To say that Roger Angell was America’s best baseball writer feels insufficient. It is true—of course—but it misses so much.
For more than half a century, Angell wrote about baseball for , covering not the sport itself so much as the experience of what it meant to care about it. He was a Hall of Famer who could not have been more deserving. Angell died at home in Manhattan on Friday from congestive heart failure, his wife told . He was 101 years old.
Angell profiled generations of the biggest stars in the game. He wrote about every World Series for decades; he covered spring training and the minor leagues and entirely forgettable weekday contests. But what tied all of this work together was its sense of purpose: Angell understood just why people watched baseball and just why people wanted to read about it. He knew what made the game important alongside what made it anything but. And he understood all of this because he all of this: Roger Angell was a baseball fan. If this seems like it should be a given for a baseball writer, it hasn’t always been, and that’s illuminated by the gap between his work and that of so many others. Who else could write this experience of spring training from the stands (1962) and this incisive profile of Bob Gibson (1980) and this meditation on watching a blown save with his wife (2011)? The common thread is the understanding of what it means to love the game.
Beyond this grasp of fandom, Angell was simply talented. His 1975 profile of Steve Blass, “Down the Drain,” is a master class in reporting that is sensitive while being direct. And that’s to say nothing of the quality of the sentences. (“Professional sports have a powerful hold on us because they display and glorify remarkable physical capacities, and because the artificial demands of games played for very high rewards produce vivid responses,” he wrote. “But sometimes, of course, what is happening on the field seems to speak to something deeper within us; we stop cheering and look on in uneasy silence, for the man out there is no longer just another great athlete, an idealized hero, but only man—only ourself. We are no longer at a game.”) The piece manages to get at an understanding both of how it felt to Steve Blass and how it felt to him. Which is what Angell did best: He never stopped trying to understand.
