Angell in the Outfield: A Roger Angell Appreciation

Roger Angell's writing goes beyond baseball. (Courtesy of Josh Szot, National Baseball Hall of Fame)

Roger Angell’s writing goes beyond baseball. (Courtesy of Josh Szot, National Baseball Hall of Fame)

Now 94 years young, Roger Angell has been a writer, editor and constant affiliate with The New Yorker for more than half of a century. However, this isn’t about Angell’s early literary fiction, the many popular personal essays, or even his influential literary heritage (his stepfather was E. B. White, and Angell’s own mother was fiction editor for TNY). No, this is about Angell’s best-known published work, yet in a category of literature that on the whole seems significantly underrepresented in serious literary discourse: namely, sports writing.

While individual titles and anthologies with specific sports and/or baseball themes (the latter being Angell’s specialty) never stand in short supply, a look at today’s introductory American literary anthologies reveals only the smallest sampling, if that, of sports literature found amidst the canonical works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry in those stuffy tables of contents. (Of course this is much to the detriment of impressionable readers often inculcated with rigid, elitist notions of “lit-tra-ture.”) While it may not be easily found in such lofty environs, though, Angell’s baseball writing demonstrates many eloquent, eccentric, and strangely understated yet rich qualities of sports literature.

In the case of Angell’s baseball writing, it also is a challenge to know where to begin. One variable (or rather non-variable) that lessens the task’s difficulty is Angell’s striking consistency throughout his longevity. His earliest ballpark reports appeared in The New Yorker with a “Talk of the Town” comment piece on Casey Stengel’s departure from the Yankees, back in 1960. More recently, he has offered blog-posted reminiscences on a range of topics such as the Jackie Robinson biopic, 42, last year’s passing of Don Zimmer in “Zim,” and this April’s historic Baltimore ballgame played in the absence of any stadium crowd—all essays written for that same publication long since so simpatico—or even synonymous—with Angell’s work.

In short, Angell’s baseball writing remains fresh and continues to surprise. His earlier work is no different, even amidst the historical contexts from which those words were born. However, as there’s only enough time here to scratch the surface of his prolific body of work, perhaps a similar, Angellian economy is best advised to focus on a few, albeit exemplary, segments from his anthology called Game Time: A Baseball Companion (2003).

One salient example that feels noteworthy involves Angell’s rather unguarded and genuine musings in an excerpt from “Sunny Side of the Street,” where he goes to meet the first black manager in major league baseball, Frank Robinson. Here Angell seems all too attentive to the palpable skepticism of his mostly white journalism colleagues. Like his typewriter and ink-ribbon compatriots of the day’s printed columns, he fulfills the obligations of his spring training assignment, but he demonstrates an uncanny awareness and acuity to observe—and question with quasi self-examination—the unsaid motives and pervasive atmosphere:

Robinson spoke with alternate gravity and humor, exuding the same sense of weight and presence I have always observed in him. We chatted a little, and then I said goodbye . . . and made room for three more out-of-town reporters, who had come for the same unspoken and unspeakable purpose: How does a black manager manage? What is black managing? How does it, uh, feel to be the first black manager?” (page 31)

So Angell not only makes the difficult editorial choice to report the “fundamentally unreportable” and bring the “unspoken and unspeakable” out and into the open, he actually has the candor to confess that such unspeakables might linger in himself (as they surely lingered in the collective minds of much of “white America” at that time, as they sadly do to this very day).

Moving from race to gender, in “Early Lessons” Angell crafts another intriguing spring training article, though this one addresses a different kind of barrier breaker in baseball: one Pam Postema, a female umpire in the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. “A quick, slim, cheerful arbiter,” Angell notes, she was also “the only woman ump in the business” (46). Angell continues: “the word on her is that she is an outstanding ball-and-strike ump and that she doesn’t take any gruff.”

No gruff indeed! Postema later took on many odd jobs in her post-umpiring days, including employment as a trucker and factory worker. She also sued Major League Baseball, settled her sex discrimination lawsuit, and then co-wrote a tell-all memoir, You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League: My Life as an Umpire. Of course, her subsequent stand to demand respect had some precedent. Angell shares one rumored incident from Postema’s earlier days when “there was a rhubarb on the field, and coach Herm Starrette, of the Giants, told [Postema] to go back to her needle and thread, and she threw him out of the game” (47). Angell himself captures an episode after a game, and it’s equally telling about Postema’s singular vitality:

A fan leaned out of the stands and handed her a ball to sign. ‘Just give me your autograph, will ya, honey?’ the man said.

Postema took the ball and the pen and said, ‘You want me to sign it “Honey” or do you want my name?'”

Whether it was just Postema’s quick-witted nature that struck Angell or if it was more the writer’s own unique eye for detail and ear for vernacular, the notice given Postema was not without apparent journalistic prescience (a recurring quality in Angell’s work). Four years after Angell’s piece was published, Sports Illustrated featured Postema on a March, 1988 cover. Proclaiming “The Lady is an Ump,” the headline of the SI cover story appeared cheeky at best or purely provocative at worst—the latter a trait seldom found in Angell’s work, especially with such important cultural issues at stake for baseball.

What makes such annals like the Robinson or Postema extracts even more compelling is their comparatively small place relative to the whole of the essays in which they appear. In fact, these are but minor episodes, vignettes in miniature. Yet they are never diminished in strength by their brevity.

Rarely, if ever, sacrificing polish or professionalism, Angell therein communicates with a deceptively informal style and voice all the more appropriate for today’s pace and new mediums for the written word. He understands all too well how the conversational narrative of baseball culture so naturally lays itself down in a series of tangents, asides and epigrams. So it was, and so it remains. For example, Angell’s “Postcards” and travelogue passages in his spring training reports carry less of an epistolary character and actually more closely resemble the content of a journalist’s blog: detailed, quirky, and produced in concentrated bursts.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

Then take the “Takes” pieces, some of which max out at only two or three pages. While these are little stories (yet not to imply that their value should be diminished at all), they are faithfully framed within that always larger, unifying one of the game. The accounts can be powerful, even tinged with sorrow, as in “Takes: Penmen,” in which Angell initially doubts the poetic talents of pitcher Dan Quisenberry—only to discover later the ballplayer’s literary output regrettably near Quisenberry’s untimely end with “an unexpected death from a brain tumor” (238). Angell laments how “the surprise of his writings was overtaken but not surpassed by the surprise of his departure.”

But as moving as some “Takes” remain, Angell also lets his readers in on just as many jokes—like one playfully titled piece, “Takes: the Purist.” Actually, it’s as hilarious as it is impressive in the way Angell conveys the apparent dismay of a long-since retired Ted Williams, who frowns upon the distracting practices of excessive fornication among the modern era’s young players. Williams frankly shares his theories with Angell on why the more promising hitters are underperforming: “They’re f—ing their brains out…They’re just thinking of that one thing” (382). But then comes the real bombshell:

‘Roger,’ the Splinter said, ‘I didn’t get laid for the first time until the All-Star Game break of my second year in the majors. I was thinking about hitting.'”

Hence another undersold talent with Angell: how his casual, congenial exterior exudes the trustworthiness of a true confidant. For not only does Angell somehow get a notably reticent legend such as Williams to voluntarily disclose that he was a virgin until just one month shy of his 23rd birthday, Angell also makes readers feel as though Williams disclosed this insight directly to them, whispered it in their very own ears.

In a way, Angell (like Williams) is a “purist.” His words so effortlessly complement the game’s great characters and stories Therein, his work contains a peculiarly pure essence of joy increasingly rare in our tumultuous world. In as much, the unique kind of pleasure elicited by experiencing an Angell essay is equal only to that of an actual game—and, depending on the game, of course, sometimes even better.

Angell’s writing almost always aims to be about more than just the sport, the thing itself. All better judgment aside, hyperbole seems an oddly appropriate tribute here to describe Angell’s work: simply put, it transcends. It swings for the fences, hits, and inspires. No matter the era, the sum of Angell’s output remains remarkably relevant. Equally remarkable, his sports culture commentary spans the past six decades—and, with a little luck and a few more years, still counting.

References & Resources


M. G. Moscato’s work has appeared in CineAction, Spitball, Sports Collectors Digest, Aethlon, Stymie, Harpur Palate, among others. Read his blog Pulp Ephemera and follow him on Twitter @PulpEphemera.
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Rob Skasko
8 years ago

His books are truly timeless. Any baseball fan would love his work. I discovered his writing from some of my Uncles books he left for me when he passed away. I then tracked down everything I could find from Angell. I find myself going back and re-reading some of the chapters from his books.
Nothing like a cold beer, a warm summer afternoon and a Roger Angell book.

M.G. Moscato
8 years ago

Hi Rob, I also love how so much of Angell’s recent work is available for free online.
Thanks for sharing (and reading)!

Dennis Bedard
8 years ago

Great piece. I always thought of him along with two other baseball writers: Roger Kahn (“The Boy of Summer”) and David Halberstam (“1949” and “1964”). All were an antidote to the SABR ization of the sport.

M.G. Moscato
8 years ago
Reply to  Dennis Bedard

Yes, I think I’ve had Kahn on my reading list for some time now. But Halberstam doesn’t sound too familiar to me. It’s probably time for me to get to reading both of them!

Luis
8 years ago
Reply to  M.G. Moscato

Yes it is- The Halberstam books are excellent.

Luis
8 years ago

I also recommend Charles Einstein’s “Willie’s Time”. It is fabulous.

DENNIS BEDARD
8 years ago

Just to correct the title. The 1949 book is The Summer of ’49. Many may remember Halberstam as the PP winner of The Best and The Brightest, a history of how the US got involved in Vietnam. His real passion, though, was sports, and told from a historical perspective that left you feeling good about America.

bucdaddy
8 years ago

As a longtime TNY subscriber, I always find Roger’s contributions a treat. Seems to me he is to baseball writing what Vin Scully is to baseball broadcasting.

DENNIS BEDARD
8 years ago

Bucdaddy nails it. The word we are all looking for is TIMELESS.

DENNIS BEDARD
8 years ago

Sorry. I just saw Skasko’s use of the correct word. A big kudos to him

M.G. Moscato
8 years ago

>Very apt comparison, bucdaddy!
>Also, thanks, Dennis, for clarifying those. . . .
>And thank you, Luis, for the Einstein recommendation.
>It seems like you guys certainly aren’t alone in a lot of these excellent recommendations. I think I see most/all of these here on one of my favorite online lists of must-read baseball books: http://www.greatestbaseballstory.com/Ultimate_Book_List.php

M.G. Moscato
8 years ago

. . . . Then there’s another, even bigger list here: http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1290.Best_Baseball_Books

scott
8 years ago

Haha, beautifully written!

“perhaps a similar, Angellian economy”

“What makes such annals like the Robinson or Postema extracts even more compelling”

You were obviously channeling the Great Angell himself when you wrote this.

I personally never cared for Red Smith or Ring Lardner, but Roger himself is definitely one of the GIANTS of baseball writing and I have read and re-read his anthologies countless times.