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

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

Angell has appreciated and written much and well of the baseball ties that bind generations without caring to flog them with nostalgia’s buggy whip. But that hasn’t stopped him from flogging the contemporary game’s dubious accouterments with the whip they deserve so often.

“The modern game is all bangs and effects: it’s summer movie fare, awesome and forgettable—and extremely popular with the ticket-buyers,” he wrote around the turn of this century. Making himself kindred with the too-short-lived commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, likewise, a man who feared for his game when he pondered the ballpark’s graduation to a cacophonous video arcade.

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But Angell has also been an empath obeying particular boundaries of reason with assorted fans of assorted teams, even if he reaches further. He’s appreciated the paradoxic hysteria of early Mets fans and the protracted sufferings of fans in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, and Philadelphia. When those fans experienced the sweet liberation of triumph, Angell rejected romanticism but understood deeper, as when the Red Sox finally ended their actual or alleged curse sixteen years ago:

"The Redbird collapse can probably be laid to weak pitching, unless you decide that the baseball gods, a little surfeited by the cruel jokes and disappointments they have inflicted on the Boston team and its followers down the years, and perhaps as sick of the Curse of the Bambino as the rest of us, decided to try a little tenderness."

It would be priceless to behold Angell’s observations and insights into the bitter coming-to-terms Houston Astros fans now undergo as they strain to sustain their love of their team in the explosion and aftermath of the Astrogate electronic cheating scandal. They are learning the hard way what once had to be learned by Chicago White Sox fans battered by the Black Sox scandal, and they deserve nothing less than our compassion and Angell’s succor.

Angell has come to terms with his mortality better than his readers might come to terms with a MLB season lacking the pleasure of seeing the spring or the season through his eye and pen. Several months before his windup of the 2004 Red Sox’s return to the Promised Land, he wrote a prize-winner that became the title of a charming collection of appreciations (This Old Man: All in Pieces) and a deeper insight into the man himself, a mere 93 when he wrote:

"“Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation."

For myself, I expect nothing, but I merely hope for one more Angellic spring training dispatch, one more season of Angellic game observations, one more postseason of Angellic reason, rhyme, and reflection. He becomes a centenarian come September 19 and once more around the park would be more than welcome, if his remarkable constitution allows.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it once more. The MLB historian Peter Golenbock was wrong to call him baseball’s Homer. Homer was really ancient Greece’s Roger Angell.