Mike O'Connell

Proof again that life keeps giving us things to enjoy (things to buy, really, but damn some of them are delicious), I did partake of the new Wendy’s strawberry Frosty this weekend.

Why it took them 53 years I couldn’t tell you, but yeah that thing is just pink heaven wrapped in polyethylene.

Nice job, Wendy’s.

You may have heard a rumor that yesterday I turned 40 years old.

Eh… perhaps.

For further details, head here.

Hope you didn’t go to bed early last night.
Those of you who went to sleep after three quarters of Game One of the NBA Finals woke up to quite the surprise this morning. Spoiler alert: the team that was up by 12 going into the last frame actually lost by 12.
Whoa.
As mentioned recently, this is why I don’t bet on basketball.
But I’d still take the Warriors.

One of the greatest records in sports started inauspiciously on this day 40 years ago.
The Baltimore Orioles were shut out that afternoon at home, collecting exactly one hit in the contest.
Their third baseman was 0 for 2 with a walk.
That was Cal Ripken Jr., and he wouldn’t miss a game for the next 16 years.
Shortly after Ripken’s streak began I was brought into this world.
Which means I must also soon be turning… no, that can’t be right.
Happy Memorial Day, everyone.

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.