MLB: Will Roger Angell take us once more around the park?

He’s as sharp at 99 as most wish to be at half his age. Let’s have another MLB season ticket with Roger Angell’s literary companionship.

For so many years, so many decades, spring meant two things: training, and Roger Angell. A spring training that wasn’t covered by Angell’s gimlet eye and lyrical hand just didn’t seem like MLB spring training at all. I haven’t seen anything from Angell this spring training, thus far, and perhaps it’s asking too much for him to take us once more around the park at 99. Or is it?

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Willing Davidson, another writer at The New Yorker, Angell’s literary home since around the last Brooklyn Dodgers pennant, visited Angell at home for the magazine’s recent anniversary issue. Davidson muses that, where it’s “tempting” to consider Angell as “a plaque on the wall reading, ‘This was The New Yorker,” Angell is more likely to say in reply, “I learned something truly amazing today!”

You could figure that reply just by reading Angell from spring training or any other time during MLB season or postseason. If you get nothing else out of an Angell essay, you should learn or re-learn something amazing that he learned, on the day he wrote or the day you read or re-read.

It began when a legendary New Yorker editor, William Shawn, sent Angell to spring training 1962 with one instruction: “See what you find.” That’d teach Shawn. Among other things, the son of a New Yorker editor (Katharine S. White) and stepson of a New Yorker legend (E.B. White) found the embryonic New York Mets and their equally surrealistic fans. Concurrently, America found a baseball writer who was neither a rough-and-tumble newspaper or wire service barfly nor a dilettante deigning to step down from the tower to slum and snark.

“[T]hat was very lucky for me when I thought it out,” Angell once told One Day in Fenway author and Salon writer Steve Kettmann. “It occurred to me fairly early on that nobody was writing about the fans. I was a fan, and I felt more like a fan than a sportswriter. I spent a lot of time in the stands, and I was sort of nervous in the clubhouse or the press box. And that was a great fan story, the first year of the Mets. They were these terrific losers that New York took to its heart.”