On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader
Roger Angell is in his 90s. He is still writing. His main home is The New Yorker, and has been for decades. His work is treasured, certainly, by sports fans. He is one of the greatest sports writers who has ever put pen to paper. And his venue, The New Yorker, was not exactly known for its sports coverage, or its jock-ish readership, or anything like that. But sports fans are everywhere, and come in all shapes and sizes. Even intellectuals. In the case of baseball, maybe especially intellectuals. There’s something about baseball that is a kind of projection screen for all kinds of OTHER things – which can be awesome, and it can be annoying, depending on where you stand. Angell writes with refreshing openness and enthusiasm, and he also doesn’t gild the lily, like some sportswriters do. He doesn’t appear, ever, to reach for effects. His emotions are sincere, and he is able to put them into words. I mean, he makes it look that simple. His stuff is always a pleasure to read. He’s got the maniacal OCD statistics love of all serious baseball fans, and he also has a love of the larger concepts, like talent and teamwork, enthusiasm and hope. What it means to root for a team. What that FEELS like. What the game feels like when it takes a turn for the better (or worse, depending). Angell also knows the game well enough to talk about what it means. Every sport has its own … vibe, shall we say. Every sport has its own rules, and history, energy, and appeal. Different sports appeal to different aspects of us. Baseball feeds something different than football, or hockey, or basketball … and if you’re a fan of more than one sport then you have experienced that. A football game could not FEEL more different than a baseball game. Compared to football, baseball often feels like … nothing ever happens. Everyone just … standing around. Until … in a flash … everyone starts moving as one. Baseball requires patience. You have to be able to tolerate a whole shit-ton of nothing much happening. Angell, in his work, gets into all of that, and what it means to him, and to others.
It’s deeply satisfying to read his stuff.
Once More Around the Park is a collection of baseball writing, written from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He has other collections. He probably will have more. The collection is beautiful and diverse. There are essays about pitchers (one of Angell’s obsessions: his writings on pitching are among the best I have ever read, and his essay about Pirates pitcher Steve Blass who, seemingly overnight, stopped being able to pitch, is a masterpiece.) At one point, he seems to realize that in his obsessing about pitchers he forgot about catchers, and so in one essay he sets out to understand the role of the catcher, interviewing as many as he can. Great stuff. There are essays about certain playoffs, there are essays about some of Angell’s many pen pals (a couple of whom became very good friends: all insane baseball fans, like himself).
Angell, by the way, is open about his own biases. He appears to be a Mets fan, from childhood, and continues to take a huge interest in them as an adult. But he is a Red Sox fan, the Red Sox are “his” team. He has a deep love of the whole game, and paid attention to every team throughout every season … but it was the Mets and the Red Sox that brought out the little-boy OH-MA-GERD-THEY-WON feeling.
The essay ‘Agincourt and After’ is a perfect example.
It’s about the 1975 World Series. A nail-biter. I was a kid, and I was born a Red Sox fan in the same way I was born Catholic. There was no question about either of these things. My first memory, I had to be around 3 or 4, was at Fenway Park. I was being held. By my mother or father. I just remember the sense of space and the noise. So when your first memory is of a major league baseball game … it gives you a certain feeling about the game. You love it by osmosis. It is passed on down to you. The 1975 World Series was my first real conscious awareness of the game itself, the first series I followed, like a maniac. Many of the games (including the famous Game Six, discussed in the excerpt below) went way too late for me to watch, but I remember hearing my father and my mother suddenly SHOUTING downstairs deep into the night. And then I got to watch the instant re-plays on the news, and got to discuss it at school the next day. Everyone was in a FEVER of Red Sox mania. And Carlton Fisk’s home run in Game Six was an iconic moment, continues to be an iconic moment, and was an Instant Classic among the grade school set.
We would imitate it during our own games at recess. We would take turns “being Carlton Fisk.”
My sister Jean had memorized the entire roster of the 1975 Red Sox. She was 3 years old. My dad would prompt her with the first name of the player, and she’d fill in the last name, from her high chair. She would SHOUT the name as she ate her Cheerios or whatever.
“Fred …”
“LYNN.”
“Dwight …”
“EVANS.”
“Rico …”
“PETROCELLI.”
And on and on. But the family joke that still remains is:
“Carl…”
“YASTRZEMSKI.”
“Carl …”
“TONFISK.”
To us, from that day forward, he would always be Carl Tonfisk. We still call him that.
“Agincourt and After” is a lengthy essay about that entire nail-biter of a playoffs season, but I’ll excerpt a bit from the “Game Six” section.
Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader
And so the swing of things was won back again. Carlton Fisk, leading off the bottom of the twelfth against Pat Darcy, the eighth Reds pitcher of the night – it was well into morning now, in fact – socked the second pitch up and out, farther and farther into the darkness above the lights, and when it came down at last, reilluminated, it struck the topmost, innermost edge of the screen inside the yellow left-field foul pole and glanced sharply down and bounced on the grass: a fair ball, fair all the way. I was watching the ball, of course, so I missed what everyone on television saw – Fisk waving wildly, weaving and writhing and gyrating along the first-base line, as he wished the ball fair, forced it fair with his entire body. He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” fortissimo, and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them – in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all five Manchesters, and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway – jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on back-country roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy – alight with it.
It should be added, of course, that very much the same sort of celebration probably took place the following night in the midlands towns and vicinities of the Reds’ supporters – in Otterbein and Scioto; in Frankfort, Sardinia, and Summer Shade; in Zanesville and Louisville and Akron and French Lick and Loveland. I am not enough of a social geographer to know if the faith of the Red Sox is deeper or hardier than that of a Reds rooter (although I secretly believe that it may be, because of his longer and more bitter disappointments down the years). What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look – I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring – caring deeply and passionately, really caring – which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete – the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the hap hazardous flight of a distant ball – seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
This book is very exciting. I have read it 3 times.