Legendary Baseball Author Roger Angell Leaves A Lasting Legacy

Heaven is a better place today with the arrival of celebrated baseball writer Roger Angell.

A refined, soft-spoken presence in a game that was often crude and boisterous, the author of The Summer Game left a legacy of literary accomplishment when he died at age 101 on May 20.

A Harvard graduate and World War II veteran, Angell spent 75 years with The New Yorker, serving as writer, fiction editor, and mentor to younger colleagues who not only respected him but often held him in awe.

He wrote everything from Talk of the Town columns to essays laced with humor, plus a winter holiday poem called “Greetings, Friends!” And then there was baseball.

Roger Angell loved baseball and it loved him – but he didn’t begin covering the game in earnest until 1962, when New Yorker editor William Shawn sent him to Florida to cover baseball spring training.

That was the beginning of a long and celebrated second career as a sportswriter that produced more than a half-dozen best-selling books and a berth in the Baseball Hall of Fame as the recipient of an annual writer’s honor then called the J.G. Taylor Spink Award.

Angell also landed in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, giving him a rare dual distinction. He had others.

According to David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998, “His enthusiasm for baseball was so immense that it could not be confined to a singular loyalty.”

Though a lifelong resident of New York, Angell admitted to being a fan not only of the Mets and Yankees but also of the arch-rival Red Sox. In short, he was a fan of the game – as his book titles showed.

After publication of The Summer Game in 1972 came Five Seasons: a Baseball Companion (1977), Late Innings (1982), Season Ticket (1988), Once More Around the Park (1991), and A Pitcher’s Story: Innings With David Cone (2001).

He was a regular in the press box and clubhouse, penning memorable essays about Steve Blass and Dan Quisenberry and contributing to the oft-repeated 1994 Ken Burns PBS
PBS
series Baseball.

A voracious reader with a legendary memory, he memorized countless poems as well as the captions of every cartoon that ever appeared in The New Yorker.

Angell had good blood-lines: his father Ernest headed the American Civil Liberties Union after graduating from Harvard while his mother Katherine, a Bryn Mawr alum, preceded him as fiction editor of The New Yorker.

His byline first graced The New Yorker in 1944, when the literary magazine published a short story he sent them from his Army Air Corps post in the Central Pacific. It was signed “Cpl. Roger Angell.”

After working for the now-defunct travel magazine Holiday, Angell joined The New Yorker as an editor in 1956. Many honors and awards followed.

He won the George Polk Award for Commentary in 1980, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2005 and the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing in 2011.

Angell was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and was the recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Spink award seven years later.

When he accepted his award at ancient Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, the audience included friends from The New Yorker dressed in specially-made T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Roger’s Angells.”

A father of three, Angell also had heartbreak in his life: cancer claimed the lives of both of his wives. He was married to the first, Evelyn, for 48 years.

A 2019 book about Roger Angell’s life, written by Joe Bonomo, was called No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing.

He left a lasting legacy and will be missed by all those who knew him and countless others who were touched by his words.