Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1372: The Angellic Choir

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the merits of True Wins vs. no-hitters, a Pablo Sandoval fun fact, whether most pitchers would prefer to be better than average with a higher ERA or worse than average with a lower ERA, and whether the running Royals are, in fact, fun, then (26:24) talk to author […]

Always looked up to you For a son trying to catch a cue But followed your every move Pretending to be just like you I, I, I Never seen you look surprised I, I, I, I, I wish I could see your dark side Hello and welcome to episode 1372 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. We're going to spend most of this episode talking to the author Joe Bonomo about Roger Angel, the peerless longtime New Yorker contributor, really long time, since 1944. Because Joe has a new book out. It's called No Place I Would Rather Be, Roger Angel and a Life in Baseball Writing. We both just read it and we both love Roger Angel.

And we're going to talk about Roger Angel's whole incredible career. So that was fun and will be fun for you. But before we get to that, anything you want to banter about? Yeah, I just want to talk about two things that you and Meg talked about, but I wasn't there. Yep. So one of them was the true win. The true win. Noah Sindergaard threw a true win.

And as you noted, they are, in one way of thinking about it, rarer than no hitters. And as you gave the caveat, as I gave the caveat in my article, that they are impossible in the American League after the DH. And so if you look at the since 1908 timeframe, when they are less frequent than no hitters, I would still say that they are slightly more common per possible start than no hitter. But in this decade, they are clearly by any standard, much, much rarer than no hitters. I think there have been, I think, six this decade and there have been 30 something no hitters.

So even if you adjust for half the league, they're still rarer than no-hitters, much rarer than no-hitters. But that does not answer the question, which sort of wanted to get into in the article I wrote, but did not, because I wasn't sure what the answer was, and I didn't want this article to run 17 days later, once I had finally figured out the answer. You got that thing up quick. I did get it up quick. Rarer frequently does not mean better does not mean more impressive all sorts of things are rare and not not that impressive so I'm curious to know though what is more impressive a true win or a no hitter clearly a perfect game I think is the most impressive right yeah yeah

a perfect game is really something yeah I honestly I think I prefer the true win or I think is the most impressive A perfect game is really something Yeah Honestly I think I prefer the true win Or I think it's more impressive I also prefer it I prefer it But I do think it's more impressive Because hitting is really hard For pitchers

Just to be good enough to hit a home run Now you can be a bad hitting pitcher And just run into one That happens now and then then. Bartolo Colon did it, so it can be done. But I think just having to do that, either way, you have to throw a complete game, which if you're throwing a complete game, you're probably pitching really well. So the difference between that game and the no-hitter, I mean, there are no-hitters that weren't even that impressive that were mostly just a product of luck if anything i would bet i wonder actually if you could compare the like the game score the average game score in true wins compared to no hitters i wonder how different it would be

you're anticipating the week's possible stat blast i don't know if it will be but i have thought i have been thinking perhaps of stat blasting something i'd be interested in the answer because you get no hitter sometimes where you just leave the guy in because he's pitching a no hitter and he's not actually pitching that well really he's walking a ton of guys and just happens to have not given up any hits often because balls were hit right at guys whereas Whereas if you're a true winner, then you're left in the game, not in pursuit of some milestone, but because you're actually pitching pretty well. I mean, not always.

And in the past, it used to be much more common for pitchers to throw complete games, even if they weren't throwing gems. But still, I bet the difference is smaller than you think. So that coupled with the dinger, which is pretty impressive on its own, I think it's uh it's no less impressive to me yeah i uh i i think that one of the reasons that we can even talk about

it is because no hitters uh while often quite impressive often quite awesome we now all have a library of bad no hitters that we've seen in our lifetime. There have been, you know, nine walk, 160 pitch no-hitters that you watched and were like, well, that was more than I needed to see of that pitcher. So the fact that no-hitters are somewhat flawed makes this partly a conversation. But also, I mean, what is...

See, this is what I keep coming back to is that instead of a... A no-hitter is... It's not a perfect game. But, you know, it's basically like the reason it caught on is because it's like a near ideal version of pitching. And the guy is a pitcher. So you're seeing like a pitcher pitching at peak pitcherness. And a true win is not that a true win is a pitcher who's who's pitching very well.

Extremely by definition, he threw a shutout that's great that's you know in one way of speaking of thinking about it every every bit is as helpful to his team but it's not quite perfect pitching in the same way that no hitters are supposed to represent a sort of a form of perfect pitching but he hit a home run which is a whole different it's a whole different skill it's a whole different skill. It's a whole different professional athlete skill that he's not supposed to have. I've been thinking about this, like how Pete Buttigieg, the presidential candidate, got a bunch of news a couple of months ago for- Playing a spoon song. Did he really? Yeah. What spoon song?

I forget. That's great, man. That's really cool. Yeah. Wow. I might have to change this analogy. He sat in on the symphony, too. Wow. What else did he do?

I didn't mean to turn this into a campaign rally. He speaks Norwegian. Oh, right, yeah. So this came up because some Norwegian film crew was going to interview him, he started speaking Norwegian and everybody's like, whoa, Norwegian. And the story is that speak Norwegian, like 5 million native speakers, for instance, don't consider it that hard to speak Norwegian. But we give Pete Buttigieg credit because that's not his thing. Like he's not a Norwegian speaker. He learned how to do this other thing or he accomplished this other thing that was like

not in his lane. I also sort of feel like that with there was this time, a period of time, like seven years ago, when everybody you knew over the course of a couple of years learned that the guy who plays Jimmy McNulty is not actually American. And it's like, wow, he's British. You're like, yeah, he's, I mean, he's a great actor who can also speak like everybody around you, but you're not impressed by the speaking like an American, except that he's learned to do this other thing, right? I don't know if I'd even use him as an example of the best American accent. Well, that's okay, but accents in general,

it's not impressive to speak like an Irish person speaks, unless you're not Irish. And then you're like, Oh, check out the guy's accent. That's fun. And so I feel like the fact that the pitcher hit a home run, I don't know whether to, to say like, that is incredible.

Not only did he throw a shutout, but he hit a home run against a major league pitcher, or if I, it should get less credit. Cause that's not actually his job. And it's just a fluke. Like lots of pitchers hit one home run. It's just kind of a coincidence that it came in his shutout there's not any necessarily any super significance to the timing of it and it doesn't necessarily mean that he's

a great hitter he's just like any any pitcher who can you know hit one every once in a while so i have gone back and forth and i'm still i still haven't talked myself into a position i haven't i myself into a position. I haven't. I don't know about that. Yeah, I'm not even sure. Like, would it be more impressive if Pete Buttigieg was the best English speaker in the world? Like, if he was the most articulate. Roger Angel.

Yeah, if he was Roger Angel of the English language. Yeah, if he was Roger Angel of the English language, or is it better that he's like a 95th percentile English speaker and like a third percentile Norwegian speaker, which is kind of what a pitcher throwing a shutout and hitting a home run is, right? Yeah. Well, I guess you could do both, right? How many true win no-hitters have there been?

There have probably been some, right? Let me see if my spreadsheet has this uh i don't know if my uh it should i would think it would let me see if i i have this okay unfortunately i've been working off of a uh of an untitled spreadsheet that just has like 75 tabs on it now where i'm just dumping data constantly and not labeling any of it all right here we go sort by hits we got no wait really wait a minute no hang on what no i'm sorry this is because i play index that's why there's no picture i play index the hitter side of it so i don't know okay i can do it i could could i do it i could it would take some time okay well i'll have that for you on Wednesday. Great. Thanks. You're really getting into true wins.

This is, you're making this your beat now, which, uh, I don't know if that's a good beat to be on because we might never see one again. You might, but you got a lot of chases. I got a, I got a, I got a true win chase the very next day. It was a very long shot true win chase because it's not as much fun when you need the pitcher to hit the home run. So Kyle Hendricks was throwing the shutout and it was clear that he was going to have enough pitches to to do it if he uh if he kept the shutout going yeah and so then it was like he might bat again but kyle hendricks

has like yeah it's not that much extra base hits in his career none of them are yeah right exactly yeah and then uh yeah early that actually kind of that kind of hurts the true win as a spectator sport because you almost need the home run early to make it interesting otherwise the odds of getting the homer late are so remote that it's almost not even worth watching for well and i mean that goes back to the central question is the fact that the home run is so unlikely does that make it more impressive not interesting it's clearly more more interesting because home runs are so rare that it makes this thing rare. But is it more impressive that a pitcher hitting a home run is super rare? Or is it more flukish that a pitcher hitting a home run is super rare?

And that it's just like one of those weird things that happened. It doesn't necessarily represent. It's rare, but it's not really flukish, right? I mean, you have to hit the ball hard to hit a home run. There are some cheap shots, but like, you know, it's not a complete fluke. Yeah, but okay. So let me ask you this. I guess if you're just swinging hard and the principle of if you swing enough times, you might occasionally hit one. This is what I mean by fluke-ish. There were, I think, hit one this is what i mean by flukish there were i think uh 19 pitcher home runs last year or 19 starters homered i think last year if you were to run a simulation of the season shake everything

up and replay last season basically you might get 19 pitcher home runs but you might have like one of the same guys doing it in the same game you'd get 19 totally different home runs. Like you're just going to get that many home runs from a league of pitchers swinging poorly at pitches for a year. You're not like, I don't really feel like one home run from a pitcher tells me something about his true talent level. Yeah, but neither does the no hitter, right? I mean, no hitters are almost always fluky a little bit. I've written the article, maybe you've written the article, where you go back and look at the one incredible play, sometimes more than that, that preserves the no-hitter. There almost always is one. Or there's just a ball that's hit really well that wasn't an incredible play but could easily have been a hit if a fielder had been standing somewhere else. So that doesn't tell you that much about the hitter's true talent either i know you're right the home run i would think that just the ability to hit a home run probably tells you more about the pitcher's offensive ability than

the no hitter tells you about his pitching ability i don't know at least relative to the the complete game shutout a shutout is more impressive than a pitcher home run though, right? Yes, I think so. And so once you acknowledge that, then you're sort of putting the home run off in this like, it's just a tool for creating a narrower filter, right? It's not the thing you came to see. The shutout not the thing you came to see. The shutout is the thing you came to see. That's true. I prefer that pitchers didn't hit at all, so I'm certainly not there to see them. Later in this episode, you're going to make a comment about pitchers hitting.

It sounds to me like that comment that you make later on is that of a person who is glad they hit it is very odd to me that now now you're saying in in the past it's the comment of someone who has received many tweets and emails about why it's actually good that pitchers hit and has not been convinced but has at least embraced one of the arguments that people make to my claim. So I prefer that they don't hit, but there is one thing about them hitting that I take as the silver lining. So we'll bring that up. Okay. Well, I'm going to, I don't know. Maybe I'll settle this later in the week. I lean toward the true win is more impressive, but I kind of

want to think more about what i think about a pitcher home run because it is true that like cologne hit that home run bartolo cologne was the worst hitting pitcher in baseball history at that like more or less at that point and he hit a home run and it wasn't even a cheapie and i don't know that i don't know what that tells me about bartolo cologne i don't i don't I haven't really fully digested that. James Shields, probably more than it does about Bartolo Colon. He was pitching, but you could look at it in a win probability added way. I don't know if that's the satisfying way to look at it, but if you were to add the WPA of the homer to the WPA of the pitching appearance,

I bet that in general, the true win ends up being higher. Maybe. Yeah, there's probably, I would guess that there's a, that if you looked at true wins, you'd find a lot more, a greater than normal amount of blowouts for a couple of reasons. One being that the pitcher hit a home run against the other pitcher. So the other pitcher is probably not good. The other is that maybe the pitcher probably got in those more at bats, which means that he was allowed to hit for himself, which might mean lower leverage later on. But I don't really know about that.

Anyway, I was a little disappointed that Syndergaard's true win was a 1-0 true win because it really muddied the waters. Lots of people were already talking about how this was the first time in 30 years that a pitcher had won a game like that. And so then that got kind of lumped in with like, oh, it's a true win. You got to win one nothing and you don't have to win one nothing. And I would rather he won like four nothing. Speaking of rarities and players doing things that they're not primarily employed to do, on Monday, Pablo Sandoval pitched again.

And is this a fun fact? I think this is a fun fact this was tweeted by sarah langs who i believe is an effectively wild listener at mlb this was according to elias pablo sandoval's second player in modern mlb history since 1900 with a home run stolen base and scoreless pitching outing in the same game the only other person to do it was Christy Mathewson in 1905. So even Roger Angel has not seen this happen before. I'm going to bring this full circle. I'm in a no-hitter league with Sarah Langs. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, I like the fact. Good fun fact. Yeah. Made especially good by the fact that it was also a Giants pitcher against also the Reds who hit it 114 years ago.

All right. So my other thing that I wanted to mention that you and Meg talked about, you were talking about pitchers complaining about the juiced ball and hitters not complaining about the juiced ball. And you made the observation that like, I mean, you know, basically it doesn't really matter. They're going to be as good relative to their peers regardless. You know, some players might be affected more as you noted but for the most part they're going to be as good

relative to their peers regardless they'll presumably be paid as much regardless and so i have a question for you in um let's see i don't know let's say in the national league in 2000 had an era a league-wide era of 4.64 and the national league in uh let's say 2014 had an era of 3.66 so we've got 3.6 4.6 call them out okay do you think that the average pitcher given the choice would rather have an era of 3.8 in a league where the average is 3.6 or have an ERA of 4.4 in a league where the average is 4.6. So they're either a quarter of a run better in a offensive league or a quarter of a run worse, but in an extreme pitching league. Which do you think they would prefer? If you sat them down and told them exactly what you were proposing, I think they would probably take just being better than average.

I think also, though, that if you just quickly said it and didn't actually explain it, A, you probably have a better reputation among many fans if you have the lower ERA. For sure. Yeah, because fans don't know you have the lower ERA. For sure. Yeah, because fans don't know what the league average ERA in every year is. They don't realize it. And sometimes you know if it's an extreme era in one way or another.

But most fans, they look and they see 3.6 or 3.8 and they think that's pretty good. And 4.4, not so good. So there's that. There's the perception of it. And there's just the general it's it's probably more fun to give up runs less frequently even if everyone else is is giving up fewer runs too it's nice not to be scored on so i think i mean if you asked me i would rather be better than average in the high offense league and i think you'd be better paid and your life would

work out better in in a number of ways. But if you just kind of superficially ran through that question, I don't know. I don't want to say like players are dumb because like if I say that they'd rather have the lower number and not taking into consideration the league average, I'm sort of saying they're like too dumb to realize that matters what the rest of the league is doing. Let me stick up for those dumb players i i i don't know that you i think there might be a case for the pitcher friendly league i think that uh for one thing you're going to be able to throw you're going to go deeper into games if you're in the low offense league even if you're slightly worse you're gonna you know you're gonna it's to be a less stressful sport for you as a pitcher.

There's not going to be runners on base as much. You're not going to have to worry so much about being perfectly fine with everything. You don't have to throw every pitch perfectly, basically. And I feel like, uh, I feel like high offense, uh, is bad for pitchers. Like that. It's not, not in the, like, uh, it feels bad, but in a literal pitchers, like that it's not in a, like it feels bad, but in a literal way, I think that it's bad for pitching development. I think that that's one of the reasons that I've hypothesized that there's no such thing

as a pitching prospect took off in the 90s because everybody was looking around and seeing essentially no pitching prospects develop. But these guys were trying to be 23-year-old major leaguers in a league where offense was out of control. It was outrageous. And I felt like there's a hypothesis that simply being in that high offense, being always in the stretch, having high pitch counts, having high pitch count innings, for instance,

all of that is just bad for your development and bad for your health. And that if you suddenly turn baseball into a three-run-a-game sport, that you would probably have healthier pitchers who have longer careers. Yeah, that's a good point. You'd also get to pitch into the fifth or sixth longer and get more decisions, which I think pitchers like to get decisions. Even if they're not just being compared to the league average ERA, they want to get the W. And you are more likely to pitch deep into a game if it's a low offense era and therefore maybe get more decisions. Yeah, that's right. Although everyone else will also.

It doesn't matter though. When you're on the mound, when it's your day to start, you're the only one who's trying to go seven deep, right? That's your job. And so it's more likely that you're going to get to do that job. Yeah, okay. There's a reasonable case there. I'm still taking the below average ERA, but yeah, I see it.

Yeah, I don't know what I would take, but I think that most pitchers would probably take the above average ERA. I wonder how far above average the ERA would have to be or how crazy I would have to make some of these numbers before I thought that most pitchers would take. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm entirely wrong. Yeah.

All right. That's all the banter I've got. Okay. One quick thing I have, which is that the Kansas City Royals enter the day, that day being Monday, as a not very good baseball team. They are a losing team. They've played 25 games and their record right now is 12 and 23. Not so good, but they do have 35 stolen bases, which is nine more stolen bases

than any other team has. So this was something we talked about in the spring and I was excited about the Royals and then I got less excited because they were not running that much in spring training and they didn't really run that much at the very beginning of the season either, but now they're really running and 35 stolen bases through 25 games. That is a pace for 226.8 stolen bases. That's a lot of steals. That would be the most since the 1993 Expos, who had 228, and no other team since then has had more than 201. So they are sort of fulfilling the promise thus far of what we wanted the Royals to be.

Therefore, are they fun, or are they still not fun because they're just a bad team? There was a first and third play that Billy Hamilton was on first and Terrence Gore was on third. Did you see this? Is this the one where they both got thrown out? Unbelievable. Yeah. And that basically wiped out all fun potential. was like Don Zimmer's bases loaded hit and run failing once in the 11th inning meant that like

there was no way he could redeem himself with bases loaded hit and runs no matter how many times it worked that I think at that point I just thought I don't want to support this I don't even want it to work anymore but I do like there have been a few times when Hamilton and Gore have been on at the same time and I've been I've been watching those games for some reason and been like here we go double steal and uh they haven't that's the only time I've seen them go okay well there was the highlight where what Hamilton scored from uh was it second on a sec fly this year and then uh that was kind of exciting so there have been occasional plays like that and I'm glad that they are living up to the billing I can't say that I'm very

regularly tuning into Royals games just because of the speed or for any other reason but I appreciate that they are an outlier in the stolen base category which is what I was hoping they'd be so mixed results so far they're fulfilling their promise and yet I'm not sure that it's quite as fun as I wanted it to be. Tons of triples, though. Yeah. Everybody thinks triples are fun. Yeah, that's right.

So, I mean, they're not a good hitting team. They're not abysmal either. They don't strike out a whole lot for the standards of today, but they're not like an extreme contact batting average team like they're batting.244. They're just not very good. It's just that they they steal lots of bases and i mean terence gore's season so far is pretty fun i think you'd have to say not only has he racked up 21 plate appearances for me in the minor league free agent draft but he is a 163 wrc plus slugging 550 yep hitting 400 through 15 games. So that's not bad.

Mondesi's pretty fun. He's got 10 steals and not as much power as I'd like, but he's still slugging 500 plus. So it's something. Ben, heavens. The man is a shortstop who's slugging 518 and he doesn't have as much power as you'd like. I didn't even know you had a strong take on how much power you'd like from Mondesi.

But to find out that it's more than a 518 slugging percentage is eye-opening. Yeah, I guess my expectations are maybe a little too high. He slugged like in the second half of last year. Yeah, he was over 600 in the second half of last year. I wasn't expecting that to continue, but I'm just pointing out that they haven't disappointed me. If anything, I've disappointed myself

by not tuning in to watch them more often because they're doing what I wanted them to do. Yeah. Alright. Also, Hunter Dozier has a top five war in the majors right between Mike Trout and Alex Bregman. Go figure. Okay. So we'll take a quick break, and we'll be back with Joe Bonobo

to talk about his new book, No Place I'd Rather Be, and the legend, Roger Angel. Looking like a New Yorker cartoon Sleeping in a cold and cagoo With you With you With you

It's been about three and a half years since the release of This Old Man, the most recent book by Roger Angel. But if we can't enjoy a new book by Angel, we can at least enjoy a new book about Angel. And Sam and I just have. The author who's given us that gift, which he named No Place I Would Rather Be, Roger Angel and Life in Baseball Writing, is Joe Bonomo, who joins us now. Hey, Joe. Hi, how are you doing? Great. Thanks for having me. Happy to have you. So I've personally had two brief and somewhat unsatisfying interactions with Roger Angel, just kind of Chris Farley interviewing Paul McCartney type things where I said hello and attempted to express my admiration awkwardly.

And I've tried two times, both unsuccessfully to interview him in a more formal fashion so I'm envious of you because you figured out a foolproof way to have an audience with Angel which is write a book about him so I wish I had thought of that not not that foolproof though like it didn't you didn't get the feeling that like Roger was was sitting around just like hoping someone would write a book about him like well yeah that's true that he had to be kind of persuaded well i was going to ask about that so yeah you guys are absolutely right uh-huh yeah he was not waiting sitting around for someone in fact i uh it was a bit of a journey to get this this uh book okayed by roger because um i had written him some emails and he had written back and kind of a friendly way but as soon as I approached the idea of a book, he blanched actually and grew concerned

because he made it very clear to me the last thing that he wants is a biography. And he's a private man, he's a reserved man. And so I respected that. Luckily for me, that wasn't the book that I was setting out to write. I was writing a book about his career rather than a book sort of in a conventional biographical sense. So I had to, of course, tell him that in writing

about his career, I, of course, had to couch it in his biography, in his life story. But I wasn't going to quote anything that he hadn't written about himself already, nor was I going to pry in a really untoward way with anyone I was talking to for the book. But he was really, really adamant about that. In fact, his colleagues and ex-colleagues at the New Yorker magazine also made it very clear to me that until I had Rogers, OK, they probably weren't going to be very responsive for the book. So I had to I had to Roger that I wasn't writing a biography

and that he was cool about it. What was the origin of this idea? I mean, that's a big project to sort of start thinking about. Was this always going to be a book? Did you just kind of want to write something critically about his writing or what? Well, I've been a fan for a long, long time, baseball fan since I was a kid. Oh, sometime in the early 80s, I noticed a book called Late Innings on my dad's bookshelf, and I took it down and instantly fell in love with Roger's writing and with his writing style, and read everything, as his fans do, and kept up with him in the magazine and then online. A few years back, actually, maybe 10 years ago, I started blogging about him.

It's an annual, it's a routine of mine, and I know of many of his fans. In the dead dark of winter, you pull out your favorite Roger Angel book to get you through to spring training. And I was reading him one time in January, February, and it just struck me again how amazing his essays are and how unique he is, especially. And so I started blogging about him, and I blogged quite a bit about him on my blog. And one day I realized, you know, this is probably enough that I could turn

into a book. And I decided just one day, let me do it, because I like to write books that I want to read, and I wanted to read a book about his career. Can you tell us a little bit about the conversations you had with him and the access you had to his archives? Because I was impressed by how often you cited the contemporary notes he jotted down while working on these decades-old essays, which was really revealing at times. It was. That was really the most fun thing that happened in the research. the most fun thing that happened in the research. After I decided to write the book, I, in doing some research, learned that he had donated what amounted to 66 boxes of his archives to the Baseball Hall of Fame sometime in the early 90s. And remarkably, they're open to the public once

you get permission. So at this point, Roger had okayed the book, and then he okayed my accessing his archives. I set it up at the Hall of Fame, drove over to Cooperstown, and spent three days or so in 9 to 5 in the great Bart Giamatti Research Center library there, the top of my head coming off at what I was finding in these boxes. His original manuscripts with corrections and edits, his box scores, all of his game notes, things he's collected over the years, notes scrawled on the back of mid-century Manhattan restaurant placemats and these kinds of things, all of his audio tapes, photographs, just absolutely amazing access to watching his writing process sort of come into being.

As far as conversations with him, we spoke on the phone. He was generous. I could have, I think, spoken with him longer than it turned out I thought that I needed to. He offered to talk to me again. We've been corresponding in email for years now. And his wife, Peggy Moorman, has been terrifically helpful in that way, too. So, again, once he sort of realized what I was doing, and it was something,

frankly, he was, he was very grateful for, uh, he was, uh, he was, uh, gave me access, uh, to, to his archives and then to, to talk to him. So one of the great thrills of reading this book was seeing glimpses of those, uh, notes, his, his sort of game watching notes and seeing how they informed the final product and, um, seeing just like the sheer amount of like jotting that he did. Like so much of what he did was just jot down things that, uh, I sort of feel like, uh, after a few years, uh, you, uh, you kind of get lazy and you only jot down some things and he never quit jotting. He just jotted everything. And I liked that. I'm curious to know if you got a

feeling that the ideas that he had or that the experience he had watching a game that he would later write about would get kind of changed for narrative purposes. Did you see any kind of contradictions between the notes that he was writing when he was in the crowd and the, you know, final 15,000 word crafted narrative that has to, you know, be interesting enough to fill a general interest magazine. Was there much change? Like,

did you, I guess this kind of gets to the question of authenticity and, and kind of like the performative nature of writing sometimes was, was the Roger who was watching a game totally perfectly overlapped with the Roger that came through in the final articles? Or was there a little bit of kind of rehearsing and practicing and shifting and changing and finding the article that would work best? Yeah, there was, of course, some of that.

He was, from the beginning, presenting the Roger Angel persona, of course, as all writers do. But I tell you what was remarkable for me to notice was how you asked if there was a contradiction. Amazingly, no, very little contradictions between the notes he jotted down and wherever it was, some crappy little minor league park, or whether it's Fenway Park during the 78 playoff game, whatever it was, you know, jostled with fans around him or sitting with older types. He was writing and thinking in complete sentences, even in his game notes.

And what's especially interesting to me is how small of a distance there was between the notes he took, the observations he made at games, and then this sort of narrative, sort of fiction writer's pace that he would use and evoke these observations and these details he noticed in the game. As we all know, he's among the great things about angels that he appears effortless on the page. And there was very little shaping he had to do of his

observations and his notes except to put them into a narrative context of the game or of the season um it's one of my favorite things i discovered in the in the archives was in the back of uh one of his note pages he wrote by the way his handwriting is atrocious i mean it one of the hardest surprisingly hardest things to do in this book was to to decipher the hieroglyphics of roger angel but i was able to do it. And on the back of one page, he wrote, J.R. Richard pitches like a man falling out of a tree. Which, of course, is a classic Angelian sort of observation and great kind of evocative detail.

And he just scribbled that on the back of a sheet of paper. And he circled it with a red pen later, which means in most cases, well, in all cases, use this. In other words, this is worth using. And in most cases, he actually used it. And I'm pretty sure that ended up in one of his 70s pieces. But they were scrawled on the back of anything he had at hand. One particular thing I noticed, which was interesting, is, and frankly, one of the surprises of writing this book.

I love being surprised when I write a book and I was at how how disappointed and and displeased angel was with a lot of the changes in the game now he's always been public about it in his pieces but when I gather them all together to start reading sort of at once I realized there really are common threads of kind of distant not not not disenchantment that's too strong because he always could plug himself back into the game that he loves so much but he was really put off by a lot of the the changes in the game starting with expansion in the 60s and then television especially in the 70s and then the labor skirmishes you know basically since then and what struck me once was one of my favorite pieces of him is In the Bubble, his piece about the

Houston Astrodome, which he wrote a year after the dome opened. And he went and spent a couple of days there watching baseball, talking to the executives in the Astrodome. And the place really repulsed him. I mean, he was really almost angered by this move indoors and by the attempt of the Astros. I mean, in a very prescient way, attempt by the mid-60s Houston Astros to turn a beautiful, slow, sometimes dull game into this sort of spectacle, almost as if Roger was looking into this century.

And his notes were particularly irksome and upset and, again, kind of pissed off. And it was interesting to see how he moved from those very subjective, kind of grouchy responses to the elegant, kind of pissed off and was interesting to see how he moved from those very subjective kind of grouchy responses to the elegant kind of New Yorker style of writing in that particular piece. His skepticism is still there, but much more elegantly presented than in his notes. of your book is that as we progress further in time, you can sort of feel that Roger is getting further and further from his idealized version of baseball, which is unsurprisingly that of his youth and young adulthood. But it also seemed to me that a lot of times he did come around on things, that his negativity was often reversed to some degree, or at least he accepted

whatever the change was, you know, a decade later. Is that a fair reading? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And that's one of the remarkable things about Angel, I think is, in the book, I mentioned when his editor, then New Yorker editor William Shawn sent him down to his first spring training in 1962. He said, go down, you know, see if you can find something to write about, but promise me two things. You'll be skeptical and don't be cynical. I think that's what it was. And those two things have kept Roger in a good place for a long time because he always allows himself or encourages himself to remain surprised by the game, be startled by the game startled is the word

that he uses countless times in his essay so his very first piece to his his uh acceptance award for the spink uh lifetime achievement award at the hall of fame in 2014 always open to how the game can startle him uh and yeah he was initially put off very much prompt television, but came around eventually to liking it. He is still skeptical about some of the sabermetric influence on the game, but has also come around to being very conversant with OPS and with war, which is not a lot of things you can say about a baseball fan who's about to turn 100. But he's always remained open to the way the game can surprise and delight him Yeah, and I believe he was even down in Sarasota this spring at age 98 Going back to spring training yet again

Even though it's a little harder for him to get around these days But his appetite for it is still there And it's funny you mention his descriptions of movements and swings and deliveries, and you quote many of them in the book, and they're so clever and literary and rhythmic. And I wonder whether that is something that is lost a little these days because we're not so much in the habit of describing what players look like because everyone knows what players look like. look like because everyone knows what players look like. I wonder whether this is to some extent a relic of his coming out of an era where, as he says, and you say in the book, often the only experience of a game or a player was what a writer described because you could only hear it or read about it if you weren't actually at the game. And so, you know, nowadays we can just drop in a gif if we want to show you what someone's windup looks like or their swing, or we can quote the angles and the miles per hour and all of that, and we can all watch any game we want.

But his descriptions are so wonderful that I wonder whether you ever found yourself lapsing into almost Angelian language as you were writing this. Because at times when I feel like I'm sort of stuck in a rut, I will just pick up a Roger Angel book and just read a page. And not that I'm trying to imitate him, not that I even could if I wanted to, but it just kind of puts me back in the mindset of trying to write in a lyrical, pleasing way. I do the same thing when I'm trying to write about music and feel stuck. I'll pull Lester Bangs off the shelf and dive in. But I can't write like Lester Bangs, and I can't write like Roger Angel. So any impulse I had toward Angelian excellence in my writing, I resisted because I know I couldn't reach it. But yeah, I mean, he's a fascinating... He used the word relic, and that's the word I use in my intro. His long essays, especially, not his more recent work, because he's tapered off, of course, but his classic essays, if you will, in the 70s and the

80s, they were so long. And we just don't see that anymore. And it's remarkable to think just how big of a magazine, literally big a magazine, The New Yorker was. It was a weekly magazine that would run on average from 150 200 pages and that arrived in your house every week and and the amazing thing about angel for all of us the great thing the lucky thing for us is yes he was is a gifted writer and yes he he uh he brings to bear the the experience he had writing short stories for many many years before he turned to writing baseball with this sort of fiction writers eye to Contacts and the evocative detail and narrative and all of that But the best luck was that he landed at the New Yorker at a time in American

Pop culture history when magazines were fat they were expensive They were stuffed with ads and so he had a lot of room to write and especially at the New Yorker And so he had a lot of room to write. And especially at the New Yorker, he was blessed with editors that would have been nearly as happy. I don't think he would have felt nearly as satisfied as a writer because he had to hit the tight news peg, the deadlines, the pike of width, etc. At the New Yorker, he had just ample, ample, almost endless space to write. And that's what allowed Angel to become Roger Angel, to be great, is because he was given permission and encouragement to write these long essays, these long sentences, these long paragraphs that really took himself and his readers on this deep

dive into baseball. And they certainly are relics, you know, relative to baseball writing now, certainly. There are more people writing and publishing baseball writing now than ever before, but everything they write is much smaller. and arguably our attention spans are smaller, that old argument, but not when Angel was working. So they're relics, but I think they might best be viewed as tonics in a way, because they require us to sort of slow our pace if we're going to dive into and read a sort of a classic era Angel piece from the 70s or the 80s, which apart from long reads in a few places online, we really don't have the opportunity to read, in particular, baseball writing

that is that long and sophisticated and elegant. So to answer your first question, yes, I might have felt inspired to write like him or after him, but I resisted it and let his great words do most of the work in the book. And you mentioned the timing and the luck and the circumstances that produce someone like Angel. And I was thinking about that as I was reading the book, not to minimize his talent at all, which is obviously prodigious, but the circumstances and the households he grew up in and the era he grew up in, you couldn't imagine a better breeding ground for a perfect father by any means, but was kind of a bigwig in the ACLU and certainly was intellectually stimulating and helped instill a love of baseball. And then you have his mother, who is a prominent longtime editor at The New Yorker, and then his stepfather, who's E.B. White. You know, we get questions all the time of how do you become a baseball writer? And if you wanted to emulate Roger Angel, I don't know how you could recreate those conditions. He was almost brought up that when he was hired at the new yorker in

1956 uh as a fiction editor there were some grumblings of of nepotism because although his mother catherine had had more or less retired from the magazine at that point she still was around and and of course her presence was there for for a long time afterward but he had established himself really as a as a an editor. And this was something that I knew a little bit about, but until I wrote the book, I wasn't very, I didn't know this to the degree that I do now, but he was an editor at Holiday Magazine for 10 years before he joined the New Yorker. Holiday Magazine was a kind of a glossy, splashy travel magazine based on look and life and those kinds of magazines in the mid-century.

And he had also published a book of short stories in 1960. So by the time he arrived at The New Yorker, he was really kind of, he actually had kind of a small career going already as an editor and as a short story writer. So he arrived with quite a bit of accomplishment already, but that is not taken into consideration, as you mentioned, his childhood and his adolescence. You write the intellectually stimulating father and also physically inspiring father too. His mother, the first fiction and poetry editor at the New Yorker, who really guided and shaped the tone of the magazine in an inestimable ways, and then his stepfather E.B. Wright, we can safely say one of the great essayists of the 20th century,

both his work in The New Yorker and with Harper's. And he took note of the work ethic of his mother and his stepfather. He was never going to try and write like anyone other than himself, but he did emulate his parents' work ethic. And I think that almost was as much, or perhaps even a greater influence on Angel's career than the actual writing style of his stepfather. He would see E.B. White disappear into his writing room all day and come out and having, you know, agonizingly sort of struggled with this piece that ended up sounding and appearing effortless on the page and loaded with great E.B. White intellect and observations and ideas. So he really took that sort of work writing ethic to heart.

But yeah, a lot of it, as frankly it is with everything, was luck and providence for Roger Angel. I'm just grateful that he landed at a magazine that gave him the space to work because that's what he needed to become great, I think. My response to everything that Ben was laying out about his background and his upbringing is the opposite. It's, I mean, it obviously is a great upbringing to create an incredible baseball writer, but it's not an upbringing that you would think would lead someone to baseball writing because,

you know, it's a fairly frivolous topic relative to you know what new yorker writers were doing and i at the time and i am curious to know how much you think roger angel gets credit for baseball being you know a writer's sport the way that i've heard it said that that baseball and boxing are the two sports that like real writers like to write about or something like that something um you know somewhat um pretentious like like that and i'm trying to write about or something like that, something, you know, somewhat pretentious like that. And I'm trying to think, though, other than John Updike's essay about Ted Williams that came out a few years before Angel started writing about baseball, I don't really think of much kind of like highbrow baseball writing before Angel.

Well, there wasn't really, yeah. So was he, I mean, this was a part-time job for him. Like he was the fiction editor for The New Yorker, which is a much, it seems like a much bigger deal on paper than the two or three times a year baseball writer. Did he ever anticipate that he was making a career shift when he started doing it? He absolutely did not. And that's, again, one of the other funny and sort of remarkable things about this is he was 42 years old when he wrote his first baseball piece. Isn't that amazing? And we think of this man who's devoted his life to writing baseball and his well-earned reputation as the greatest living American baseball writer, but he didn't start writing regularly about baseball until he was in his early 40s, which, of course, when you're 40 in 1960, that's different than being 40 in 2019.

So he was up there. And what happened famously, as William Shawn said, we're trying to get some more sports writing in The New Yorker. We've covered boxing and tennis and college football and a couple things on baseball. But he knew that Angel was a fan and Sean was famous for letting his writers kind of immerse themselves in whatever it was that turned them on, whatever it was that they were curious about. So the two of them agreed

to go down there and it was just to write the one piece. He said, I'll go down to spring training. The New York Mets are here. It's their first year. It's a story i'll i'll see what i can find and he filed all folks behind the home behind home his first piece it ran in 1962 he decided why not a post-season season to recap too i'll give that a shot and he did but he did not think of this as a turning point or a right or sort of a left or a right turn into something different because he was fiction editor and an influential one and a great one and a hard-working one and the baseball pieces were something that just happened but it's again testament to the the the the wide birth that the new yorker and his editors gave him and also of course to his talent and to his interests that he turned this into something

regular and and something and something remarkable but no remarkable. But no, this was not a career shift that he was planning. This happened entirely by surprise, which is all the more remarkable. Yeah. To go back to our previous question about the circumstances he was raised in, I guess another way in which you could say that if anything, it could have encouraged him to go in a different direction is that you could imagine that being immersed in these conversations constantly about the magazine and the editor and deadlines and pieces, you might have the opposite reaction and want nothing to do with that in your professional life, which I can kind of identify with because my parents are more on the financial end of things. And I have many memories of

conversations about how the market was doing that were just incredibly boring to me as a small child. And I don't know if that's why I went in a different direction or whether I always would have. But you can imagine that having happened to him, too. You do mention that there was some slight rebellion in that he didn't apply himself all that much in school, whereas his mother particularly, I think, had been a very good student. So that was his form of rebellion, just not getting great grades. But of course, he was writing the whole time and applying himself in other ways. And as you say, he didn't start baseball writing in earnest until he was past 40. And I think if you can do that, that's great, because I think if you've done a lot of other things first, then you bring that knowledge and perspective of other topics and other ways of approaching

writing to baseball writing, which is, I think, part of why he's so great at it, is that he's not just writing about baseball, he's writing about something bigger, although it seems like he sort of resists that idea a little bit. You had some of his New Yorker colleagues saying that and attributing that to him, that his essays always have a subject which is baseball and then an object which is something different entirely. But he seems to resist the idea that he is writing about life in a larger sense. Yeah, I think frankly that's a bit shtick at this point. Yeah, I think frankly that's a bit shtick at this point. There's no way that someone as smart and as comes from. He sort of resists the laurels, is the word he uses at one point, that people want to sort of drape upon him. And I get that. I appreciate that modesty. The other interesting

thing I learned, or I didn't learn, I guess I had reinforced, I guess, when I was talking to Adam Gopnik and Remnick and some of the folks at The New Yorkers, Angel very much resists the word essay, too, because The New Yorker magazine resists the word essay. They never use it. They don't publish essays at The New Yorker. They publish pieces. I think that might be changing slightly now. Adam Gopnik calls it a bit of an affectation. But I think it's the general New Yorker sort of idea that yes, we know we're highbrow, we know we're literary, but we want to appeal to a wide audience,

a sophisticated audience, an educated audience, a curious audience, but an audience that isn't necessarily in the market for literary or God forbid, academic writing. So coming along, writing in that New Yorker tradition and being an editor of the New Yorker for those many years, I think it's instinctive in Angel to resist a tag that might make him appear too literary or too academic. But at this point, he recognizes the amazing career that he's had in not just writing about baseball, but writing about life.

One of the things that was somewhat frustrating about reading this very good book is that you would refer to things that he'd written that were from like 1950, and I would want to immediately read them. And like a lot of them were not 12,000 word articles, but sort of smaller things or comments in the New Yorker, things of that nature. I don't know how precisely you can answer this, but to a person who has, let's say, every book from the summer game onward,

what percentage of his writing does that comprise? How much has he written that is not in a book? Oh, I have, in the course of writing this book, printed out stacks of his uncollected essays that have got to be two feet high. I mean, there's tremendous, and some of really, really great pieces. Like, in particular, his piece in, what was it, 82, I guess, on the Milwaukee Brewers. Oh, that's, Ben and I, I think, have both used that before.

Oh, it's one of his best. Yeah. When he visits the bar, you know, where they're hanging out and where they live in the back. And you saw he just brings that kind of tavern, white, you know, blue-collar Milwaukee kind of milieu to life. That was not included in the book. I think he excerpted it in the game time a little bit later. But there are a lot of his really terrific pieces that haven't been collected yet. And I'm just talking about baseball

pieces but then there are you know kind of light casuals that he's written uh which the bulk of which he collected in his second book day in the life of roger angel but a lot since then that never got published not all of the highest quality you know a lot of it is kind of um parodies and sort of light light stuff as opposed to his baseball pieces. But just in considering his baseball pieces alone, there is a lot that hasn't been collected. Because his last two books, as you guys know, have been non-baseball books. This Old Man is Most Recent and then Let Me Finish, an absolutely terrific book of autobiographical essays, which I think is going to be considered one of his best books, one of his finest books. But no baseball pieces in either of those.

Very, very few anyway. And so it's been 15, gosh, when was his last baseball book published? Game Time was 2003, I think. So it's been 16 years since he's had a baseball book, but he's written consistently about it since. And then there's a lot of uncollected pieces before that. So yeah, there's a lot out there still. And so the New Yorker Archive, if you're a subscriber, it's all technically available, but it can be very difficult to read articles from the New Yorker in the 1950s. It's not a great experience all the

time. If there was one article that is not collected in one of these books, I use the word article, piece, if there's one piece or less than a piece, maybe just a comment, maybe just something in Talk of the Town or something, but that you think is really worth seeking out and reading in the New Yorker's archives. Is there one you'd recommend? Yeah, there are a couple. The first is the one I already mentioned, the Broomer's piece in the early 80s is, I think, Prime Angel. And I really recommend everyone track that one down, the name of which is escaping me. But he had a lot of small pieces, too. A lot of casuals that I mentioned earlier, including an interesting one, which was an

unsigned casual in 1967, which was a very anti-Vietnam War casual, sort of reflecting the New Yorker magazine's general stance against the war. And it's interesting to read some of his non-baseball pieces in that regard. But there are three pieces that I really like, which are unfortunately long gone, and they're actually his short stories. He published three baseball-related short stories, two of which he gathered in his first book, which was a book of his short stories called The Stone Arbor. Long, long out of print, unfortunately. He gathered two of those under a title called The Summer Game. I forget the name of it, but he collected two of

them under the same title. And then there was a third short story called Opening Day. And both, all three of those stories, as I write about in the book, involve two middle-aged women ball fans who like to drink during the day. They spend their afternoons in the bars. And they're just beautiful slice-of-life stories about these two female baseball fans and the fun they're having in the bar, getting tipsy, talking about baseball. And that third piece, Opening Day,

which he didn't include in his first story, in his first book, excuse me, is a really, really terrific short story that really brings to life the mid-century, evokes the mid-century sort of New Yorker baseball fan sitting at a bar talking about them crummy Brooks and the New York Giants and the Yankees. And I wish that those three of his early, early short stories about baseball would be more easily accessible, but unfortunately they're not. Yeah, that first short story that he wrote, The Killing, which is extremely generously described as a baseball short story. It basically is a baseball short story in that two baseball

players were mentioned, but one of them is Fat Freddy Fitzsimmons, who was briefly a thing on this podcast because we stumbled upon the description that Fitz had been, quote, out to lunch when necks were handed out. And I don't know why, but we were taken by that. Yeah, it stuck, right? Last question on this sort of sequence of questions is, was there anything that you couldn't find? Was there anything that he published that just has been disappeared?

No. I was able to find everything that I looked for. I mean, luckily for us, the bulk, the vast majority of Angel's work was published in the New Yorker. And so it's all there in the archives. But he did some newspaper op-eds occasionally, but always in big places like the Times and the L.A. Times. A couple things for sport, I think, and maybe Sports Illustrated. But since I was confining most of my research to his stuff in the New Yorker, I was able to find all of it. And most of his material, yeah, is out there. I just hope that his uncollected stuff gets gathered sooner rather

than later. You show the progression in his writing over the years, not just from non-baseball to more baseball, but then to greater length and then to blogging in the past decade or so, which I've enjoyed as well. You have at least one example in here, a few early examples of Angel writing things that just aren't that great. It's kind of heartening just to see that everyone started somewhere and wasn't amazing immediately. So you cite this single sentence from Holiday Magazine, an essay he wrote in 1954 that was pretty acclaimed and influential called Baseball the Perfect Game, kind of hinted at what was to come. And the sentence just says, a solidly hit triple with the bases loaded is unbelievably exciting to see. And that's it. And it's just, you know, it's not the worst sentence, but it's just generic. And there's adverbs in there. And it's just a contrast to later Angel where almost every sentence just there's something to admire or a word that you may not even know.

But I look up a lot of words when I read him because I'm just not sure what those words mean. And yet it never really seems as if he is writing with a thesaurus by his side, looking for the fanciest words. He just knows those words. And I'm sure he uses them in speech. And given how he grew up, that's no surprise. But it kind of broadens your vocabulary to read him in a way that doesn't seem pretentious. Oh, there's no doubt. But going back to your first observation, one of the more, as a writer, one of the more pleasing, I'm sure that's the right word, but amusing things anyway I discovered was just how routinely his early short stories were rejected

by the New Yorker. I mean, when I went among the archives, I researched was the New Yorker archives at the New York Public Library, and they have all of the old correspondence, a lot of it anyway, between Angel and his fiction writer, his fiction editors at New York, Gus Lebrano, chief among them.

And boy, I got to tell you, dozen or so stories, consecutive stories, rejected, returned by the New Yorker. I quote some of the rejection, some of the rejections in the book, not to be mean, but because I think it's it's it's as you say, it's it's instructive to see how even Roger Angel had to had to earn his dues, you know, had to had to pay his dues and earn his way up. Especially at the New Yorker, who you would have thought might have given him a little bit more forbearance given his background. But no, they would say, this is not up to snuff. You've got to work harder on it. And even some of his early casuals were returned also. So yeah, he had to pay his dues just like everyone.

Yeah, that was startling to see, to use this word. So the great pleasure of reading him for me over the last several years has been his blogging, which I was sad to see he didn't do last postseason, but he had been doing right up through 2017. And sometimes it's just a few paragraphs, just a stray observation from watching a game that he'll file a day or two later. And the thing I love about it is that you're constantly aware that this man is living history and he still has his powers of crafting a sentence seemingly as well as he ever did, even though he's not attempting the extremely long pieces that he used to. But it's not just that, it's just that you're aware that this is someone who has been aware of most of baseball history. I mean, just do the math. He started following baseball in the late 1920s, so he has experienced most of Major League history himself firsthand. And so he's someone who saw Lefty Gomez's first game, and yet here he is in

2017 writing about players. And because he hasn't been covering the game on a daily basis, he now seems to discover some of these players for the first time when he's watching playoff baseball. And he will make these comparisons to players who no one else alive or certainly writing about baseball can remember seeing and he'll just casually drop these these comps to players who played several decades ago and it's great because his memory is seemingly not just good for a 98 year old it's good period i don't know if it's as good as it always was but he seems to have almost perfect recall of these moments and this imagery that i am envious of because he can bring it all back

and then replay it in his own mind and describe it as if he's seeing it for the first time. To a person, when I talked about them to Angel, they would mention how remarkable his memory is, how incredibly prodigious it is. And as far as I tell it's it's pretty damn sharp still now going into his 99th year um and yeah you're right that when he could be looking at some rookie now right or second or third year player who's making a big splash in the postseason altuve or someone and yeah he's you know with the great thing about angel one of my one of the um things i love about him is that he he it's almost like he he lays uh you know like transparent overlays you know of the things I love about him is that he it's almost like he lays you know like transparent overlays you know of the current game or old games onto

the current game and so in seeing Altuve or someone he'll turn him slightly and he'll suddenly see some either journeyman player from the 50s or some great player from you know for the mid-century and he'll see something similar in their swings or something similar in the way they run the a trot after a home run or something and yeah he's always connecting present game which people both love and complain about to the old game which people both loved and complained about and always always showing us the the the the way the games are the current game is tethered to to its history i mean nobody has a through line like angel it's just remarkable he saw like you say gomez you saw garrick and ruth hit home runs back to back in

yankee stadium i think as i mentioned in the opening he uh you know he watched daniel murphy hit a home run who was born what 40 years after mel ott retired you know who he also saw play it's just you say do the math it gets it gets just remarkable after a while. Yeah, and it was unfortunate that he couldn't blog about the last postseason for whatever reason. And that was the first postseason that he hasn't written about publicly since 1962. Yeah. Which is pretty remarkable. And his recaps would come along in mid-November, late November.

Late November sometimes, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of amazing to think that anyone would want to read that these days. But if Roger Angel wrote it, they probably still would. I certainly still would. But history repeats itself and baseball history repeats itself. And he's seen that many, many times. And yet, I guess that is a comfort to him or something that you talk a lot about how he enjoys the community aspect of it and the belonging and ballparks are neighborhoods. And we all kind of connect over this game. And you would think that by the time you get to his age,

every player you'd think, well, I've seen dozens of players like this player before. And yet he doesn't seem to get sick of it. He's there in spring training again, and he makes these connections, and maybe it summons these memories and brings things back to his mind. But at no point does he think, well, I've seen enough. Yeah. And again, part of it is because it's his nature. It's his native temperament. This is the man he is, in other words. But he's just

always open to to the way the game might still surprise him when we were talking at one point for the for the book and i mentioned this i mentioned this in the book he he mentioned that decades ago as as players starting started to get bigger and faster and this is well before the steroid era they were getting bigger they're getting faster they were hitting the ball look you know further and throwing harder he was pretty sure that eventually baseball was gonna have to redesign itself and move at length in the length of the bases I mean the length from home plate to first and first a second because eventually the so-called bang-bang double play or bang-bang play at first or second that that's going to be a thing of the past because we're just going to outrun the ball because we're bigger and faster.

But he is amazed, and now I am after he brought it up, that there are as many bang-bang plays in 2019 as there were 100 years earlier, 75 years earlier. And those are the kind of things that he notices, and not, I'm going to say uses, but recognizes as the way the game is kind of majestic and surprising and perfectly designed, and it's just impossible for him to resist

the beauty and the breathtaking fun of that. Even though the game has stiff-armed, I should say the sport, not the game, the sport has stiff that, even though the game has deformed. I should say the sport, not the game. The sport has deformed him in many ways, a lot of fans over the years. But that kind of example of the bang-bang plays at first occurring with relative regularity 100 years apart, the kind of thing that just puts a smile on his face. Yeah, and one of his big concerns seems to be that players will get too big and too strong and too fast, and we won't

be able to identify with them anymore and put ourselves in their place, which is interesting to me because I already don't do that, I think, for the most part. Maybe I just started following the game at a point where they already were so dramatically different from your average Joe that I don't even think of them that way. I almost watch them more as if I'm watching a superhero movie or something and just kind of marveling at hitting, for instance, which I don't particularly like, but I like that it reminds us how good all the other guys are. So you can still enjoy the game even though they're almost a separate species at this point. So my last question for you, I was reading an article or a piece or an essay or who knows what it was in The New Yorker earlier this month about John Hersey, who wrote the famous Hiroshima that took up an entire issue of the magazine. Yeah, that's a great profile. It's so good.

Oh, my gosh. It was very good. Yeah. So it's obviously this extremely celebrated piece and pioneered a new type of journalism, but he was kind of uncomfortable with that legacy and carrying that mantle. And he seemed to feel that maybe fiction was more prestigious. And he just didn't really want to be the guy who wrote Hiroshima. And he wanted to be known for other things that he did. of course he has been so accomplished in so many other ways in his career as an editor, in his short fiction career, in his capacity to cover everything at one point or another.

He was a movie reviewer just subbing in for Pauline Kael for a while and writing about other sports and culture. And his most recent piece from late last year is about voting and politics. So he can kind of cover everything. And New Yorker editors over time appreciated that more and more, and I think wanted him to apply himself to other topics and pour more of himself into pieces, which has worked out really well. But do you sense any bitterness or any desire to correct the record because people think of him as Roger Angel baseball writer and not just legendary writer, editor at large?

I don't, to be honest. I think part of that has to do with his modesty, whether or not that's a public persona, a public affectation or not, that's what he leads with is that he shrugs modestly at his career. We might say to to her see's credit he did continue writing novels he did really devote himself to that something he was hopefully proud of at any rate but I think what with angels case what what would have helped if there was any sense that yeah I asked I didn't realize until I wrote the book I started researching the book just how that the his baseball career was his third career, actually. Yeah.

You know, he was an editor, as we've discussed, and also a short story writer. And when the Stone Arbor, his first book, a collection of his stories, was published in 1960, it did fairly well. It got good notices in some big places and won some of the individual stories, won some awards. So he had this modest career as a short story writer. And I asked him about it, why he stopped. And he told me that he just had no more stories left in him to tell. And I think that he unconsciously or otherwise transferred his desire to tell stories, you know, his this sort of narrative impulse, he transferred it to baseball. And he found as much satisfaction and artistic and aesthetic confirmation in writing about baseball as he did more so I think then in writing short fiction which of course he continued editing until relatively

recently but also I think what helped was that he did have the counterbalance or the supplement of being a fiction editor. Because yes, he wrote about baseball, but as we know, for the majority of his career, he only wrote three pieces a year. Granted, they were 30, 40 pages each, and they were remarkable, and he worked long on them and traveled throughout the season watching games. But he only published three baseball essays a year. Every day when he wasn't at a game or watching watching a game he was in his office working with fiction writers some celebrated ones as

well as some sort of obscure ones and that was a daily grind I mean it's a work it's working loved and it's work he's very very proud of and I think in this day-to-day give and take between himself and fiction writers, where they talked about art all day, and they talked about aesthetics, and they talked about how to improve a story, how to make this evocation of the world in a literary, realistic way, how to make it better, how to make it bigger. I think that satisfied him or nourished him in any ways that maybe writing about baseball didn't. So I think that was sort of a kind of a perfect fit for him to be a fiction editor as well as a tremendous baseball writer.

Well, I don't know if the world is a better place because he found his way to baseball. He may have written about other things and just as celebrated away if he hadn't. But as baseball appreciators, I think we're lucky that he did and that he is still around and still at the height of his powers in a lot of ways. So I'm glad that he greenlit this book and I'm glad that you wrote it. And I think it's a great resource for people who already like Angel and want to be reminded of why and perhaps to be introduced to some pieces that they haven't come across.

And also, I think for people who have heard about him, but don't know why everyone raves about him, this is a good introduction and one that will send you off down countless avenues as you look up various pieces that are brought up in here. So I hope so. The book is called No Place I Would Rather Be, Roger Angel and Life in Baseball Writing. You can go get it now. And Joe, we thank you very much for coming on. Guys, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

That was fun. Okay, that will do it for today. Thanks for listening. If you're listening on Tuesday, happy potential Shohei Otani return day. Can't wait to watch him take his first consequential post-surgical swings. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already done so. Joseph Villareal, Roger Kryan, Nick Bounds, Rob Stilwell, and David McCallum. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at

facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. On his birthday, no less. Happy birthday, Dylan. You can pre-order my book, The MVP Machine. It comes out in about four weeks, so please do get your pre-orders in. And if you do or you're planning to, send an email to themvpmachine at gmail.com with some proof get your pre-orders in and if you do or you're planning to send an email to the mvp machine at gmail.com with some proof of your pre-order a screenshot or photo of

the receipt or just the pre-order confirmation and you will qualify for some pre-order bonuses and goodies that we will send you once the book comes out including some extra writing and a conversation about the book between me and travis and some additional documents everyone go read some roger angel it will brighten your day. Remember what Roger wrote in 2014? Baseball's absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all. And we'll be back, hopefully to brighten another of your days, a little later this week. And here I sit, the retired writer in the sun.

The retired writer in the Sun Thank you.