R.I.P. Roger Angell

One of the masters of American prose. Not just in sportswriting – although he is, as they say, “the one to beat” in that arena as well – but period. His writing glides and flows. It’s elegant, it can be poetic, but never flowery. Reading his writing is a soothing experience. He leads you through it, gently. His sentences glide, everything is fluid, nothing jars or jolts. He was a master. His focus was, of course, baseball. The poet laureate of baseball writing. As Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s (played by Brad Pitt), says in Moneyball, “It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” Yes. It is hard. Impossible even. Roger Angell knew that. He was romantic about baseball. But his romanticism was just a mirror: he reflected what was already there, the James-Earl-Jones-monologue-in-Field-of-Dreams emotions around baseball … and found a way to put it into language, elegant graceful beautiful language. He was always so much FUN to read. I love good sportswriters, and everyone brings something different to the table. But nobody brings what Angell brings, because writers like him don’t come along all that often. Your only choice is to sit back and enjoy how he does what he does.

I’ve written a ton about Roger Angell, back from the days when I did a “daily book excerpt”: I went book to book to book in my shelves, every damn day, and posted an excerpt from each one, most of the time with copious commentary by yours truly. What can I say. Those were the Bad Years. I have a collection of Angell’s writing, Once More Around the Park, and devoted a week or so to these pieces, and writing about them here.

I consider “Distance” – his profile of feared fastballer Bob Gibson – to be a high watermark of “celebrity” profiles – and not just sports celeb profiles – but profiles, period. Gibson was a notoriously difficult man to know – and everyone was so afraid of his fastball they held him in awe (and dread). Angell was fascinated by the fastball – so he went and spent some time with Gibson post-retirement, trying to understand him. It’s such a beautiful piece of writing and psychologizing as well as analysis of what it was that made Gibson so untouchable (unhittable) as a pitcher. I recommend seeking that one out in particular, although all of his pieces are lovely.

Roger Angell lived to be 101. He wrote up until the end. It was a good life. I will miss him. Every writer should be familiar with his work – whether or not you’re a sports fan. His writing is so perfect it stands as a (daunting) inspiration to strive to be better at your own craft. You might as well learn from the best.

Here’s an excerpt from one of Angell’s many stand-alone pieces on baseball. He did write some newsy stories, round-ups of series, etc. (his piece on Carlton Fisk’s famous homer – and the game and the series it was a part of – swells my heart with the beauty of the writing and the generational trauma it represents). Sometimes, though, he focused in one aspect of the game. He did deeply researched pieces on catchers and pitchers. He kept coming back to pitchers. These guys are DIFFERENT. What is it like to BE them?

This excerpt is from a 1976 essay called “On the Ball” about fastball pitchers.

The smiling pitcher begins not only with the advantage of holding his fate in his own hands, or hand, but with the knowledge that every advantage of physics and psychology seems to be on his side. A great number of surprising and unpleasant things can be done to the ball as it is delivered from the grasp of a two-hundred-pound optimist, and the first of these is simply to transform it into a projectile. Most pitchers seem hesitant to say so, but if you press them a little they will admit that the prime ingredient in their intense personal struggle with the batter is probably fear. A few pitchers in the majors have thrived without a real fastball – junk men like Eddie Lopat and Mike Cuellar, superior control artists like Bobby Shantz and Randy Jones, knuckleballers like Hoyt Wilhelm and Charlie Hough – but almost everyone else has had to hump up and throw at least an occasional no-nonsense hard one, which crosses the plate at eighty-fie miles per hour or better, and thus causes the batter to – well, to *think* a little. The fastball sets up all the other pitches in the hurler’s repertoire – the curve, the slider, the sinker, and so on – but its other purpose is to intimidate. Great fastballers like Bob Gibson, Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax, and Nolan Ryan have always run up high strikeout figures because their money pitch was almost untouchable, but their deeper measures of success – twenty-victory seasons and low earned-run average – were due to the fact that none of the hitter they faced, not even the best of them, was immune to the thought of what a 90-mph missile could do to a man if it struck him. They had been ever so slightly distracted, and distraction is bad for hitting. The intention of the pitcher has almost nothing to do with this; very few pitchers are delivered with intent to maim. The bad dream, however, will not go away. Walter Johnson, the greatest fireballer of them all, had almost absolute control, but he is said to have worried constantly about what might happen if one of his pitches got away from him. Good hitters know all this and resolutely don’t think about it (a good hitter is a man who can keep his back foot firmly planted in the box even while the rest of him is pulling back or bailing out on an inside fastball), but even these icy customers are less settled in their minds than they would like to be, just because the man out there on the mound is hiding that cannon behind his hip. Hitters, of course, do not call this fear. They call it “respect.”

Perfection.

RIP.