Roger Angell, 1920-2022

Baseball writer Roger Angell died this past Friday at the age of 101. Though calling Angell a “baseball writer” is a little bit like calling the London Philharmonic a “band,” that’s what he was, the most famous baseball writer on the planet for more than half a century. He lived from global pandemic to global pandemic, from the first year of Prohibition to the decriminalization of marijuana in some form in nearly every state. He witnessed every New York Yankee World Series win, writing about the game from when Willie Mays was in his prime to when the World Series was officially “presented by YouTube TV.”

A hundred other public obituaries have said more elegant things than I can about the life and career of Roger Angell. Most say he wrote more like a fan than like a sports-page scribe. More like a writer is what they mean to say.

He didn’t write a million books. As a matter of fact he kind of wrote only one, A Pitcher’s Story, written with another of my other heroes, David Cone. Most of Angell’s books are collections of short stories, and I’ve read them all. Actually I own most of them, and I’m extremely cheap about buying books. Angell didn’t write a ton of books, I suppose, because he did have a day job: fiction editor (among other things) at The New Yorker, the magazine where he worked for something like 62 years. As far as I know only Hugh Hefner can top that one.

Featured, naturally, in Ken Burns’s Baseball, Angell speaks of the game with the same seriousness and joy he brought to the printed page. I believe one can say that about the game itself: seriousness and joy.

And a day in the life of Roger Angell.

This entry was posted in Current by moc. Bookmark the permalink.

About moc

My name is Mike O'Connell. I am 41 years old and live in Northern Virginia. I am a teacher, a musician, and an enthusiast of all things American.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *