roger angell
My parents, among their many fine qualities, showed uncommonly good judgment in the sports books they bought for me. I look back and I’m actually a bit awed by how they never seemed to miss. I don’t know if it was my mom or my dad; they would come from “Mom & Dad” or maybe (possible spoiler alert) they would just be in the pile from Santa Claus on Christmas morning.
But: Second Wind, Bill Russell’s autobiography. Ghostwritten by Taylor Branch, that one - Taylor Branch! It expanded my idea of what a sports biography could be; he wrote, yes, about how he learned KC Jones’ form by imitating his hand first, and then his elbow, and then his whole arm, but also geopolitics, how the argument about the shape of the table in peace talks wasn’t absurd, that the shape of the table was the whole disagreement in Southeast Asia.
The Fireside Book of Baseball was a kind of greatest hits collection of articles and essays. It’s where I read Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” for the first time, which many will tell you is the greatest baseball essay of all time. And, if memory serves, Giamatti’s “The Green Fields of the Mind,” which I will tell you is the greatest baseball essay of all time.
My dad had a copy of Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer. I didn’t receive it as a gift, but I sat on the floor of his den and read it cover to cover. I might have spirited it out of the house at some point - if they noticed they never complained. Don’t tell on me. Some time later they gave me his follow up, Good Enough to Dream, about his adventures owning a minor league club upstate. It took me years to get around to reading it, and when I did I regretted that it had taken so long, or maybe I was delighted to still have its pleasures to enjoy. Dad also had The Game of their Lives, about Frank Gifford’s Giants and the 1958 championship game against the Colts. That one was about football, so it didn’t interest me as much. On the other hand, I think it was the first place I saw an F-bomb in print, so it carried a scandalous thrill to be reading it at whatever tender age I was.
Somewhere along the way they gave me my favorite, Willie’s Time. I think Willie’s Time doesn’t get the accolades it deserves. It’s beautiful and fascinating and sad, it’s history and biography and autobiography and poetry. Charles Einstein did things with words and sentences and paragraphs that I didn’t know were possible. His writing worked its way into my soul; I can’t recall ever consciously trying to imitate it, but along with Annie Dillard, he shaped the way I write even today more than any author I can think of.
I can’t imagine how they found these, other than, you know, caring.
Willie’s Time was my favorite, but Roger Angell was the best. It probably would have been Five Seasons, his chronicles of the years 1972 to 1976. I can’t remember for certain, because it was pretty quickly after that I laid hold of a collection of his earlier pieces, The Summer Game. It might have been the other way around.
His craft was immediately apparent. And that’s what I think of, craftsmanship, more than style, certainly more than flash. You read along, one clear and perfect phrase after another, and suddenly arrive at a conclusion both surprising and inevitable. And you’d wonder how he could pull it off.
Well, by working at it, I suspect. He did have the luxury of writing for the New Yorker, of being able to take some time to shape a piece, not having to file it that night. And the benefit of having a mother who worked at that magazine, so that he grew up surrounded by all those writers, including E.B. White who I learned yesterday was his stepfather.
That is, it must be said, a lot of advantages to have if one wants to become the best of writers. It ought to also be noted that one has to take advantage of the advantages one is given.
As with Einstein, as with Dillard, I don’t think I ever tried to imitate Angell. But I also wouldn’t dare to say his style became any part of mine. What would that mean? It could mean only that one’s style was to be an impeccable writer, like a playwright saying, “I write like Chekhov.”
It’s terrible, trying to write about a writer who inspired me. Partly because all I can hear in my head is how inadequate my words are to convey his style. Partly because all I can hear is the way this particular piece of writing doesn’t measure up. Partly because the real thing is just sitting there available to anyone who wants to find it.
So here, I’ll save you the effort. From an essay called “The ‘Go!’ Shouters,” about the early days of the Mets:
I cannot understand how Orlando Cepeda, the Giants’ slugger, ever hits a pitch. At the plate, he stands with his hands and the bat twisted back almost behind his right shoulder blade, and his vast riffles look wild and looping. Only remarkable strength can control such a swing. In one game, he hit a line drive that was caught in front of the center-field screen, 425 feet away; in another, he took a checked half-swing at an outside pitch and lined it into the upper right-field stands. Harvey Kuenn, by contrast, has the level, controlled, intelligent swing of the self-made hitter. He is all concentration, right down to the clamped wad of tobacco in his left cheek; he runs with heavy, pounding determination, his big head jouncing with every step. Mays, it is a pleasure to say, is just the same—the best ballplayer anywhere. He hit a homer each day at the Polo Grounds, made a simple, hilarious error on a ground single to center, and caught flies in front of his belt buckle like a grocer catching a box of breakfast food pulled from a shelf. All in all, I most enjoy watching him run bases. He runs low to the ground, his shoulders swinging to his huge strides, his spikes digging up great chunks of infield dirt; the cap flies off at second, he cuts the base like a racing car, looking back over his shoulder at the ball, and lopes grandly into third, and everyone who has watched him finds himself laughing with excitement and shared delight.
The first baseball game I went to in New York was not a Mets game, it was at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were playing the Royals, and one of my soon-to-be-erstwhile teaching colleagues wanted to go because Kansas City had a young, rising star named Johnny Damon who he wanted to see. My colleague was certainly right about Damon. I can’t tell you what he did on that night in 1997, but over his career he compiled 2,769 hits, 235 home runs, and 408 stolen bases. It did not quite get him into the Hall of Fame, not yet anyway, but it certainly qualifies for what the statheads call the Hall of Very Good.
We were sitting there behind home plate in the old Yankee Stadium, at a time when New York had not quite come back so far that Yankee Stadium on a weeknight in April or May was a place you would want to take your kids to. The crowd was sparse and largely drunk. I recall commenting on the number of assholes sitting near us, and my colleague - his name went down the memory hole with as much of my middle-school teaching experience as I could cram in there - my colleague said, “It’s like we’re asshole magnets.”
One of us mentioned that the experience at Shea Stadium, where the Mets were playing, was somewhat different, and I brought up “The ‘Go!’ Shouters.” My colleague said, “They really do shout ‘Go!’”
We stayed through the game, or until the ambience became unsavory enough that we decided a good night’s rest, before another day of teaching, was the better part of valor. It was, for whatever it’s worth, two or three hours spent with a colleague who I suddenly wished I had gotten to know better. He taught math and I English; our paths only crossed occasionally. Sitting at a baseball game, you find yourself talking about things. There’s not much action, you know, or at least, amid the action there are plenty of pauses to fill. I had by that point decided to, and announced my decision to, leave the school at the end of the year. I guess we talked about that. At one point I mentioned how much racism there was at that place, and he replied, “Not just racism - not-me-ism.” Too late I had discovered, in at least one or two respects, a kindred spirit.
Later that summer I went to Shea for the first time. I remember nothing about the game itself. A few things I do remember: my seat was under an overhanging deck, and it felt like watching a game in an unfinished basement. One sportswriter had written that Shea looked old the day it opened, and I believed it, because in 1997 it was decrepit. Somewhere near me a man said in the thickest Brooklyn accent imaginable, “Dey shoulda kept dat fat foist baseman!” The thing about New York is, people still actually talk that way, and in the accent is the whole history of the place, alive today.
Further on, the Mets were attempting to rally. They had a better team than I remembered that year, they finished 88-74, but thirteen whole games behind the Braves, and a sense of futility was hanging around the place. But the charm of Mets fans is their ability to carry the opposing thoughts of optimism and futility in their minds at the same time, the sense that we’re not going to succeed but we oughta try. And so a man too young to be behaving this way - if memory serves, he was wearing a straw boater - stood up and shouted to all of us feeling game’s tide receding, “Let’s make some noise, boys!” And up went the chant: “LET’S. GO. METS!”
They really did shout Go! They still do today. After a win, in a pennant race, as the crowd files down the staircase, someone will start it up again. LET’S! GO! METS! It’s happy and innocent and casts all the rank aspects of the sport, the commercialism and the money and the swag, to the side in favor of unity and pride in being, in New York at least, the underdog.
Angell again, better than I can say it:
For a time, the long, low “Oooh!” sound and the accompanying thunderclap of applause that greeted the cannon shots by Ron Fairly, Willie Davis, Frank Howard, and the other visitors convinced me that I was in an audience made up mostly of veteran Dodger loyalists. The Mets’ pitchers came and went in silence, and there were derisive cheers when the home team finally got the third out in the top of the fourth and came in to bat trailing 10–0. I didn’t change my mind even when I heard the explosive roar for the pop-fly homer by Gil Hodges that led off the home half; Hodges, after all, is an ex-Dodger and perhaps the most popular ballplayer in the major leagues today. Instantly, however, I learned how wrong I had been. Gil’s homer pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full, furious, happy shout of “Let’s go, Mets! Let’s go, Mets!” There were wild cries of encouragement before every pitch, boos for every called strike. This was no Dodger crowd, but a huge gathering of sentimental home-towners. Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible. When Hickman and Mantilla hit a double and a single for one run, and Christopher singled for another, the Mets fans screeched, yawped, pounded their palms, leaped up and down, and raised such a din that players in both dugouts ducked forward and peered nervously back over the dugout roofs at the vast assemblage that had suddenly gone daft behind them.
I think of this essay every time I go out to Flushing for a game. For a few years, a while back, my niece was at college nearby and a couple of times we managed to get out to Citi Field together. Other times we would go down to Coney Island to see the Mets’ single-A affiliate the Cyclones. She would bring the glove she used on the college softball team. (It could have come in handy once, at a Cyclones game, on an immensely high pop foul that was heading straight for us. At the last minute we both realized that a 100-plus-foot pop fly travels at very high speed when it gets back to earth, and bailed.)
We would watch the game and talk about baseball. We would chant “Lets! Go! Mets!” We would talk about college life, her softball team, going to Japan, life in general. There were pauses to fill. The games would wind on, it would get late, we would start thinking about the train schedule to Bronxville and my early meetings the following morning. We tried not to leave early, and cursed late-inning pitching changes and pointless managers’ challenges.
Eventually, we would head back down those chant-filled stairs and over to the 7 train. Angell didn’t write about riding the train in “The ‘Go!’ Shouters”; the Mets in their first season played over in the old Polo Grounds, onetime home of the Giants. He has a nice, albeit dated, aria about heading for home:
The cab swung west on 155th Street, and I glanced to my right, along Edgecombe Avenue, and saw a little crowd gathered on a path that runs through a scrap of park and down Coogan’s Bluff toward the Polo Grounds. There were perhaps thirty or forty men and women there. Most were Negroes; many were carrying portable radios. Below them, the great bank of lights above the roofed horseshoe illuminated the bones of the absurd, doomed old stadium. The ticketless spectators stood immobile, staring down through the early dusk, although they could see no more of the field than the big scoreboard above the bleachers and a slice of emerald grass in deep center field. It seemed likely that some of them had been there all afternoon, listening to the roars from below, smiling and nudging one another at each momentary bit of good news over their radio….
But I love the 7 train, the International Express, once made famous by the reprobate reliever John Rocker who told Sports Illustrated, “Imagine having to take the 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you're [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids.” Yes, yes! All that and more! But especially the joie de vivre of the happy band reveling in victory or looking ahead in defeat. Young couples on dates. Kids who scored tickets somehow. Twenty-something office workers coming down from being buzzed on $14 Coors, shouting across the car at each other. Seventy-something retirees carrying scorebooks, decked out in more Mets regalia than is becoming. (I believe in a rule of three: a hat and a jacket is ok. A jacket and a jersey is OK. A hat, jacket and a jersey makes you look like a kook. Thank god for the kooks.)
It was a trip back to the city on the train one night that really inspired this post, long ago. Two men were talking, about the things you talk about. They were different ages, which may be what first caught my attention. Good plays and blown plays. Family and friends. Work. First names that meant nothing to me, obviously. I watched more than listened. In Queens, the younger man stood and said goodbye, and exited the train. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the moment of goodbyes, I realized it was a father and son, enjoying that too brief window, if it opens at all, when neither parent nor child has to take care of the other, and if we’re lucky enough, we get to discover each other as friends.
It was more recent events that finally inspired me to write it. Roger Angell died this week at the age of 101. He wrote almost up until the end, and honestly kept getting better up until the end. You can read the Times’s obituary here, or a tribute by Joe Posnanski, better than mine of course, here.
Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try—antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.