed the name, reading The Sporting News and watching every World Series game I could (when I was not in school). He begins with spring training at the camp of the New York Mets, who were destined to become New York’s lovable losers until late in the decade, when they became champions. He describes games at the old Polo Grounds before Shea Stadium was built and the “Go” shouters.

He traces the championship teams of the sixties and especially the World Series matchups between them: the Yankees and the Dodgers, the Giants, the Cardinals, the Red Sox, the Twins, the Mets, the Reds, the Orioles, and the Pirates. There are all the stars I grew up with–Mays, Maris, and Mantle, Koufax and Gibson and the generation that followed, Yastrzemski, Rose and Perez, Clemente and Stargell.

As the players changed, so did the stadiums. Angell describes the demise of the old box-like stadiums with seats close to the game for the bigger stadiums in the round, used for multiple sports in many cases but with fans much more distant. It is ironic that most of these stadiums that were “new” when Angell wrote have since been demolished in favor of parks much more like the old fields with modern amenities. Even the shiny new Astrodome, although still preserved, no longer serves as a baseball venue.

The heart of the book is Angell’s accounts of the World Series games of each year. He brings back memories of the dominating performances of Koufax and Drysdale, and of Bob Gibson, who broke the hearts of Boston fans in his showdown with Jim Lonborg. Gibson, pitching his third game of the series was dead tired but hung on to win 7-2. Likewise, he reminds me of the hopes fulfilled when the Pirates in nearby Pittsburgh overcame the dominating Orioles of Earl Weaver to win the 1971 World Series. Some have criticized his inning by inning, sometimes play-by-play approach, but for me, it was a walk back in time, a reminder of great baseball of the past. He fills in the detail and drama of those games long tucked away in the recesses of memory.

He describes a game in transition as leagues expanded, playoffs were introduced and old stars faded as new names like Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, and Reggie Jackson came on the scene, as TV revenues grew and with them, salaries, and new stadiums. And yet, it is the same summer game, played on a diamond, between baselines, nine players in the lineup on each side, fans in the seats behind first or third, filling out scorecards, rooting for the home team, vicariously sharing in the glory of the game.

Thank you Roger Angell! One can only hope there will be baseball in heaven so that Roger Angell can write about it.

Absolutely love this book. Angell writes with a "you are there" immediacy that captivated me from the first page.

Great book of New Yorker essays about baseball by a man who probably writes about the sport better than anyone.

Let's see...we've got thoughtful stories about (among other things) baseball, parents and children; touring France after WWII, E.B. White, William Maxwell, martinis, friendships, and Emily Hahn (must add her books to my list). I just talked myself up to 5 stars.

Mediocre collection of alleged humour from someone who should have kept their stuff in the desk drawer, and stuck to wrestling with semicolons (to borrow from the title story). Don't bother.½

Roger Angell (1920- ) is best known for his writing on sports, baseball in particular, for which he has received frequent accolades and acclaim. However, before making his name as a sportswriter he was contributing fiction, commentary and humour to various publications, most notably The New Yorker, where he became a fiction editor in 1956. All of the stories in The Stone Arbor appeared in that magazine, and the writing throughout the volume exhibits the immaculate sheen of the typical mid-century New Yorker story. It has been said that readers of The New Yorker want and expect to see themselves reflected in its pages, and that is probably true of Angell’s stories, which among its cast of characters feature commuting businessmen, salesmen, privileged landowners, young single working women and members of New England’s moneyed upper crust. Angell’s people are facing a variety of challenges to their well-being, some brought about by money problems or a change in circumstance, others by events taking place or decisions made beyond their sphere of influence. In “Castaways” a businessman away from home listens in on a conversation taking place in a hotel bar among three men—a boss and two underlings—and is sent into a rage by the Machiavellian brand of leadership the domineering boss spews to his companions. In “The Stone Arbor,” elderly Jason Lowery clashes with his son over a highway construction project underway adjacent to his property that, as he sees it, threatens his way of life. In “In an Early Winter” Amanda has impulsively married Joe after a very brief courtship, but upon meeting his parents is left wondering what she has got herself into. And in “Cote d’Azur” a brother and sister come face-to-face with their father’s uncertain legacy. In each of these and other stories in the volume, Angell establishes an easygoing rapport with the reader only to turn things upside down at some point when his people come to an awkward realization or behave irrationally or let their temper get the better of them. There is nothing particularly ground-breaking going on here, but it is all so impeccably done that it is impossible not to appreciate the significant achievement these stories represent.

Roger Angell has been doubly blessed with a passionate love for baseball and an undeniable talent for writing. Fortunately, for us, he combines these two elements of his character quite often. In this collection of essays, he turns his enlightened lens on the 1972-1976 major league baseball seasons, which featured landmark events like Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, the Amazin’ Mets of 1973, the birth of the free agent era, and Carlton Fisk’s incredible shot in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series at Fenway.

Angell’s pellucid prose animates these events, and many others, in a way that will instantly recall them to the forefront of your memory—if you were lucky enough to live through them—or make you wish you’d witnessed them if they somehow escaped the scope of your life. Angell also examines some everyday fans like three rabid Detroit devotees as well as some of the game’s invisible stars like professional scouts.

A true baseball lover couldn’t do much better than to read anything Angell has ever written about the game. From the months of November through February, nothing fills the baseball void as Angell does.

Wonderful. Roger Angell's memoir, arranged loosely by subject, wanders happily through time, with frequent admissions of the whimsies and vagaries of memory. As he says, “Memory is fiction – an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use,” and readers may well be led to dig into their own archives and to wonder why certain scenes have “stuck” and not others, and why certain memories are shaped as they are. I enjoyed all of the chapters, including those on sailing and baseball, which is a strong testimony to the engaging nature of Angell's writing. His writing is vivid, and there is a sense of immediacy as he seems to examine each memory as it rises up with curiosity, sympathy, and appreciation. Very early on I was taken aback by his story of a day out with his mother and her “lover,” Andy White, but as the book progressed I got over this shock and better recognized the complexities of the lives of these impressive characters. (I recently read E.B. White on Dogs, and really enjoyed the different perspective offered here on White and his family by Angell, his stepson.)

Throughout the book are memories of friends and family who are now gone, each gloriously individual and quirky, presented with dignity and humor. At eighty-six a memoirist is entitled, it seems to me, to occasionally wax a bit melancholy, but Angell never abuses this privilege. His editorial skills have served him well here in selecting the perfect combination of stories – the amusing and the tragic, the heartwarming and the intriguing – to convey the pleasures and pains that must inevitably make up a long life well savored.

I always try to read a baseball book in February. Down in Florida and Arizona, spring training is underway as players prepare for the season. Likewise, reading about the sport is sort of my version of getting into shape for the season. And there just is no baseball writer better suited to rekindling a fan's love with baseball than Roger Angell.

Angell, longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker and frequent contributor of articles about baseball to that magazine, is a splendid writer regardless of the subject, but his unabashed love for the game imbues his essays with an elegance and insight that is rare. Today more than ever, there is no shortage of coverage of your favorite team or sport, but no one can both clearly describe the action, explain it, and elevate it above the mundane like Angell.

The Summer Game pulls together essays Angell wrote between 1962 and 1972. There's an essay from nearly every World Series during that span, including the Amazin' Mets who went from their founding season in 1962 (when they lost 120 games) to winning the World Series just seven years later. The 1960s were a time of great upheaval and chance for baseball — the league expanded from 16 teams to 24, the season expanded from 154 games to 162, the playoffs expanded from just the World Series to add a preliminary round of games, television began to dominate the coverage and change the way the game was played and watched (the first night World Series game was played in 1971; in 2015 every game was played at night), new stadiums were built with all the charm of tin cans, players were on the cusp of gaining free agency and million-dollar salaries. Angell chronicles each of these changes with thoughtful clarity and consideration; the book is worth reading strictly for this historical record of a tumultuous decade but Angell's writing makes it so much more than that.

Of course, I can't make such a claim and expect you all to take my word for it, so here are some examples of his mastery.

Sometimes Angell tackles the "big picture", as when he wrote in 1966 about the first-ever domed stadium, the Houston Astrodome, and the unwelcome introduction of the big flashy scoreboard that is now ubiquitous:

Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher’s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the place of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own. Any persistent effort to destroy this unique phenomenon, to “use up” baseball’s time with planned distractions, will in fact transform the sport into another mere entertainment and thus hasten its descent to the status of a boring and stylized curiosity.

But he didn't always write on such an abstract level. Describing a 1962 spring training game in Florida, A watery wash of indigo clouds hung lower and lower over the field during batting practice, deepening the greens of the box-seat railings, the infield grass, and the tall hedges in center field, and for a time the field, a box of light in the surrounding darkness, resembled an aquarium full of small, oddly darting gray and white fish.

He was there in 1962 when the New York Mets played their first season, and he marveled at the way jaded New Yorkers embraced a team that lost 120 out of 154 games:

It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand-man audience made up exclusively of born losers — leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines — who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless cause.

Even his play-by-play game descriptions were a level above the ordinary:

But no lead and no pitcher was safe for long on this particular evening; the hits flew through the night air like enraged deer flies, and the infielders seemed to be using their gloves mostly in self-defense.

And he had a knack for describing players that made you feel they were standing right in front of you, like Detroit Tigers pitcher Mickey Lolich: He pitched the first two innings like a man defusing a live bomb, working slowly and unhappily, and studying the problem at length before each new move.

Or Tommie Agee of the Mets: I’ll bet that a lot of local Little Leaguers have begun imitating Agee’s odd batting mannerism — a tiny kick of the left leg that makes him look like a house guest secretly discouraging the family terrier.

Or Baltimore Orioles pitcher Dick Hall: Dick Hall is a Baltimore institution, like crab cakes. He is six feet six and one-half inches tall and forty years old, and he pitches with an awkward, sidewise motion that suggests a man feeling under his bed for a lost collar stud. … Hall is almost bald; he has ulcers, a degree in economics from Swarthmore, a Mexican wife, four children, and an off-season job as a certified public accountant; and he once startled his bullpen mates by trying to estimate mathematically how many drops of rain were falling on the playing field during a shower.

Maybe I didn't need Angell to make me fall in love with baseball all over again this spring. But I can't imagine a better companion for the season to come.

Roger Angell is like an 'institution' among writers and New Yorkers. Writers? That's easy, because he's been a fiction editor and contributor at The New Yorker for decades now. New Yorkers? Ah, that's mostly because of baseball, of course, and Angell's many columns, articles and books about America's favorite pastime that have piled up over the past fifty years or so. And New Yorkers do love their baseball, dating back to the days of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants - and New York-born Angell, at 95, certainly does date back that far, demonstrating in vivid terms his memories of Lefty Grove, Duke Snider, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and others.

Me, I love Angell because of the books, the writers, all the literary connections he's made and maintained throughout the years. Giants like John Updike. "Colleagues for more than half a century," Angell collaborated with Updike - by phone, courier and email - in editing the scores of Updike short stories that graced the pages of their magazine over the years. An Updike enthusiast since college, I relished this description of the shy, gentle man -

"Now and then he would turn up at the office, startling me once again with his height and his tweeds, that major nose, and his bright eyes and up-bent smile; he spoke in a light half-whisper and, near the end of each visit, somehow withdrew a little, growing more private and less visible even before he turned away. The fadeaway, as I came to think of it ..."

There are small, equally incisive portraits of other literary figures, some famous, some not - Bobbie Ann Mason, Philip Levine, Ann Beattie, Donald Barthelme, Nabokov, William Stieg, as well as his famous stepfather, E.B. "Andy" White.

And many farewell tributes to famous people, some he knew personally, others he did not, but admired from afar: Bob Feller, Duke Snider, Earl Weaver, Don Zimmer and other sports heroes; V.S. Pritchett, Harold Ross, Gardner Botsford, William Steig. There are even a few humorous haikus here, written at the suggestion of his current wife, Peggy, whose fifth graders were learning the haiku form.

There is not a bad piece in this whole book, when you come right down to it. Roger Angell writes in a way that makes you think, "Why I could have written that." That's how easy he makes it look, but he admits repeatedly that writing is hard. And he's right. If you make it look easy, that means you have worked and worked at it.

I have two favorite pieces here, and both of them are infused in equal parts with grief and humor, which is a pretty hard thing to pull off. But Angell does it, first in "Over the Wall," in which he writes about the death of Carol, his wife of forty-eight years and how he struggled to cope with it. And second, in the book's title piece, "This Old Man," all about the pains and problems of growing old, and remembering dear ones who are gone, but also about the occasional and unexpected joys that come along to surprise you.

I loved this book. And by the way, if you've not read Angell's memoir, LET ME FINISH, don't miss that one either. Roger Angell is an American treasure. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Few works of art are truly timeless. Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Beethoven’s Fifth. Michelangelo’s David. Add to that list Angell’s “The Summer Game.” The book, a collection of essays Angell originally penned for “New Yorker” magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s, recreates an era both nostalgic and immediate. Long retired superstars like Jim Palmer, Denny McLain, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Wille McCovey, Wille Stargell, Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, and Jerry Koosman—to name just a few—come back to life in these pages. And Angell is so skilled at describing the action and nuance of each game and each play that the reader is transported to the action. Angell puts you in the stands right next to him.

Angell’s writing reveals his love of the language as much as it showcases his love of the game of baseball. For example, while discussing the Pittsburgh Pirates’ propensity for populating their pitching staff with monosyllabically named hurlers, he writes, “This year’s Buccos recklessly disposed of Mudcat Grant, but with Blass, Briles, Moose, Lamb, and Veale still on hand (I plan an extensive footnote on this startling incursion of ungulates), and the club’s coffers now heavy with championship loot, they can easily swing a deal for Vida Blue that should bring them safely through the seventies.” I know of no other writer past or present who talks about baseball with such wit and skill.

Angell appreciates baseball’s enduring paradox—a game that seems so simple is rife with endless possibilities for complexity. And despite the sport’s evolution (during the time when Angell wrote these pieces, both leagues were undergoing expansion, and divisional play—along with league playoff series—had recently been adopted), the game on the field remains familiar and pure (PEDs notwithstanding). If you love baseball, read this book, and lose yourself in the sublime.

This is a book that is a memoir and meditation on "America" combining the author's musings with a history of baseball in the 1960's.
It is superior sports reporting, on a par with Liebling's "The Sweet Science."½

MLB during the 60s and 70s.

A series of memories constituting a memoir, by the baseball writer and New Yorker fiction editor. He writes about the romance of driving across country in the 20s and 30s, about the movies during the golden age in the late 30s and early 40s, “when the studios were cranking out five hundred films each year” and he went every day after school and before his father came home from work. He writes about his father, whose bitter divorce from Roger’s mother Katharine eventually resulted in Roger and his older sister’s fairly unhappy five days a week with their father and happier weekends with their mother and her new husband E. B. (Andy) White. He writes about playing and watching baseball in his childhood. “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.” He describes a subway trip with a friend and Angell’s king snake, to the Bronx Zoo for a “Consultation” about the snake’s imperfect shedding of its last skin. Another chapter tells about interesting family members such as Aunt Elsie, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who was wounded in WWI and almost supported herself with her literary biographies and articles for magazines, but looked down on her sister’s work at The New Yorker, and Hildegarde, who walked naked on a Provincetown beach, wrote a biography of Simon Bolivar, married an oil man named Granville Smith with whom she bought a sheep and cattle farm in Missouri, and when she died was almost immediately supplanted by Evelyn Dewey, John Dewey’s daughter. A whole chapter is devoted to Andy White, who married Katharine in 1929. Another chapter celebrates the martini, yet another details Angell’s stateside war experiences of early marriage and teaching the Browning .50 caliber machine gun to new inductees. Travel in Europe and en route via liner is the subject of “La Vie en Rose.” Angell writes about the pleasures of sailing.
In a chapter titled “At the Comic Weekly”—what Harold Ross once called The New Yorker—Angell talks about Ross (“It’s surprising that Ross never saw himself as a writer”), William Maxwell, William Shawn, Emily Hahn (“perfect pitch in the little aria of the casual”), and Gardner Botsford. Angell and his wife visit area graveyards, including their own plot in Brooklin, Maine. The concluding chapters are downbeat: In “Jake,” Angell writes about a fiction writer, John Murray, whose second story had not yet appeared in The New Yorker when he committed suicide, and in “Hard Lines”—the expression is the equivalent of “Tough Luck”—Angell talks about his friend Walker Field, dead of a glioblastoma at thrity-eight, and some other losses.

YES, HE IS THE POET LAUREATE OF BASEBALL: There are some great baseball writers. Roger Kahn and Pat Jordan come to mind. Roger Angell is the very best of them all. This book is as much a part of my youth as family vacations. I have read this book numerous times, often just picking up random pages and reading for hours until sleep overtook me. There is something about New York City, the 1950s, and the Brooklyn Dodgers that contributed to the axiom that the best sportswriting is baseball writing. Angell is it, in its purest form. Jaques Barzun, a French writer, visited America around the turn of the century to discover what de Toqueville had found some 70 years earlier. Barzun concluded that, "In order to know America, you have to know baseball." To a current generation of young baseball enthusisasts who want to grasp what an older generation felt about this game, I recommend "The Summer Game" above all others. "Five Seasons" might be next, but "The Summer Game" is the best of the lot. It carries forward from Angell's 1950s experiences, and is part of his reportage for The New Yorker. Somehow he infuses the high art literacy necessary for a publication of this sort with the most lyrical, dead-on anlaysis of baseball ever. He starts with the 1962 Mets, and covers them over several Casey Stengel Polo Grounds seasons. No description ever conveys the wackiness of those lovable losers better, or the old-style devotion of New York fans of the by-gone era. This is the Brooklyn Dodger contingent transferred to Polo and Shea. Angell covers the '67 Red Sox, the '68 World Series (McClain vs Gibson overshadowed by Lolich), the Amazin' Mets, the Bay Area in their season of two division champs (1971), and other events, always including the World Series' played between '62 and '71. His writing about Dodger Stadium and Dodger fans in 1966 demonstrates the best of the "new age" Los Angeleno baseball enthusiasts, the modernists if you will. It describes vividly how an era has turned. He paints a picture of a beautiful new stadium bathed in Califrnia sunlight that is pure romanticism. To a young California reader, as I once was, it was the most perfect imagery. STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
STWRITES@AOL.COM

Roger Angell, at 88, is a lucky man. He thinks so himself. He's survived his knocks, his various unhapinesses - divorced parents, a divorce of his own, friends gone but not forgotten - and he appreciates what he has now, as well as what life has dealt him along the way. "Hard lines" is a phrase recalled from his college days, a shouted or whispered expression that could mean anything from "Buck up," or "Get over it, to "I'm so very sorry." Another reviewer noted he was glad that Angell spent more time talking about his childhood and youth than he did on his days at The New Yorker, where he worked as an editor for over fifty years. Me too, I guess, because remembrances from childhood and young adult years when we're all so fulla juice are often the most interesting. But when, in the latter part of the book, Angell does in fact get around to discussing the magazine and all the luminaries and characters who passed through its doors and pages, that part too is intensely interesting, especially if you're a "book person," as I have always been. I found myself taking notes, writing down names of authors and book titles I'd never heard of. And a few of those are already in my cart, waiting until I can sneak another Amazon order past my wife. This is not just a lot of fond reminiscing about "the good old days." This is memoir writing of the very highest calibre. I knew before I began this book that E.B. White was Angell's stepfather, so I expected to learn a bit more about that famous author of Charlotte's Webb and Stuart Little. And I did - in fact there is a whole chapter on "Andy" White - but I found myself perhaps even more interested in what Angell tells about his real father, Ernest Angell (called "Serious Cupid" by his school chums), a not particularly successful lawyer. What impressed me most about Angell's father was the seriousness with which he took his role as a "single parent," something rare among men in the 1920s and -30s. This is such a fascinating book I'm not quite sure what else to point out. I was interested to learn that Angell spent his summers for most of his life near Brooklin, ME, not far from Sargentville, ME, where writer Doris Grumbach plunked herself to spend the "end" of her life, and where she has resided mostly happily for the past 20 years. Grumbach is now 90 (and I just read two of her memoirs). I wonder if the two know each other. Perhaps one of the things I like most about Roger Angell is that despite a very successful professional life he refuses to take himself too seriously, but yet he recognizes the seriousness of what he has lived through and what might still be coming. Here's an excerpt from the "Hard Lines" section:

"It's my guess that we cling to the harsher bits of the past not just as a warning system to remind us that the next Indian raid or suddenly veering, tower-bound 757 is always waiting, but as a passport to connect us to the rest of the world, whose horrors are available each morning and evening on television or in the TIMES. And the cold moment that returns to mind and sticks there unbidden, may be preferable to the alternative and much longer blank spaces ... Like it or not, we geezers are not the curators of this unstable repository of trifling or tragic days, but only the screenwriters and directors of the latest revival."

At 88, Roger Angell may be on the downslope career-wise. However, as a writer he's at the top of his game - no "geezer-ness" in sight. He clued me in on a couple of other former New Yorker memoirs from Gardner Botsford and Emily Hahn, which I look forward to reading. But mostly I am grateful Angell has finally told his own story, honestly, without bitterness - even about its painful memories - and with humor and flair. This is one very terrific book.

Dated, but wonderfully written. Actually it should be outdated and obscure; instead it's considered a classic. Angell does quite a bit in one book. He spends a lot of time capturing the atmosphere of spring training, runs off nostalgic season summaries (1977-1981), fills the pages with excellent interviews of players, journalists, fans, general managers, & covers major and minor stories of the time, notably early free agency & the 1981 strike. His stories also cover woman sports journalists, semi-pro leagues, and, most memorably, hall-of-fame pitcher Bob Gibson.

I can't compliment enough his interviews. He captures players really talking seriously to him about what they do, their personalities coming out as the talk about their ideas on pitching, hitting, free agency etc. Players like Tom Seaver, Reggie Jackson, Pete Rose and Ted Simmons really come alive.

For me personally, the time period covered was an unexpected blessing. Although the time is before I started watching baseball, the 1977 to 1981 seasons, and although I never saw these guys play, at least not until they were much older, I know the names, and I know some things about their futures. So Angell, in a way filled in a gap for me, covering major players just as they are getting started, some still in college. This is fascinating.

There is a very graceful overall structure, or at least I think there is, in the mixture of really nice baseball stories and the themes that underlie and connect the stories. He builds up to the 1981 strike, it's a book-wide theme, maybe the purpose of the book. But, the book does not get lost in there. Instead it's a side story, part to Tom Seaver's or Pete Rose's interview. The focus is a love a baseball. And, when the strike comes, the book doesn't end. Angell breaks off into interesting side stories, mixing college prospects with aging legends and, even following some sem-pro leagues. Baseball has history, and a future and it infiltrates so much of our culture, and Angell gets it all in there.

The sequences of interviews seem to have a purpose too - the pitching themes come early and peak with Bob Gibson. The hitting stories really spin off much later in the book.

"Pitching is a beautiful thing. It's an art - it's a work of art when done right. It's like ballet or the theatre. And, like any work of art, you have to have it in your head first - the idea of it, a vision of what it should be. And then you have to perform. You try to make your hand and body come up to that vision."

(Tom Seaver, probably 1977, quoted on p 30).

“Well, hitting is a physical art, and that’s never easy to explain,” he said. “And it’s hard. It’s one hard way to make a living if you’re not good at it. Hitting is mostly a matter of feel, and it’s abstract as hell”

(Ted Simmons, probably 1981, quoted on p 344).