Remembering Roger Angell

It’s the 1986 World Series, Game 6, at Shea Stadium in New York, bottom of the tenth inning. The Boston Red Sox, who haven’t won the championship since 1918, establishing a reputation for dramatic unsuccess, have just taken a 5–3 lead over the New York Mets. Three more Mets outs and the elusive Series at last will be Boston’s. In the press box, high above the field, I’m a rookie magazine reporter, not long out of college, seated alongside Roger Angell of The New Yorker. As a boy, I reread The Summer Game, a collection of Angell’s early baseball essays, so many times, and stuffed so many escaped pages back into the paperback binding, that it resembled a bundle of careworn love letters.

Angell, who died this year at 101, was the finest writer ever to turn his consistent attention to baseball. He started writing about the game for magazine and became a regular baseball correspondent for in 1962, where he was a mid-career fiction editor. Inspired by John Updike’s on Ted Williams’s last game, in 1960, Angell found that the sport allowed him to access a startling depth of talent for prose. His were extended performances of admiration and seduction set forth in Macoun-crisp sentences. Right away, in 1962, here he is describing Willie Mays on the basepaths: “He runs low to the ground, his shoulders swinging to his