San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How Bay Area writers got Angell into Hall of Fame
When I was a young reporter at the Sacramento Bee, I asked a longtime baseball writer why Roger Angell wasn’t honored at the Hall of Fame. Surely there is no one better.
The answer, I was told, and simply accepted as fact for the next decade or so, was that Angell was not a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America because the New Yorker did not cover baseball on a daily basis. For that reason, even the great Sports Illustrated writers of that time weren’t in the BBWAA — it was a weekly publication.
I never stopped thinking about what an injustice that was, though, especially as Angell gained numerous literary honors for his work over 70-plus years with the New Yorker, including the PEN lifetime achievement award. When Sports Illustrated and other sports outlets with a daily online presence were allowed to join the BBWAA at last, in 2007, I mentioned to my friend Jack O’Connell, the BBWAA’s national secretary/ treasurer, what a shame it was that Angell still wasn’t in the organization so that he could be recognized at Cooperstown. “BBWAA membership isn’t a requirement,” O’Connell said. “It’s just that everyone in the writers’ wing has been a member.”
I may have jumped up and down on the spot. Though I belonged to the San FranciscoOakland chapter of the BBWAA, I immediately began making calls to members of the New York chapter, assuming that this oversight would be rectified quickly and easily.
Instead, I lobbied for several years, and always came up against the same problem: That chapter had a bunch of former members already in line for nomination, and they weren’t going to bump any of those retirees back for a writer at the New Yorker. I was told, repeatedly, there was a lot of professional jealousy toward Angell in the chapter because he had a month or more to write his pieces and he never had to work on a daily baseball deadline.
Again, I was confounded. You could give me 700 years and I couldn’t produce the genius that Roger Angell provided readers with his work. Maybe that outsize talent also created some animosity — as a writer, Angell was head and shoulders above all of them.
Finally, in 2012, Steve Jacobson of Newsday agreed he would nominate Angell at the annual New York BBWAA meeting. The day before that meeting was scheduled, Hurricane Sandy struck, and Jacobson wound up dealing with flooding instead.
I was starting to get nervous.
Angell was by that point over 90 years old. I didn’t know him well, really only to say hello at Yankee Stadium or at the occasional postseason game, but I had been reading him since I was 9, when my dad handed me “Agincourt and After,” Angell’s word-perfect account of the 1975 World Series. I wanted a true national treasure to be able to enjoy his day in the sun in Cooperstown.
Again, O’Connell came to the rescue. At MLB’s 2012 winter meetings, I bemoaned the chances of ever getting Angell nominated by the New York chapter and asked whether the Bay Area chapter could do so instead. I mean, really, that wouldn’t make sense — Angell wrote for the New Yorker, for goodness’ sake. So I didn’t hold my breath.
“Sure,” O’Connell said. “There’s no rule against that.”
I’m not sure there’s ever been an easier nomination process than the one the local chapter held at Ricky’s sports
bar in San Leandro. Instant agreement from all, and Chris Haft, then of MLB.com, and Dan Brown, then of the San Jose Mercury News and now of the Athletic, volunteered to write the biography for the official national ballot, a stirring summation of a career so undeniably deserving of the highest honor for a baseball writer.
The next winter meetings, O’Connell told me he would be announcing at the national BBWAA meeting that Angell had made it in.
He called Angell and handed me the phone. “Thanks to you — and to the San FranciscoOakland chapter,” Angell said. “I never thought this would happen.”
You and me both, Roger. I actually have no idea what I really said, because I was pretty giddy and a little teary at that point. Angell was 94. He was going to make it to Cooperstown, in person.
The joyous praise heaped on Angell that winter at the annual New York BBWAA Awards dinner and of course, the next summer during Induction Weekend, was just tremendous, though I did look sideways at a few of the veteran New York writers as they rushed to profess their love for him. It was mind-boggling to spend time with Roger and his wife, Peggy, on the veranda of the Otesaga Hotel, as Hall of Fame players — including George Brett, Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver — approached to congratulate him.
I brought along my dogeared copy of “Five Seasons,” and on the evening of his Hall of Fame ceremony, sitting in the lobby of the Otesaga, he wrote inside, “Thanks for the nomination, and thanks for your writing and thanks a million for being in baseball with me.” The inscription added new meaning to a book with the subtitle: “A Baseball Companion.”
It will always be a point of local pride that the Bay Area’s BBWAA chapter was responsible for the greatest baseball writer ever getting what he deserved, and it was such an honor for us to do so.
Roger Angell died last week, at the age of 101. A true Hall of Famer.