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

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

It’s not that daily beat writing hasn’t produced its lyricists and true wits, of course. They occupy places on my bookshelves: Ira Berkow, Thomas Boswell, Alison Gordon, Ring Lardner, Jim Murray (if you can imagine the offspring of Lord Byron and James Thurber, Murray was he), Shirley Povich, Damon Runyon, Claire Smith, and Red Smith. My life’s blessings have included reading Berkow, Boswell, Gordon, Murray, Povich, and the two Smiths in my newspapers for more mornings than I have time to count.

And, picking up the occasional New Yorker to read the latest Angellic exegesis, or buying his remarkable anthologies The Summer Game, Five Seasons, Late Innings, Season Ticket, Once More Around the Park, and Game Time. You could own those six books and, examining as they do baseball from 1962 through 2003, have the game’s answer to Edward Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Except that no Caesar had to try hitting Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, or Greg Maddux, or getting something past Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, or Ken Griffey, Jr.

“It happened without any plan at all from me,” Angell told Davidson about that first assignment to spring training. “I didn’t see it as a career move, I mean. And the long trail of those pieces and books happened one by one and grew only out of my own pleasure and excitement over the endless complexities and beauties of the game.”

I’d like to think that’s why San Francisco Chronicle writer Susan Slusser, when she was president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, launched the movement that finally conferred upon Angell what no writer not tied to a daily baseball beat had ever earned, the Hall of Fame’s J.G. Spink Award, in 2014. She knew an often-forgotten parallel between baseball and its writing: A solid team must have at least one man who hits for distance.

Which, I asked writing on Angell’s 99th birthday last September, would you prefer—the customary clanking strain of sound-biting, or living, breathing prose (and wisdom) such as that in which Angell once concluded a remarkable study of the delightful but ill-fated relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry?

"We want our favorites to be great out there, and when that stops we feel betrayed a little. They have not only failed but failed us. Maybe this is the real dividing line between pros and bystanders, between the players and the fans. All the players know that at any moment things can go horribly wrong for them in their line of work — they’ll stop hitting, or, if they’re pitchers, suddenly find that for some reason they can no longer fling the ball through that invisible sliver of air where it will do their best work for them — and they will have to live with that diminishment, that failure, for a time or even for good. It’s part of the game. They are prepared to lose out there in plain sight, while the rest of us do it in private and then pretend it hasn’t happened."