Sports Biblio Digest, 10.20.19: The Baseball Life of Roger Angell
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The World Series In D.C.; The Faith of Vin Scully; Grassroots Baseball On Route 66; Basque Footballers in Mexico; The Wyoming 14; Enes Kanter; Bill Tilden; Buzz Bissinger; Golf On The Rez; The Cornbelt Comet; 25 All-Time Best Non-Fiction Sports Books
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Roger Angell turned 99 years old in September, and as I’m writing this, the New York Yankees are playing the Houston Astros in the American League Championship Series.
Those were the teams playing in Angell’s last published baseball piece for The New Yorker, in May 2018. Like much of his work in recent years, geared more for online consumption rather than print, it’s a sparkling gem, taut and enlightening, with a deft touch of the pen that’s been widely envied for more than 60 years.
Since publishing his first baseball story for The New Yorker and the magazine’s “The Sporting Scene” column in 1962, Angell has compiled an erudite, memorable and graceful body of work, baseball and beyond, that anyone appreciative of good English should savor.
While he’s been the magazine’s fiction editor and has written two memoirs and many short fiction pieces, Angell’s baseball writing has earned him most of his fame.
He’s been honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame with the J.G. Spink Award and is a recipient of the PEN America/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing.
He started hanging around Major League parks as baseball was moving away from being a writers’ game, ushered into the television age.
His baseball writings are stuffed with observances of how the game and American society were changing, and not always for the better, in his estimation.
As he notes in “Let Me Finish,” his marvelous memoir published in 2006:
“Sports were different in my youth—a series of events to look forward to and then to turn over in memory, rather than a huge, omnipresent industry, with its own economics and politics and crushing public relations.”
Elsewhere, in a 1992 article entitled “Early Innings,” he is clearly wistful:
“Most of American life, including baseball, no longer feels feasible. We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it.”
Yet Angell is a master at navigating through the modern maze of the business of baseball, and the social mores that also changed the game. In the last of his six baseball collections, “Game Time,” published in 2003, Angell’s long takeout of Bob Gibson is a sterling example of a genre of its own.
Published as “Distance” in 1980, Angell does plenty of reporting before he visits Gibson at his home in Omaha, meeting a deeply introspective and fiercely intelligent retired pitcher, wtith memories of his days with the St. Louis Cardinals sharply resonant. Gibson was often aloof to the press, and as Angell notes:
“I have considerable sympathy for any writer who had to ask Bob Gibson some sharp, news-producing questions two or three times a week over the span of a decade or more, but wanting Gibson with a sunny, less obdurate temperament would be to want him a less difficult, less dangerous man on the mound—not quite Bob Gibson, not quite a great pitcher. The man is indivisible, and it is the wonder of him.”
For Angell admirers, taking in his work is a great revelry, and like Gibson, the writer also is indivisible. Tackling his work, even in collected form, can be a good bit of work even for dedicated readers.
For those wanting a single-volume summary, or introduction, to Angell, a new biography is a welcome addition. Joe Bonomo’s “No Place I Would Rather Be,” published earlier this year by the University of Nebraska Press, is a 173-page account of Angell’s baseball writing, for the most part.
Angell’s early years are discussed, growing up as the stepson of famed writer and stylist E.B. Wright, his boyhood in New York City and summers in Maine and on a grandparents’ farm in the Midwest, as well as service as a military unit publication editor while serving stateside in World War II.
Bonomo, who teaches English at Northern Illinois University, introduces readers to other baseball stories Angell wrote before The New Yorker, including a 1954 article for Holiday magazine, “Baseball–The Perfect Game.” This is “prime Angell,” Bonomo writes:
“Angell outlines for himself and his readers what about the game might deserve his, and our, sustained, thoughtful attention, beginning by observing that the game binds us in its community-making rituals, inspiring self-identification, hometown pride and fierce loyalties. After sharing fond memories of watching Joe DiMaggio and others play, Angell explores what will become one of the central themes in his baseball writing: the paradox of the supreme difficulty of the game and the apparent ease with which its players play.”
It’s an astute observation that carries so much of the rest of the book, as Bonomo explores the maturation of Angell as a writer. He learned much from Red Smith, Arnold Hano and John Updike, whose most famous sports story, in The New Yorker, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” chronicles Ted Williams’ last game in 1960.
Bonomo, who had access to the writer’s notes, acknowledges the “fortune and good timing” that guided Angell’s long career. He started to find his baseball writer’s voice while excitedly covering a Braves-Yankees spring training game in 1962, as aging hurlers Whitey Ford and Warren Spahn caught his eye:
“Struck by the paradox of aloneness while surrounded by a community of like-spirits, Angell’s joy blends with bitter sweetness, without a drop of treacle.”
As Angell eased into his new role, baseball was changing rapidly, first with expansion in the late 1960s, and then free agency with monster salaries for superstars in the 1970s, made possible by television deals that endangered the fiscal health of the minor leagues.
Bonomo writes that during this time, Angell’s moodiness, about baseball and American society, was obvious, and led him to write “as close to purple as he’ll get in his writing.”
The nearly church-like act of attending a game at a ballpark, how Angell first experienced the game, had been replaced not only by the noise of TV, but the “vulgarity” of futuristic venues like the Astrodome, where for many fans the game is secondary to socializing and luxuriating in modern conveniences.
But it was the ballplayers, managers, owners and people of baseball that intrigued Angell the most. In examining his Gibson story, Bonomo writes that Angell sees Gibson “as emblematic of the price of fame, to both the athlete basking in praise and the fan lofting it.”
That mutual tension has escalated since Gibson’s time, of course, staggeringly so, with labor issues, including strikes and the walkout that ended the 1994 season without a World Series.
It's the games, especially in the post-season, where Angell also excels, as Bonomo revels in the writer at work during the 1975 World Series between the Reds and Red Sox, unafraid of admitting to a certain sense of fandom.
When the Mets rallied to beat the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series. Bonomo writes that Angell’s story notes were flooded with rooting observations: “I think that I’m a METS FAN,” and there are references to the Mets as “we” in the margins.
As his fame increased, Angell bristled at being called baseball’s “poet laureate.” Nor did he accept descriptions as a baseball historian or essayist, as he tried to explain in the late 1980s:
“It seems to me what I have been putting down for a quarter century now is autobiography: the story of myself as a fan.”
The World Series starts Tuesday, and it appears it will be the second fall classic in a row without Angell’s byline. But’ we’re eternally enriched by all the words he’s put on paper, and in the ether, as a writer and fan extraordinaire.
A Few Good Reads
The last time Washington, D.C., was represented in the World Series, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his first year as president and the Depression was in full swing. The year was 1933, and the stars for the Senators were Goose Goslin, Heinie Manush and Joe Cronin, who didn’t have much of a shot against the New York Giants. The Washington Nationals will try to become the first Major League baseball champion from the nation’s capital since 1924, when Walter Johnson was playing. That’s nearly a century of scars that have taken some time to heal;
A half-century ago the New York Mets shocked the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, and 50 years’ worth of Baby Boom nostalgia has come to an end;
It’s been 30 years since the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay Area and the World Series, as Al Michaels, who called the Giants-A’s games for ABC, recalls;
He came out of a New York Irish Catholic family and graduated from Fordham, a Jesuit university, and many decades later, legendary baseball announcer Vin Scully explains what his faith means to him today: “Faith is the one thing that makes it work, makes me keep going. You appreciate what you’ve been given;"
In Paterson, N.J., local leaders want to restore the vacant Hinchcliffe Stadium, once the home field for the New York Black Yankees and the New York Cubans of the Negro Leagues, and turn it into a museum and multisport facility to help revitalize a city in decline;
A dedicated baseball photographer and the outgoing president of the Baseball Hall of Fame have created a new organization called Grassroots Baseball, and their RV trip along historic U.S. Route 66 will provide the subject matter for the second book in the series of the same name, to be published in 2021;
A suitcase belonging to Bill Tilden and that was found after his death in 1953 is among is among the memorabilia once belonging to the tennis legend being donated to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I. “He’s the most forgotten great athlete in American history, and it’s really a sin. People have no idea how big of a force he was 100 years ago,” says Allen Hornblum, Tilden’s most recent biographer;
A year after the John Carlos-Tommie Smith protest at the Mexico City Olympics, 14 black football players at the University of Wyoming were dismissed from the team after trying to wear black armbands protesting the Mormon church’s treatment of blacks. The occasion was a game against Brigham Young, and earlier this month, 50 years later, those players were honored after getting a formal letter of apology from the university that banished them;
Nile Kinnick was killed in a 1943 training flight off the coast of Venezuela as he served as a U.S. Naval aviator during World War II. The University of Iowa football stadium was named after the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner, and Hawkeyes players today are taught all about the phenom known as The Cornfield Comet;
After LeBron James shamefully prostrated himself for business interests that transcend the NBA, new Boston Celtics acquisition Enes Kanter threw some social media shade James’ way, reinforcing the true cost of standing up for ones’ beliefs. The Turkish player has not been allowed back in his home country and his family (which has disowned him) has paid the price for Kanter’s opposition to strongman president Recep Tayip Erdogan, whose troops are going after Kurdish soldiers in Syria following U.S. President Donald Trump’s betrayal of a longtime American ally;
From The Ringer, how Los Angeles became the NBA’s media capital;
A new HBO documentary about “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger delves into his more recent biography that includes extravagant spending on clothes shopping and his transgender curiosities after a his GQ profile of Kaitlyn Jenner:
“I sometimes think that the issue of gender and sexuality has become only the provenance of transgender men and women. That’s wrong! Heterosexual people or people in general deal with it all the time . . . I did not want to die without having explored what is a core sexuality.”
In 1936, as fascist bombs fell on Guernica, the Basque soccer team was in France, part of an extended diaspora of the breakaway region’s best players during the Spanish Civil War, including those from Athletic Club Bilbao, the 1936 Liga champions. At These Football Times, the story of CD Euzkadi, a Basque club team that finished second in the Primera Fuerza league in Mexico in the 1938-39 season, after FIFA barred member nations from playing the Basque national team during the war;
A golf outing on the Navajo reservation in Arizona is quite a bit different than the lush courses on the PGA Tour:
“Rez golf, like rez life, is hard — punishing at times. Linger on a brown too long and red ants bite the ankles. Balls are lost forever in spiky sage. The sun is merciless, golf carts absent and booze illegal. An errant goat, sheep or horse can delay play or spoil a shot.”
Sports Book News
New from the University of Nebraska Press, “Bodies Built for Game,” a sportswriting anthology that questions “the power structures that athletics enforce." Co-editor Natalie Diaz, a former pro basketball player who teaches literature at Arizona State University, explains the collection in more detail, including its generous use of poetry;
Coming in January by Penguin Random House, from ESPN writer Howard Bryant, “Full Dissidence: Notes From An Uneven Playing Field,” a continuation of the race, society and sports issues he explored in “The Heritage,” published earlier this year. Bryant’s a talented writer, and I really enjoyed his Henry Aaron biography. In the expanding universe of woke sportswriters, however, he’s near the top, with an unrelenting invective that’s starting to rival the likes of Dave Zirin, which I find rather regrettable;
I like a lot of the selections on Chris Morgan’s list of his top 25 non-fiction sports books of all time (one of these books I’ll be writing about more in depth soon) at Yardbarker, and like many others of the genre it’s heavily about North American sports. It’s been 17 years since Sports Illustrated’s heralded Top 100 list that’s due for an upgrade. Morgan is a pop culture writer whose books include “The Comic Galaxy of Mystery Science 3000 Theater,” a television program I miss very much.
Taking a Break
There won’t be a newsletter next week as I’ll be attending a publishers conference. Will be back in a couple of weeks!
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This is Digest issue No. 183, published Oct. 20, 2019. PLEASE NOTE: There will not be a newsletter next week. The Digest will resume on Nov. 3.
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