Every once in a while I check Roger Angell’s Wikipedia page to make sure, you know, well, yeah.

Every time I’ve checked it so far it speaks of him in the present tense, and barring something unforeseen, tomorrow when I check it it’ll list his age in triple digits.

(Now that’s an unusual way to start a tribute!)

Roger Angell was born in 1920. World War One had just concluded. As had–sorry to introduce into the story–the previous global pandemic. (Hey, we survived that one… just sayin’.)

In 1920 the magazine that made Roger Angell famous was still five years from publishing its first issue. Certainly one of the most well-known magazines of the century, The New Yorker is where Roger Angell has published his work since 1944. Officially on staff for something like 60 years, he was for decades the magazine’s chief fiction editor. He was still contributing pieces in 2019, three-quarters of a century after his first byline.

Oh, and by the way, he’s the most famous baseball writer of all time.

How far is Roger Angell ahead of number two? Okay, think of the second-most famous sixteenth-century English playwright after Shakespeare.

Roger Angell first wrote on the subject of baseball in 1962, when William Shawn, then editor of The New Yorker, dispatched the 42-year-old writer to Florida to report on the game’s Spring Training season. He was 20 years older than most of the players. And half a century later he was still one of the national pastime’s most widely-read authors, reporting on World Series games well into his nineties.

Most of Roger Angell’s baseball books have been collections of essays. Some of the greatest essays written on the sport. His 2002 collaboration with David Cone (A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone) has been called a masterpiece. (Okay, it was I who called it that.)

I guess it was no surprise that Roger Angell became a writer. It was the family business, after all. His mother, Katharine S. White, was a writer and editor at The New Yorker from 1925 (six months after its inception) until 1960. his step-father, with whom he was very close, was E.B. White. Yes, that E.B. White, of “Strunk and White” and Charlotte’s Web fame.

Angell learned the craft well, and has a century’s worth of awards to prove it, including a spot in the writers’ section of baseball’s Hall of Fame.

A century’s worth of awards.

Well, his first century.