Revered, elegant baseball chronicler
Roger Angell, the elegant and thoughtful baseball writer who was widely considered among the best America has produced, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Margaret Moorman, said.
Angell’s voice was original because he wrote more like a fan than a sports journalist, loading his articles with inventive imagery.
Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk came out of his crouch, Angell wrote, like “an aluminum extension ladder stretching for the house eaves.” Baltimore Orioles relief pitcher Dick Hall pitched “with an awkward, sidewise motion that suggests a man feeling under his bed for a lost collar stud.” Angell (pronounced angel) described Willie Mays chasing down a ball hit to deep center field as “running so hard and so far that the ball itself seems to stop in the air and wait for him.”
The baseball season didn’t seem complete until, as he did late each fall, Angell wrapped up its multiple meanings in a long New Yorker article. Many of his pieces were collected in books, among them “Late Innings” (1982) and “Once More Around the Park” (1991).
But he wrote not just about teams and the games they played. He also considered what it meant to be a fan.
“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,” he wrote in his book “Five Seasons” (1977).
“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.”
For Angell, the New Yorker was, to some degree, the family shop. His mother, Katharine Sergeant Angell White, was among the magazine’s first editors hired by Harold Ross in 1925. His stepfather, the essayist E.B. White, was a frequent contributor. Angell published his first piece in the magazine, a short story, in 1944 and went to work there in 1956.
Like his mother, Angell became a New Yorker fiction editor, discovering and nurturing writers, including Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and Garrison Keillor. For a while, he occupied his mother’s old office — an experience, he told an interviewer, that was “the weirdest thing in the world.” He also worked closely with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Ruth Jhabvala and V.S. Pritchett.
Angell became a baseball writer by accident. He was already a fan in 1962 when, he told an interviewer for Salon, he was asked by William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, to “go down to spring training and see what you find.”
It was an auspicious year to be a young baseball writer: the first season of the New York Mets. “They were these terrific losers that New York took to its heart,” Angell said.
The tone of his baseball writing, he once said, was inspired by a now canonical Updike article, written in 1960, about Ted Williams’ final game at Fenway Park. “My own baseball writing was still two years away when I first read ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ ” Angell wrote, “and though it took me a while to become aware of it, John had already supplied my tone, while also seeming to invite me to try for a good sentence now and then, down the line.”
Angell was sometimes referred to as baseball’s poet laureate, a title he rejected. He called himself a reporter. “The only thing different in my writing,” he said, “is that, almost from the beginning, I’ve been able to write about myself as well.”
He disliked sentimentality about sports. “The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the ‘Field of Dreams’ thing, gives me a pain,” he once said. “I hated that movie.”
He was alert, however, to what he called the “substrata of nuance and lesson and accumulated experience” beneath baseball’s surface. And his humor flashed above all this.
He once referred to Ron Darling as “the best right-handed part-Chinese Yale history major among the Mets’ starters.” He wrote that Carl Yastrzemski, “like so many great hitters, has oddly protuberant eyes.” And he noted, about a skinny Houston Astros team, that “they sometimes suggest a troupe of gazelles depicted by a Balkan corps de ballet.”
He was born in Manhattan on Sept. 19, 1920. His father, Ernest Angell, was a graduate of Harvard Law School, a World War I veteran and a former semipro pitcher who in 1950 became the national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. After his parents were divorced, Angell continued to live in Manhattan with his father.
He graduated from Harvard in 1942 and then worked as a magazine editor for the Army Air Forces. After his discharge, he was a writer for Holiday magazine and wrote frequently for the New Yorker before being hired.
He wrote well into his 90s. In 2014, he was awarded the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the Baseball Hall of Fame’s honor for writers. In 2015, when he was 94, he published a collection of essays about aging titled “This Old Man.”
Until his final years, Angell attended as many as 40 baseball games a year, rooting for the Mets, the Giants, the Red Sox, the A’s and even sometimes the Yankees.
Baseball is “a great game for writers because it’s just the right pace,” Angell once said. “You can watch the game and keep score and look around and take notes. Now and then, you even have time for an idea.”
And, he said, he loved the way “baseball will stick it to you; it means to break your heart.”