The Greatest Writer of Two Centuries

Come September 19, a truly fascinating individual who has in turn fascinated us all, will celebrate his 95th birthday.  And if this were a fairer world, and it were truly about me and my wishes (as opposed to him and his), I would like to spend that day sitting with him in a box seat at pretty much any baseball stadium in the country.

Roger Angell continues to fascinate us, writing amazing prose well into his tenth decade on the planet.  I don't need to give you his life story; after all, that's why God made Wikipedia, and it isn't so much his life story as his gift.  In the great play "Inherit the Wind", the Clarence Darrow character sneers at the reporter, with "You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something."  Roger Angell's gift was to push nouns against verbs in ways seldom done, with adjectives and adverbs as the salt on the glass.

This extremely old gentleman has been a part of my life for over forty years, though I have never met him -- my loss.  He won me over as a reader shortly after the publication of a gift to the world called "The Summer Game."

A writer of pieces for The New Yorker, the classic literary magazine of a type lost for the ages, Angell spent a good part of the 1960s doing a few pieces a year on baseball, a not-so-hidden passion of his. He would haunt spring training and do a New Yorker article; then a couple focused pieces during the long season, then finally a wrap-up of the World Series -- in the days before playoffs.

After ten years of this, in 1971 he was persuaded to compile the previous ten years' columns into a book, which became a best-seller and still one of the greatest compilations of baseball writing in the history of the game -- and that was "The Summer Game."  One could take a copy of it and glean the entire history of major-league baseball from 1962 (and the birth of the atrocious New York Mets of Casey Stengel) to 1971, merely as a succession of vignettes that collectively give us that picture.

One such glimpse, from a game at the Astrodome in Houston, the very first domed stadium shows what happens when literature meets baseball:  "With two out in the top of the first inning on the afternoon of May 23, 1965, Jimmy Wynn, the centerfielder of the Houston Astros, moved under a fly ball ... Looking upward, Wynn pounded his glove confidently, then anxiously, and then froze in horror.  The ball had vanished into a pure Monet cloud of overhead beams, newly painted off-white skylights and diffused Texas sunlight, and now it suddenly rematerialized a good distance behind Wynn and plumped to earth like a thrombosed pigeon."

This would sound a bit, oh, I don't know, wordy (or, to me, brilliant), if you didn't take into account how much this man loves the game.  It is precisely this intersection of amazing literary capacity with a fascination and love for a simple game that enraptures me.  Baseball is at its core a simple game, easy to love -- at least then -- with lots of time in its playing to select the right word to use.  Baseball met Roger Angell and both are the better for it.

In the same piece, this gem from Angell in his first Astrodome game -- four years before Neil Armstrong walked on he moon:  The groundskeepers smoothing the base paths were dressed in fake bright orange space suits and fake white plastic space helmets.  Each level of the stands was painted a different color -- royal blue, gold, purple, black, tangerine and crimson -- and I had the momentary sensation that I was sinking slowly through the blackberry-brandy layer of a pousse-cafe."

"The Summer Game" was such a hit that as Angell, then in his 50s, continued to produce the New Yorker articles, he was able to turn out sequels by anthologizing his articles every five years thereafter -- "Late Innings", "Five Seasons", "Season Ticket", etc., and weaving in the stories of ballplayers successful and less so -- Bob Gibson, the Hall of Fame pitcher still feisty as an Omaha restaurant owner, and Steve Blass, the Pittsburgh pitcher whose career was derailed by an inability to throw strikes, are both interviewed and wonderfully presented as the human beings they became.

You know, I think I want to write this piece as a way of saying "thank you" to someone while he is still on earth, still producing, still capable of appreciation.  I spent immense hours on airplanes for decades in the course of my work, and my pleasure was to open one of Angell's books, start anywhere and just read -- and appreciate -- as the clouds rolled by.  The fascinating thing is that the stories never got dated even though they might have been 30 years earlier when I read them.

I don't think I will get the opportunity to see a game with Roger Angell.  So I know only one great way to thank him best, and that is to cite the most amazing piece of writing to be taken out of one of his books.  It is "amazing" for its prescience rather than its use of language, and I would like to think it went into the book because the author recognized the insight of the speaker.

In Season Ticket, Angell recounts a 1982 spring training trip to see the Orioles, interviewing Earl Weaver, then their manager, about Cal Ripken, who was about to start his rookie season. Weaver tells Angell that, at whatever position the team decided to put him, "his manager can just write his name into the lineup every day for the next fifteen years; that's how good he is". Starting that year, Ripken in fact was written into lineups every day for more than fifteen years, setting the all-time consecutive-games-played streak of 2,632 games.  That piece went to press before Cal Ripken had played even a year in the majors.

Ask the right question, get a historic answer, copyright 1982.  That's the gift of brilliance, of insight, of understanding, of the love of the game that I love.  That's the gift of Roger Angell.  Please read him.  You'll thank me later.

And to you, Mr. Angell, a happy 95th.   Let's go see a ball game.  Please.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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