Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1592: The Roger Angell Centennial Celebration

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

In honor of New Yorker writer and editor and Baseball Hall of Famer Roger Angell’s 100th birthday, Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley discuss what they admire about Angell’s life and work, how he’s influenced their writing, and a few of their favorite Angell works. Then (26:22) they cue up a collection of original, […]

Welcome, everybody, to this special event. It's the party of the century, so let it commence. We've got music, we've got fools, and we've got plenty of friends. So let's party like it's 1920 again. Hello and welcome to episode 1592 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer, joined today by both of my co-hosts, Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hey. The three of us are teaming up today to praise and celebrate Roger Angel, who turns 100 years

old on Saturday. And Angel, of course, is the beloved and decorated writer and editor for The New Yorker, who has written about baseball better and longer than anyone. He is probably your favorite baseball writer's favorite baseball writer. And we have talked about what makes him so special before, and I'm sure we will again. But we wanted to do something to honor him on his 100th birthday. And I actually listened in on a Zoom call that he was a part of this week. And he joked that he was going to get a cake, but the fire department put a stop to it because the candles would be a fire hazard. So many candles.

So in lieu of sending baked goods, we're just going to talk a bit about why we admire Angel so much and then turn things over to a cavalcade of writers who have sent their own tributes and well wishes. So Meg, I know you recently reread The Summer Game, and maybe we'll mention a few specific pieces that we find ourselves returning to, but I haven't read one of Angel's classic collections cover to cover in some time, but I'm kind of constantly picking them up and flipping through them. And I think I've said this before, but when I'm writing and feeling a little bit blocked, I sometimes just go get an Angel book or open up his New Yorker archive, which Chrome auto-completes for me if I type in Roger and I'll read a page or two of whatever happens to pop up there. And I find that it just sort of centers me or helps me unclog whatever is clogged and the words and the

sentences start coming more smoothly. And I'm not trying to sound like him, nor could I if I did try to, but there's this elegant and lyrical and unforced and unaffected quality to it that I guess reminds me of what I'm aiming for, what we're all aiming for, and he makes it seem easy, but he doesn't pretend that it is easy, which I appreciate. He's pretty open about how hard writing is for him and for everyone, which is really reassuring. Of course, most of us can work as hard as he does and not sound nearly as good at the end, but it's still nice to know that this isn't just flowing from him effortlessly. So I sort of think of him like, you know how they say that some hitters never take an at-bat off or never take a pitch off,

and Angel never really takes a sentence off and I don't mean that every sentence is brilliant and deserves to be bronzed or hung in the rafters but every sentence serves some purpose or includes some observation or turn of phrase or unusual word that makes it worthwhile and that's a treat as a reader, but as a writer, you really learn a lot from it. Yeah, I think one of the things I appreciate the most about his writing, one of the things that makes it so compelling is that he has a very keen and accurate understanding of people apart from his obvious comfort with baseball as a game. And I think that it allows him to have a really good handle on what's important. That can have a kind of expansive definition for him. You mentioned that I'd been

rereading. I knew we were going to do this, so I picked up The Summer Game, which I haven't read in its entirety, sort of front to back in quite a while. And there are all of these, these moments where you can see he is making a very intentional choice and how he is going about covering a particular series. You know, he decided to spend some World Series rather than going to the ballpark in various bars around Manhattan. And he clearly thought that how people experienced baseball was important. And I think he, he was able to do that because he understood how and understands sort of how people operate as human beings and how joy and hope and disappointment is sparked in all of us. And that has such a tight relationship to baseball when it's at its best. And sometimes when it's at its very worst and so

rather than you know being confined to what's going on sort of foul pole to foul pole he understood baseball and understands baseball is operating within a human ecosystem that is much broader than that and so he is able to seek out and see and experience the game in a lot of different ways. And I just, when I was sort of coming up, that was really important to me because it allowed me to, as a writer, have a more expansive view of the game also. Because it's like, well, if he's allowed to do that, then surely I am allowed to do that, if less well. So I think that's one of the things that really struck me

going through it it's like yeah the the folks in the bleachers matter and what's going on on the field matters and how you consume the game matters and where you are when you're watching something impacts how you experience it and all of that is sort of grist for the mill in a way that can be really interesting and compelling and can sustain your interest in the sport, I think, much longer than simply being caught up in balls and strikes, although that is also important. And if he didn't have a handle on that part, I think the rest of it would feel kind of hollow and like it was covering for something. So it's just a very delicate balance between baseball and real people and he pulls it off so deftly. It's really remarkable.

Yeah, I think that, well, this is going to be a little over, I mean, it's going to be a lot overly simplistic, but it feels like to me, a lot of times you either see people define themselves as either insiders or outsiders within a system. And if they're insiders, they make use of that access that they have of being an insider, but you're at risk of being co-opted and to no longer really see the flaws of what you're covering or to necessarily be honest or transformative within the system, but instead you just become part of that system. But if you're an outsider, then over time you often develop a sort of hostility toward the thing that you are defining yourself as an outsider of. And as a writer covering different things

throughout my life, I've always sort of struggled with sometimes wanting to be an insider and sometimes wanting to be an outsider. And both of those being a little bit, they're not the full experience. And Roger Angel really is right in the middle he is he's clearly an outsider like like you say meg he's reporting on the world series from bars and and i don't even think he my recollection is that he's not even doing it as like a narrative technique he's just that's where he watched the game right he like it was a road game it was a right he lived in new york the yankees were playing in Philadelphia or something like that. I don't remember where they were, Cincinnati. I think this was the

Cincinnati World Series. And so he goes and he just watches at the bar because that's where it's on TV. And he reports on the World Series from that vantage point. And he also, you know, will report on games from the bleachers. That was sort of his ideas that he was going to just be the, the, the writer who's writing from the bleachers. And so sort of his ideas that he was going to just be the writer who's writing from the bleachers. And so in that sense, he's definitely an outsider. He does not spend, he's not, this wasn't his full-time job. He was the fiction and humor editor, I think, for the New Yorker during most of his career. That was really his full-time job. He would just write a few baseball pieces a year. So clearly an outsider, but never, ever in a way that was hostile toward

the game or toward the people in it, never in a way that defined itself by being arch. And the way that he manages to straddle both of those things and see the sport in a full 360 degree view with all the love that you could possibly have for everybody in it. It just, it floats everything that he writes with this sort of buoyant love and intelligence that is really hard to manage. Yeah, he's very present in everything he writes. You get a strong sense of his personality and his wit, but it's not ostentatious at all. He's not making it about him, but it just kind of comes through until fairly recently, he pretty rarely wrote about himself. And now that he does that, of course, he's great at that too, but it still sort of manages to come

through. Even if he's writing about baseball, you always know that it's this singular personality who is sharing these observations with you. And we haven't had the pleasure of having him on the show, though he certainly has a standing invitation. But we have had guests in his age range, like Arnold Hano and Eddie Robinson. And it's always a thrill to talk to people like that, because A, it's nice to tell yourself that maybe we'll make it to that age with our faculties intact, even though the odds are greatly against that happening for any one of us. But also because it's just like talking to a time capsule almost or reading one. And I loved reading Angel's playoff blogs just in the past few years, because that was past the time when he was really

regularly covering baseball, and he would just kind of come out of quasi-retirement as a baseball writer for October, and he would be discovering these things along with you, because he wouldn't have been watching all of these teams and all of these players day in and day out. And because he has 80, 90 years of baseball memories, which in his case seem to have been preserved entirely intact, this is someone who remembers being at Lefty Gomez's first game in 1930. Roger Angel's mind's eye should be designated a National Heritage Area. And because he has that film in his head, which for us is grainy and black and white, and for him still seems to be in vibrant color, he would make these

comparisons that probably no one else in the world would think to make or be able to make. He'd just be writing about some reliever on, I don't know, the Astros and would say that he reminds him of Herb Pennock or something. And is there even footage of Herb Pennock? I don't know, probably. But how many people are around who remember what he looked like and who would make that kind of connection? So you just always got the sense that you were reading about baseball from this perspective of someone who has this incredibly rich library from which to make these comparisons. So even if it was just a few paragraphs that he was writing about last night's game, to read about that along with him and that humility of an incredibly accomplished, you know, Hall of Fame baseball

writer at that point, who would be very open about not knowing about certain things or not knowing certain players and would still be delighted to discover them even after watching generations of players come and go that was a thrill and is a thrill one i don't know if this might be a combination of my own memory and and his very large catalog which you know given how long he's been writing is hardly surprising but lately i've been finding myself appreciating how prolific he was and until very recently is because it's really easy to find a piece of his that i don't remember very well and kind of discover it again because he's he's written so much over the years and not just about baseball right and so to be able to have someone whose work

I respect so much and that has meant so much to me somehow still feel new if I give enough time between sort of consuming it feels really special also. And I don't know that anyone but someone as prolific as him would be able to achieve that. But it's nice to be like, oh, I vaguely remember reading about this. I know I've read him on this series before, but there's a turn of phrase in here that I didn't recall or a paragraph that, because of what's going on in the game now, reads as bizarrely prescient or kind of helps you to establish a through line through the game's history on certain issues. welcoming and feel so nice to sort of settle down into it again is i i don't know that i can think of another writer where i have that quite same experience of their writing because so few people have careers that span so long yeah i think because of what you said ben that he has remained present and aware and participatory in a way that is really remarkable for someone his age.

So it's just, it's a very strange and I think rare combination of things. And it facilitates rediscovery in a really beautiful way. Yeah. And you're going to hear from people shortly in their 20s who are talking about how much they admire Angel and people in their 70s. And they all grew up reading him and maybe different eras of Angel because he was writing for that entire time. I mean, if you're lucky enough to get to 100, usually by then it maybe has been a while since you've been in the public eye or you've been producing great work regularly, and he has been. So you could be in your 20s and have grown up reading not just old Angel,

but new Angel. That's a great gift too, because there are generations who share this. It's like we all share baseball and can kind of bond over baseball. We can bond over Angel because he has become an institution too. So I went back this week and I read a piece of his called In the Fire from 1984, which is in season ticket. And that's one of my favorites of his because it's about catchers. And I love reading about catchers and thinking about catchers and writing about catchers. And it starts with this imperative, this command, consider the catcher. I always like to consider the catcher, so immediately I'm in. And then he forces you to consider the catcher by describing catchers for hundreds of words, catchers in general, specific catchers. And that's something that really stands out about his

work is the amount of time he spends describing what players looked like and their actions and their physical movements. And I don't know whether that's a product of when he started, because you kind of had to describe everything at that point because no one else could see it. That was the only way for anyone really to experience it. You couldn't watch on TV. You certainly couldn't turn on MLB TV. And so maybe you were kind of conditioned as a writer to describe things and make people feel like they were there. Or maybe it's a product of the fact that he was writing for the New Yorker and had massive word counts that most writers don't. Probably helped. Yeah.

But I think that it's actually, I think that the reason that we don't describe things anymore is that we're afraid to because we know that people can can have have seen and it's so fun to describe things and we don't do it enough when when i get to describing a player i always love it and i think i should do that more and then immediately i become afraid that someone's going to be like well it's it's more like an l than a J. Right. So we've become kind of like too scared to be descriptive. And Roger Angel could just say whatever he wanted, it looked like. Any metaphor would do. Yeah, right.

Or you get lazy because you can just drop a gif in, right? You can embed a YouTube video. And I guess if a picture is as good as a thousand words, then I guess you're saving everyone some time. But maybe a picture is as good as a thousand words, then I guess you're saving everyone some time. But maybe it's not as good. It's certainly not as good as a thousand angel words, right? Because you would think that all of that description would be laborious, like, especially if it's something you saw and a player you know. Why do I have to read hundreds of words about what this looked like?

I saw it myself or I could look at it myself. But it's such a pleasure with him because you never know how he's going to describe it and what metaphor he's going to use or what word he's going to use. Right at the beginning of In the Fire, he's talking about catchers and he calls the mask a portcullis, the catchers looking out through the portcullis. And then he describes flashing signs as semaphoring. And those are accurate, I think, and applicable, but how many people would think to call it a portcullis or semaphoring? Not many. And so even though the

site might be familiar, the description is not, and it's suspenseful to read along and see, okay, how is he going to describe this? And somehow he makes that fun and entertaining too. And that essay, In the Fire, he talks to about a dozen catchers. And the whole thing is basically about how hard catching is and how catchers are always front and center. And yet we overlook a lot of what they do. And fortunately, this was the 80s when the emphasis was on preventing stolen bases. So he only devoted a page or so to receiving. He left a little ground for me and others to cover 30 years later when new stats placed the emphasis on framing. And so he really just went around talking to catchers about their jobs and brought back this information to us.

And he calls them his instructors or his informants, and he's talking to Ted Simmons and Bob Boone and others. And so there are really long quotes in this essay, and some of the quotes are great. He even writes, sometimes catchers can sound like authors, but really I'd rather read angels' words than anyone else's. So the catcher quotes are kind of depriving us of angel quotes, but I think that reinforces how he sees his role, that he is willing to step aside and let other people speak through his pen or through his typewriter because he's sort of a translator. He's a tour guide and he is a scholar and a learner and he is discovering these things along with us and imparting them to us. And that's sort of his role as a writer. And

I think that reflects his humility that he's not grandstanding. He's perfectly willing to let other people take it for a few paragraphs. And to admit that he might be wrong. There's a line in In the Fire where he expresses some belief or advances some explanation and then says, I think none of this seems certain. Can I read a passage I like a lot? Sure. This is from The Go Shouters, which is from 1962. This is on sort of the early days of the Mets.

And he is noting, you know, the Mets are terrible, and that there is a gentleman, despite the fact that the Giants at this point in the seventh inning have a 9-1 lead, who has decided to blast and sort of play on a foghorn and issues toots, and then the Mets fans around him yell, go! And this continues for a while despite the game state, and he has overheard some gentlemen near him. What about Frank Thomas, said the other. What about him? What's he batting now? 315, 320? He's got 13 home runs, don't he? Yeah, and who's he going to push out of the Yankee outfield? Mantle? Maris? Blanchard? You can't call these characters ball players. They all belong back in the minors, the low minors.

I recognized the tone. It was the knowing, cold, full of the contempt of the calculator feels for those who don't play the odds. It was the voice of the Yankee fan. The Yankees have won the American League pennant 20 times in the last 30 years. They have been the world's champion 16 times in that period. Over the years, many of their followers have come to watch them with the stolidity, the smugness, and the arrogance

of the holders of large blocks of blue chip stocks. These fans expect no less than perfection. They coolly accept the late-inning rally, the winning homer, as only their due. They are apt to take defeat with ill grace, and they treat their stars as though they were executives hired to protect their interests. During a slump or a losing streak, these capitalists are quick and shrill with their complaints. They ought to do damn well better than this, considering what they are being paid. Suddenly, the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try, antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was the losing cheer the gallant yell for a good try antimatter to the

sounds of yankee stadium this was the new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming most of all perhaps these excellent yells for the mets were also yells for ourselves and came from a rise self have understood recognition that there is more met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom the foghorn blew. It blew for me. And I don't know. In 2020, that feels particularly apt. But this is what I mean.

The description of that, as you said, Ben, took an interesting turn to compare it to members of a board, capitalists who are trying to eke out value from the Yankees. And then the human side of Mets fans were like, yeah, we're a bunch of chumps too. So here they are, our chumps. I don't know. It's just a very, warming is a word he used in there in a different context, but that's kind of the character it takes for me. I remember that section because I read the summer game in late 2016 and I was writing a piece for ESPN the magazine. And because of this experience, I have the exact opposite experience that Ben has where he just picks up Roger Angel to get the blood flowing. I'm like on vacation because I just want to copy down every paragraph and then insert it somehow into whatever article I'm working on. Like any page has a sentence that applies to the exact

article you're working on. And at the time, I think I actually wrote down a bunch of that section because this was about the difference between the experience of being happy for a team that is winning versus a team that is losing. And I ended up submitting a first draft of that article that had like 12 Roger, like way too many Roger Angel quotes. And then I had to do a very different second draft because they were like, well, we don't actually want a piece with 12 Roger Angel quotes. So I think I ended up getting one in, which was about the 1962 Giants winning the World Series. He wrote, if they had one, they didn't win. He said, if they had one,

it will cause San Franciscans to discover for themselves the gloomy truth. Total triumph is unsettling for introverts can taste in it the thrilling, debilitating, and ultimately fatal virus of future defeat yep so yeah he uh i mean yeah he is too good to read basically yeah i wrote a piece for the ringer about catchers and some underappreciated aspects of catching a few years ago and so i used in the fire as a framing device sort of and inserted a few Angel quotes here and there.

But you have to be careful about quoting Angel because he'll make you look bad. Oh, yeah, he sure will. It will make it very clear that you are not Roger Angel if you are quoting too liberally. So you have to use him in moderation. So I think I've caught myself wondering a few times this season what he has made of all of this, the strange pandemic baseball and the pandemic in general,

because it's rare that you can say that there's something happening in baseball that Roger Angel hasn't seen. But I think we can say that this summer. And so I am very curious about his observations, and I hope that we will one day get to hear or read them. But I think most writers maybe have inferiority complexes or feel some imposter syndrome, and maybe sports writers especially, just because some people tend to look down on sports as a frivolous pursuit and the people who cover it as ink-stained wretches more so than literary artists but i think that's one of the reasons why we all look up to angel he really kind of classes up the joint because

roger angel wrote about baseball so it sort of justifies our choices as well. So we're so happy to have had him all of this time and to have him now. And like Angel, I guess we will get out of the way and let other people talk. I put out a call to a bunch of baseball writers over the past couple weeks and solicited little tributes, whatever they wanted to say, what influence he's had on them, a personal interaction, a favorite piece of theirs, and unsurprisingly, many of them had something to say. So I will play this collection of clips in alphabetical order from Lindsay Adler to Holly Wendt. I've also gotten this episode transcribed so that these testimonials will be more accessible. Check out our show page for a link to the transcript.

And Roger, from the three of us and from the 30-plus people you were about to hear, thank you for everything and happy birthday. I jumped up and down when they gave me a good thing and they gave me a prize for riding. Ain't no errands, ain't really for relevancy's sake and they gave me a prize for riding. This is Lindsay Adler, Yankees beat writer for The Athletic. In a hundred years, if somebody wants to know what it was like to watch baseball in the 20th century, Roger Angel is the writer they'll turn to. No one in the history of the sport has been better at describing not just what happens on the field, but how it felt to be there. Angel has been a big inspiration to me because of the way that he was able to combine his love of the sport with a literary approach and write about it in a way that really represents how it feels to be a baseball

fan, to be a person who loves this sport. I don't think that my writing is similar to Roger Angel's, but it is always in the back of my mind that if I can make one phrase, one paragraph, maybe one story be closer to Angel's side of the spectrum, that will be a good day. That will be a victory for me. He is an inspiration to me. I'm thrilled to live in the same lifetime as him and be able to read his work. And I wish him a very happy 100th birthday. I'm Emma Batchelary. I write for Sports Illustrated. And my favorite Roger Angel passage comes from a piece called Agincord and After, written in 1975, about the World Series that year. He wrote, What I do know is that 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 net, 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. Those are a few lines that I've always loved and that I think have a spirit that shows up in so much of his work and that makes so much of it so good. Those questions of why we care and why we should care and what it means to care. So happy birthday, Roger. This is Alex Belth, editor of the Stax Reader and Esquire classic. When we think about Roger Angel,

the words that often come to mind are eloquent and graceful, literate. While none of these are incorrect, I think that they are descriptions that Angel himself would take exception to, particularly the literate part, because Angel never meant to write about baseball coming from down, from the heavens,

looking down and grandly proclaiming anything about this game. No, he wrote about baseball coming from down, from the heavens, looking down and grandly proclaiming anything about this game. No, he wrote about it as a fan, with his ass in the stands, with everyone else. And although Angel came with his own pedigree, of course, his mother, Catherine White, his stepfather, E.B. White, huge influences at the New Yorker. And Angel himself was a fiction editor of great prominence at the New Yorker by the time he started writing about baseball. Obviously, he was a literate and smart guy. But the way he wrote about baseball was very personable. He didn't feel like he was putting on airs. And he wrote with great senses of observation, but also with great curiosity and history. But he was able to write sort of personally

without being confessional in any way, which is, I think, sort of true to his personality. He's really a one-off as a sports writer because no one really had that same opportunity of writing for The New Yorker. You write 2, 12, or 15,000-word pieces a year. But in his own way, Angel's baseball pieces were as important parts of the magazine for at least some readers as A.J. Liebling was or Pauline Kael was. And I'm a

German Xer, so I grew up with Angel's anthologies. And for me, they were really important books because I felt that this guy sort of demystified what I thought of as grown-up writing, which really was long paragraphs with lots of semicolons. I mean, that stuff just was so intimidating to me as a young reader. And here was Angel writing about a subject I was interested in and doing it in a way that made it seem somehow feasible. Not that I wanted to write like him per se, but just that he seemed authentic in his voice. And that authenticity was really freeing. And of course, just as a baseball fan in the 1970s and 80s, once the season ended, three or four weeks after the season, there would

be Roger Angel's summation of the playoffs and the World Series. And while those were not hot stove fodder, it wasn't about gossip, it wasn't about the industry of the game, although Angel did weigh in on those things at times. No, it was just this finely observed, densely observed recap. And in those days, no season was really quite finished

until the Angel piece came in. It sort of helped you get going into the long winter without baseball. So salute to you, Mr. Angel. Thank you so much. I'm Joe Bonomo, author of No Place I Would Rather Be, Roger Angel and a Life in Baseball Writing. It seems unlikely that we'll ever see a baseball writer like Angel again. His through line astonishes. He watched Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig belt home runs in Yankee Stadium, and he blogged the 2017 postseason. In his hometown, he's seen his

beloved New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers depart, the polo grounds in Ebbets Field raised and paid for apartment complexes, old Yankee Stadium spiffed up, torn down, and then erected again. The New York Mets arrive, and state-of-the-art Chase Stadium, built, aged, leveled, and replaced. He saw Joe DiMaggio stride the outfield and Barry Bonds launch epic homers. His affectionate, knowledgeable, and skeptical pieces allow us to slow time, to dive deep, and to appreciate baseball in the eras in which it was played in ways that few writers attempt now. At a time when many fans, and Major League Baseball itself, are concerned about the game's pace of play, Angel's lengthy, patient baseball essays might feel like relics, but they might best be viewed as tonics. Happy 100th birthday, Roger.

This is Tim Britton, Mets beat reporter for The Athletic. I was in Sarasota before Red Sox-Orioles spring training game in 2017, just walking back to the press box pregame a few paces behind Dan Shaughnessy, when Dan did an abrupt 180 degree turn, eyes wide, and said, maybe to me, maybe to no one in particular, that's Roger Angel. He said that with the enthusiasm of a kid at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, seeing his favorite character as a balloon for the first time. I caught up with Dan as he caught up with Roger, and I got to be the third wheel on this conversation between two writers recently honored by the Hall of Fame. And it felt kind of like being at the pitcher's mound before the 99 All-Star game, while Ted Williams held court with Tony Gwynn and Mark McGuire, and I was, you know, Ed Sprague or someone. But what I loved most

about that moment was Dan's enthusiasm at seeing Roger because that's the quality I've always appreciated most in Roger's writing. Yes, writing about baseball is a dream come true for me and so many of us, but no, that doesn't mean there aren't days in a 162-game season or even full years like 2020 where everything going on around you makes that choice feel a little personally reductive or irrelevant. I go back a lot to Roger's memorable paragraph on the act of caring and the emotions it creates within us, the potential for joy it creates within us, and I feel like it feels more important now than ever when we're bombarded with so many things that can leave us numb. Like the best writing in any genre, reading Roger makes me feel less alone. It makes me feel more connected to baseball's past and all the ways we used to view the sport, which are different in so many ways, but similar in more ways than you'd

expect. And just in general, reading Roger makes me happy. And that's what the best writing does in any genre. So it's an honor to say happy birthday, Roger. This is Anthony Kastrovitz. I'm a national columnist for MLB.com. and I join the chorus of folks inside and outside my business who are wishing a happy hundredth to Roger Angel, whose work has inspired so many of us. As tends to be the case, Roger's most celebrated pieces involve the biggest names, the biggest games. But what I admire most about him is his ability to capture the nuance of the sport, the unsung and sometimes anonymous heroes. Beginning with his very first piece for the New Yorker, he's never lost the perspective

of the fan in the stands, or at least back when we had fans in stands. Roger is a wordsmith. He wields those words with purpose and with poetry. So Roger, here's a birthday salute and a thank you for being such a lovely and trustworthy companion for baseball fans everywhere. This is Jerry Krasnick, just sharing a memory of an interaction with Roger Angel. I, like a lot of writers, would see Roger through the years in New York and exchange pleasantries with him. Always admired him greatly for his craftsmanship and his beautiful writing. I've always admired him greatly for his craftsmanship and his beautiful writing. The one interaction I vividly remember was in 2014 when Roger won the Spink Award,

and they had the Friday night reception for him on the back porch of the Yoda Saga. I remember thinking, this is one I really want to get up there for, because I want to shake Roger's hand and just say hi and congratulate him for all his great work because this was a big moment. And obviously, I think he was 93 years old at the time. Problem was I got started very late. I got hung up on a writing assignment. So I had to go rent a car and I really was running late and I was lead footing it up there probably about 80 miles an hour and naturally about a half hour outside of Cooperstown, I got pinched at a speed trap in Sydney, New York. And I think I got $150 ticket. And I just remember being in a horrific mood. I was really not happy. And then as it turns out, I get there in time for the reception. I pull in, I go out on the back porch, all the

rocking chairs and the beautiful view, idyllic summer day in Cooperstown. And I remember having a conversation with Roger and just being able to express my admiration for him and sharing his big moment, shook hands with him and really was pleased to make it. So whatever the ticket was, I think it was $150. I definitely got my money's worth just being able to share my thoughts with Roger. share my thoughts with Roger and I wish him the very best on his hundredth birthday, as I'm sure so many people that he's influenced throughout the industry feel the same. My name is Patrick Dubuque and I'm an editor at Baseball Perspectives.

The reason I write about baseball is because of Roger Angel, although I didn't learn that fact until many years later. For a sport enraptured by nostalgia, most sports writing is surprisingly disposable, much like the game itself, imprinting and re-imprinting stories on the same fields, new players performing the same parts. Deadlines demand reliable quotes, respectful and distant hero worship, the business of mythology. It's good journalism, but I'm an awful journalist. What Roger Angel did first and did best was to make baseball not

a pastime, but a culture. Three pages into the summer game and it's readily apparent. The perspective is not from the player or the lofty press box, but ten rows deep behind home plate, surrounded by the common fans and their common chatter. The game was already growing human, along with the rest of the country after the 1950s, but Angel wrote both as a fan and a person, and truly made the sport ours, instead of just for us. We own six decades of baseball thanks to his writing, and they're ours for good. Even as the proper nouns evaporate, the championships themselves go forgotten. What's left is the refined humanity.

It's in no small part because of Roger that we can take this beautiful, clumsy pursuit and use it to think and to talk about bigger things, instead of just who's going to win tomorrow. This is Stefan Fatsas from Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen. In 1987, in his annual glorious, elegant, insightful, multi-thousand word recap of the season gone by, Roger referred to the lowly, tattered, demalian Mets. Tattered, demalian. I had to look it up. Broken down, beggarly, disreputable. It became my word, my Roger Angel word. I've used it in print to describe the Detroit Lions, the Toronto Blue Jays, and my cleats. When Roger was inducted into the writer's wing of the Hall of Fame in 2014, I wrote a little tribute and discovered

that he loved Tattered Dimalian as much as he made me love it. He first called the Mets the word in 1973. In 1978, it was Bill Veck's Tatterdemalion Free Swingers. In 1980, Mike Norris's Tatterdemalion Major League Record. And then the lowly Tatterdemalion Mets of 87. A quarter century later, in a blog post in 2013, the Tatterdemalion struggle for that second American League wildcard. in 2013, the Tattered Demalions struggle for that second American League wildcard. In 2016, the poor Mets became the Tattered Demalions, capital T. At that point, I had to ask him. I didn't know someone would be out there keeping track of my usage of a word over the years, Roger told me. I think he was embarrassed as if typing a word six times in six decades of writing about baseball was a crime against letters. I've got to stop using it. It's off my list forever, he said.

I begged him no, told him how much it meant to me. It's a great compliment, I guess, Roger finally said. As far as I know, he hasn't used it since. But there's time. If ever a baseball season deserved to be called tatterdemalion, it's this one. So thank you, Roger, for making your word my word and for all of your words. Happy birthday. This is Peter Gamins, and I've worked a few places in my career. I'm now at MLB Network and working for The Athletic. I've been friends with Roger for a long time.

I mean, he has some New England roots in that he spent all those years at an incredible family compound in Brooklyn, Maine, which is one of the most beautiful places anywhere in the United States. But the first thing that's really striking, I mean, I had already read his first three or four books by the time I met him.

And obviously, I was honored to meet him. His command of the English language mixed in with a very subtle sense of humor, which every piece that he ever wrote cracked me up. This made me laugh because it was so subtle. But the thing about that humor is all part. We all like to have fun. We talk about things. We talk about things. We laugh about things.

What he saw, he wrote. He didn't have other people telling him things. He loved going to baseball games. He loved talking about baseball. And his description of what he saw, he didn't have to use numbers. He liked them. But at the same time, he was such a great observer of the sport. And he wrote in the first person because he would tell you,

I'm writing about what I see. But he saw it in such ways and descriptions of what people did and threw. I mean, I, of course, because I covered Louis Tiant, and he might be the most impactful person I ever covered when I covered a baseball beat. His description of Tiant and all the parts of his delivery from the 1975 World Series is still one of the greatest pieces of writing I've ever read. Another thing that he did so brilliantly is that his conversations with people, and I think a lot of people think the Bob Gibson piece was the best.

I never could say that I think that one piece he did was that much greater than any other piece. But what he did is he so listened to anyone he talked to. And I've always thought, I mean, there are friends of mine who work for teams that say one of the most important skills of any leader in baseball operations is the ability to listen. And one thing I always try to do with players is see if they digest what we're talking about.

Because usually those guys can learn, and they'll listen, learn, and get better. But Roger, no conversation was ever about Roger. It was always about the person with whom he was talking. The skill in which he did that. I worked with Bob Gibson for two years at ESPN. We would do baseball tonight once a week. I think it was a Thursday night. And I found Bob Gibson to be one of the most wonderful people I ever met.

And fascinating. But he liked to sort of maintain that wall. Behind which, or really on top of which, he played. But Roger captured him perfectly. Because Gibson so understood. This is really an honest, he's not looking for anything but who I am. And he opened himself up to it because of who he is. So he's one of the most influential people I've ever known. And he's one of the greatest writers I've ever known. And I think one of the most interesting people. And I played

intramural baseball against his stepbrother, Chris. And I once hit a home runoff. And so the whole Angel family is very important to me. I'm Stephen Goldman, baseball prospectus, consulting editor, writer, and host of the Infinite Inning podcast. The first time I entered the press box at the new Yankee Stadium, I was directed to my assigned seat by one of the team's public relations flacks. There was an old man sitting in it, but the flack said, just ask him to move. As I got up closer, I realized who that old man was. I returned to the PR flax. That's Roger Angel.

You ask him to move. I wasn't serious. I didn't want him to move. I sat next to him instead, and over the course of the game, we got to chatting a little. Something, no doubt, And over the course of the game, we got to chatting a little, something no doubt inconsequential to him, but amazing to me. He asked me how to spell as Drupal. Somehow after that, we fell into ranking Cary Grant movies. I wish I had been rude enough to say, what was E.B. White like? Or how was it editing John Updike? Or even, if I give you my number, would you call me after this and read me one of your pieces? But I wasn't. That's okay, though.

That little bit of happenstance gave me the gift of being able to have a small, personal connection to one of the greatest of all baseball writers, one who found the humanity within the horse race and the art within the business, which turn out to be the most important parts. Back in the 1980s, someone wrote that the pleasure of reading Bill James was that of seeing a first-class mind wasted on baseball. That should have been said about Angel at least 10 years before, but even then it's only half true.

Angel showed that baseball was as fit a subject for a first-class mind as any other. Possibly I've got the causality wrong there. And it was he, by virtue of his writing, who first elevated it to that status. Happy birthday, sir, and thanks for the chat. Hello, this is Derek Gould, baseball writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Mr. Bill Tosh was my beloved high school English teacher who ignited my interest in newspapers and humored me a bit by letting me skip class every once in a while for a few baseball games. A few months after he passed away, a package arrived at my doorstep. It was his copy of Roger Angel's Four Seasons. I treasure it because it reminded me of the articles my teacher

had me read and how I marked them up, underlined, highlighted them, trying to understand Mr. Angel's grasped-on sentences in the same way a rookie pitcher tries to mimic a veteran's change-up grip. See, there is baseball writing, and there is baseball literature, and then there is Roger Angel, baseball's poet laureate. He's our Hank Aaron, and it's not just all the home runs that he hits. It's the total bases. Mr. Angel's stories slug. Happy birthday, sir.

Thank you as a baseball writer for showing what's possible. And thank you, thank you as a reader for the gifts you've given us as a great writer who let us see this great game of baseball anew through your words. Hi, this is Jay Jaffe, senior writer for Fangraphs. old, when my grandfather sent me a box of dog-eared sports paperbacks culled from flea markets and library sales, among which was The Summer Game, a book I've returned to again and again over the past four decades while also devouring Angel's other baseball work. Not only are Angel's incisive wit, ear for dialogue, and attention to detail joys unto themselves, but he's the godfather to generations of outsiders who took unconventional roads to covering baseball, outsiders who sought to provide

readers with a different perspective than the one provided by newspapers, capable of objectivity when necessary, but still in touch with the emotions of a fan. I'm one of those outsiders, having come to baseball coverage after more than a decade in graphic design, and so I owe him a huge debt. Thanks, Roger, and happy 100. This is Tyler Kepner, the national baseball writer for The New York Times. It's been my great honor to get to know Roger and to be around him a little bit during my years at The Times at Yankee Stadium, at the Baseball Writers Dinner when we honored him a few years ago. Roger's always been an inspiration to me. He's the Babe Ruth of baseball writers, unquestionably the most eloquent,

insightful, and graceful baseball writer I've ever read. Certainly one of my favorites going back to when I was a kid and I first realized that I wanted to be a baseball writer. I got the book Season Ticket for my middle school graduation back in 1988, and I devoured it. When I went to Vanderbilt, I used to reward myself with a Roger Angel essay that I would photocopy out of the library, one of his season-ending essays from a season that I had watched as a kid, 82 or 83, 84, one of those. And I would read it on the plane back home at the end of the semester, kind of as a reward for getting through finals. It was something to look forward to, to go back in time with Roger.

He's taught me so much just about writing and just about how to carry yourself, how to maintain a kind of youthful enthusiasm and vigor for the game. And to be able to make such keen observations, you know, has taught me to be observant and to trust my vision and to believe that what I had to say and that my observations could resonate with readers and was the kind of thing that I should lean into rather than shy away from. So, Roger, I hope you have a happy birthday and thank you for the inspiration and for so many years of amazing work. You truly are the best in our profession. Hi, this is Sarah Langs.

I'm a researcher and a reporter for MLB.com and Roger Angel, his writing has meant so much to what has gotten me to where I am today, to knowing that I wanted to write about baseball, to loving the sport long before I even realized that writing about it and talking about it and analyzing it was even an option as a career path. My father is a huge, huge reader, voracious reader, and my mother loves sports as well.

And I can remember my father getting me books of Roger Angels and talking to him about those and him telling me just how much of a legend Roger Angel was and, you know, helping me really understand and appreciate baseball writing in that way. And I can't credit that enough for just getting me to where I am today and understanding, you know, things that may be possible. And obviously where he comes from with writing for the New Yorker and not maybe if there is even a typical way, certainly not the typical way to writing about baseball and all that he said about that and that he never set out to do it. That's always resonated with me a lot. So happy birthday, Roger. It's really, we're all so lucky to get to read what you've written and hear what you've had to say throughout your life.

Thank you. I'm Will Leach. My first piece in New York Magazine was in 2003. I didn't write regularly for them until 2008. And in 2009, I was sitting in the press box for the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies. And because I was from New York Magazine, I was sitting in the faux literary corner, the non-beat guys, the parachuting windbags of weekly magazines, next to the great Roger Angel from The New Yorker. They stuck us over together.

It was my honor. Roger Angel had just written a piece in the previous issue about a game between the Minnesota Twins and the Detroit Tigers. I don't remember this game, but I remembered it very vividly then, just how incredible of a game it was. But it's still been about two weeks since that game, and the piece had run in the issue before. And Angel wrote this piece about this game.

And I remembered it vividly then, and I still remember it now, even though I don't remember the game. Angel wrote about twin shortstop Orlando Cabrera, I'm quoting now, of course, summed things up in any case with, quote, this is absolutely the most unbelievable game I've ever played and seen. Angel writes, it would be a shame, as stated, to lose all this. And Commissioner Bud Selig's statement this morning came as a surprise. Quote, after consultation with my staff and all the owners and in view of the stout play and the remarkable game played by the Minnesota Twins Quote, lot of great things up the line. The players are pretty well butchered, and so am I. All ticket and promotional revenues from the postseason, including the various players pools, will be donated to UNICEF. I will see you all at spring training. I have been wanting Bud Selig, or Bob

Manfred, to say something like that my entire adult life. I was sitting next to Roger Angel, and I loved this piece then, and I leaned over to him, and I said, sir, I'm sure people bother you this all the time, and I just want you to enjoy the game, but I really and truly loved the piece that you wrote in the last issue about the Twins Tigers game. And he turned to me, he said, thanks, no one ever remembers the last one. I'm not sure exactly what that meant.

Maybe he was used to people praising for things he'd written 50 years before, but that was my one experience with Roger Angel. I sat the rest of the game silently giddy and I was glad I talked to him. I plan on doing so again the next time I get stuck with him, or he gets stuck with me in the press box. My name is Rob Maines, and I'm a writer for Baseball Prospectus. Long before the internet, I first became aware of Roger's work when my mother, the parent who made me a baseball fan, would send me his articles from the New Yorker, the pages torn out of the magazine fan, would send me his articles from the New Yorker,

the pages torn out of the magazine and stapled together along the side. I graduated from there to the summer game, five seasons, late innings, and season ticket, eventually looking forward to his annual greetings friends as much as his baseball observations. I lived in New York City in the 1980s, and like Roger, I was a Mets fan, and it was a special thrill for me to read his writings about those teams. As a writer, though, I've never tried to imitate his style, for much the same reason that as a hitter, Jeff Mathis never tried to imitate Ted Williams. My name is Andy McCullough. I'm a senior writer at The Athletic. I don't have much profound to say about Roger Angel outside of the fact that he's my favorite baseball writer. His work, I stumbled across it in high school when Sports Illustrated did a list of the 100 best sports books. And I think it was either number one or number two was The Summer

Game, his first collection of baseball writing. And as a voracious young reader, sort of gobbled that up and, you know, season ticket, late innings, five seasons, you know, those four classics are really just like, the only reason I know anything about baseball history is through reading those books. And like, if you asked me if I would rather like watch the 86 World Series, like the highlights or read Roger Angel's November wrap up of that series, I think I would read Angel 100 times out of 100. I don't have a favorite of his. It's probably a toss up somewhere between Gone for Good about Steve Blass, Agincourt and after about the 75 World Series. But every year, usually the end of the baseball season, I will reread one of those four books. I think they make me sad almost in a way

in how they chronicle like a bygone era. They also remind me of, you know, my youth and my childhood. And, you know, they remind me that what is still possible, I guess, when writing about sports. So I just want to say thank you to Roger Angel for everything he's done for, you know, sort of loser hacks like myself and the inspiration he's provided. And say happy birthday. This is Ben McGrath, a writer at The New Yorker and Roger's former fact checker. The annoying story about Roger at The New Yorker offices, annoying to him that is, is of him kind of wandering the halls, jangling change in his pocket while sort of nervously working on a piece,

kind of working through writer's block. And I think the reason so many people at the magazine used to recount this image is because it was comforting to realize that his writing, which seems so effortless, could be difficult for him. But I think, I like to think of a different image of him at the magazine, which is him, sort of his eyes going wide as you relate an anecdote to him, and he's saying, really? Really? And there's nothing patronizing in his delivery in that image. It's all delight and wonder. And I think it's interesting because it's become almost a cliche to say that Roger writes from the perspective of the fan in the

seats instead of the cynic in the press box, which is true. But I also think that sometimes people get the wrong idea and imagine that he's channeling a middle-aged nostalgist. You know, baseball is so full of nostalgia, cripplingly so even. But Roger, I think, might be the least nostalgic great writer who ever lived. And I kind of think it's that ever-renewing sense of wonder and delight that he's kept bringing to his observations on the page. Like, I don't know, Jimmy Williams' fungo bat, Louis Tiant's slipper kick, think of like, you know, hip hip Jorge, the Yankee Stadium chant. That's the kind of stuff that it took my having kids, I think, to finally realize that these are the details that someone falling in love with the game for the first time would really notice.

Hey, this is Eric Nussbaum, author of Stealing Home. The thing that always amazes me about Roger Angel is his humility. It's the fact that when you read something he wrote, it always feels like he's watching baseball for the first time. He's describing something like it's never been seen before. And he's even admitting when it's never been seen before. And he's even admitting when he's never heard of players. I remember reading a story about one of those really good Giants World Series teams, like 2012 or 14, where he's talking about Yusmero Petit. And he had never heard of him before. And he has like a whole paragraph about this great pitcher he's never

heard of. And the fact that you can be this legendary 90-something-year-old baseball writer and coming at the game with those fresh eyes and that humility, it's something I strive for in my writing, too. Hi, I'm Dan Okrent. I first became aware of Roger Angel back in the late 1960s when I was reading The New Yorker and discovered his short humor pieces that he published occasionally. And I thought he was extraordinary. The first piece that I read and that really captured me was about palindromes. And in it, Roger demonstrated an extraordinary skill by writing a 41-word palindrome, which almost made sense. But a few years later, he started to write regularly about baseball. And I remember those first pieces of his that I read

about Steve Blass's absolute incapability of finding the strike zone and not knowing how it happened. His description of Louis Tian's pitching motion, his annual season roundups, which were sometimes more interesting than the seasons themselves. I finally met Roger in 1980 in spring training in Arizona, and I found that he was engaging in person as he was on the page. And what a performance on the page. I don't think he ever wrote a sentence, has ever written a sentence that I didn't admire, and he wrote hundreds that I envied. Sometime in the, I guess it was early 2000s, a friend of mine at the New Yorker said to me, and this was

a friend who had absolutely no authority or responsibility. It was idle barroom talk. He said, how would you like to succeed, Roger, as the baseball writer at the New Yorker? And I immediately said, not a chance. I don't want to be Babe Dahlgren. And I would have performed probably as well as Babe Dahlgren did. Besides baseball, Roger has taught me in the pages of The New Yorker that a martini needs vermouth and that Gordon's is a perfectly good, if not the perfect gin to make your martini from. The last time I saw him, he was a mere 98 and at a dinner party of six or eight people. He captured us all by reciting poetry, 30-line poems, 40-line poems from poets,

both modern and ancient. What an extraordinary person. I have a feeling now at 100, he's just as extraordinary. He's probably learning how to play the tenor saxophone or something like that. We're all so lucky to have had him lead us through the life of baseball over the last half century. Nobody better. This is Jacob Pomeranke from Sabre. I'm sure Roger Angel

could find the most descriptive, evocative words to sum up his own writing and contributions to baseball, but the word I keep coming back to is a simple one, joy. Whether he's writing about Lou Gehrig or Jacob deGrom, about elderly fans at spring training in Florida, or the games of Mortal Grates on induction day at Cooperstown, his writing brings so much joy to us as baseball fans and as readers. It's a contagious joy, the best kind there is, that invites you to sit down in the seat next to him and stick around for a while, listening to his timeless stories for a hundred more years. We should all strive to spread as much joy to people's lives as he has in his. Happy birthday, Roger.

Hi, I'm Joe Posnanski, senior writer at The Athletic. And what can I say about Roger Angel other than him being the guiding light for all of us who write baseball and, of course, being my personal hero? You know, I think the thing that I love most, the words are so beautiful. The craftsmanship of Roger Angel is so clear in everything he does. But what I love most is the joy that he puts into every single baseball story that I've ever read. Everything is just brought down to this perfect little essence of the game.

You know, and I have so many favorite Roger Angel quotes, but my favorite is probably the most famous one, which is when he wrote, since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly, keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. And I think about that all the time as I write baseball.

Happy birthday, Roger. You've been an inspiration to me and millions of other baseball fans. This is David Roth. I'm a writer and editor at Defector. I have in front of me a copy of the book Season Ticket, which I know was bought for me by my parents because it has my name in it and my dad's handwriting. I was 10 years old when the book came out, probably slightly older than that when I brought it to summer camp with me. The spine attests to the fact that I've gone back to it a bunch of times since. It's hard to look at the life that I had that got me to writing for a

living and to say that there's anything from when I was 12 or 13 that would indicate that I would have been the person I was then and have the work that I do now, beyond caring about reading and writing. It didn't make sense while it was happening, and it doesn't make sense to me now. But I think that in the pieces that are in this book, and in a lot of the writing of Roger Angels that I've read since then, it's clear that there's a way of thinking and feeling about baseball that made sense to me as a fan, as someone who was then trying to figure out how to play it, and also, I think, as somebody who was trying to figure out how to sort of be in the world. Not just an appreciation for the craft and for the people that did it for a living, but also for the way that the games and our feelings about the games fit into the bigger world and into the

bigger people you know that we are around our fandoms the epigraph of the book which i'm probably not scooping anybody on is a quote from ted williams and it says don't you know how hard this all is and while there is an effortlessness to the writing that's in it, I think that I'd read a lot of sports writing by that point. And I knew that it was something that maybe I would like to do with my life. I had no idea how to get there. I also had no idea how hard it would be to do it well. But I think with anything that you care about, or anything that you apply yourself to over the course of years and then decades, what's hard about it is also what's gratifying about it. It made the work look

dignified and made it look fun. And it made it look like something that you could spend your whole life doing and look back on it and feel okay about it. I don't know if I knew that then, but I feel that way now. So thanks for it. Happy birthday. Hi, I'm Susan Slessor. I cover the Oakland A's for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Roger Angel has been my idol since I was about nine years old and got my first copy of Five Seasons, which is now completely doggered and shredded. I'm so obsessed with Roger Angel that I spent years trying to get him nominated for the Spink Award. I wasn't even sure he was eligible at first because he'd never been a member of the BBWAA, and I spent a long time lobbying the New

York chapter to try to nominate him, but eventually we went through the Bay Area chapter, my chapter, to nominate him for the Spink Award, and of course he received the Spink finally on induction day, and I've never been prouder. I love Roger. Happy birthday, Roger Angel. You are absolutely a god among men and you have made baseball writing so much better for so long. No one can top you. I'm Adam Sobsey, the co-author of Bull City Summer. When I start writing about baseball with my eyes closed, so to speak, you know, pull the cord and drop into the way of thinking about it that feels most natural to me. At some point, I become aware that the groove I'm in is Roger's. It's his language, tone, rhythm,

and imagery I'm mimicking. It's baseball's essential voice, and the key to it, I think, is a certain wily languor. Roger is almost like a pitcher who plays possum with his fastball. Just when you think you've got him timed, he surprises you with a zinger. And he paints corners too, as in this perfect line, which I will never forget about the left arm of David Wells. You hear it talked about as if it were a disconnected wonder, a famous zucchini at a state fair. Hi, my name is Louisa Thomas and I write about sports for the New Yorker. So the influence is pretty obvious. I read Roger Angel's The Summer Game for the first time when I was maybe 13. His New Yorker archive soon after. It changed my life, I can say that without hyperbole.

It taught me a certain sensibility. It taught me how to watch sports and later on to write about sports with humor and rigor and sympathy and with an eye for detail and a lookout for the bigger picture. I first met Roger when I came to The New Yorker out of college. I never got to know him too well. I was way too intimidated. He seemed to me to be the sensibility of the magazine and what I like best about it embodied. Now that I write about sports, the New Yorker, sometimes even about baseball, I don't pretend to follow in his footsteps who could. But when I write, I have him in mind. He really showed me the way.

Hi, I'm Jesse Thorne. I'm the host of the NPR interview show Bullseye, among other ventures. And a few years ago on Bullseye, I got to interview Roger Angel. And doing that gave me a chance to think about what he meant to me and what he had meant to me. When I was a kid, like between the ages of 8 and 15, let's say, I don't think I read more than 15 or 20 books that were not about baseball. And to be clear, I was a very big reader. I had in my room an entire bookcase full of baseball books. The guy who owned the used bookstore by my house when I was walking home from the subway station after school would run out

and flag me down because he'd got a new baseball book and he was going to loan it to me. My favorite, even then, even when I was a young teenager, was always Roger Angel. I don't know why Roger Angel dedicated almost his entire writing career to baseball. It's sort of an odd choice for somebody who could have just written about what went on in his little house in Maine, like his stepfather, E.B. White, did. But for that choice of subjects, I'm grateful. I don't know if, as a kid, I would have found Angel if it weren't for baseball. From Roger Angel, I learned that it didn't matter what you loved if you loved it purely, if you saw the beauty in it, if you understood what it meant. And I learned that in writing, there was nothing more important than clarity, that the aesthetic value of a great

sentence or a great paragraph didn't come from big fancy words, but from the distillation of meaning. His words capture the subject, but more than that, they find the meaning. And meaning is universal. Baseball just happens to be a nice vehicle for it. When I finally got the chance to talk to Roger Angel on my show, I talked to him about baseball and the New Yorker and about getting old. But honestly, I was just sitting there waiting for the chance to tell him. His writing about baseball taught me everything I know. I'm John Thorne, and I've written a bunch of baseball books, and I am the official historian

for Major League Baseball. And on the occasion of Roger Angel's 100th birthday, I would like to say that it has always been my ideal to be him when I grew up. And that remains a fact. No one has ever written about the game better than Roger. And I can only aspire to occasionally turn a phrase as he does. Hi, this is Tom Verducci, senior writer, Sports Illustrated, and analyst, MLB Network and Fox Sports. Roger Angel, he is as uniquely an American treasure as baseball itself. I mean, you read the words on the page and it is like putting on a

bespoke suit. You can feel and see the craftsmanship, the meticulousness, the exactness of it. But unlike a bespoke suit, Roger's words will last a whole lot longer. They are monuments to his tremendous talent. But I am just as impressed by everything that went before the actual words on the page. And I'm talking about his reporting skills, his skills of observation, his curiosity, his passion, his ability to get people, as he liked to say, to tell their sacred stories. Because Roger had a way of making people at ease and to sharing their stories. When you think about people from Bob Gibson to Steve Blass to Johnny Bench to David Cohn. They told Roger Angel stories and perspectives they did not otherwise tell. For me, one of my highlights was to spend time with Roger in Maine. It was a few years ago at his summer home. Maine is where he spent summers

since he was a little boy. It's where he learned how to drive, learned how to sail, grew from a boy to a man. And it was just a treat to spend time with him walking on the rocky shore near that little wooden envelope of a house, tooling around town in his beat-up Volvo, and eventually winding up standing atop the gravesite where he will be buried in the local town cemetery. And I understood that this was the definition of a successful man. And by that, I mean someone who knew what his calling was, answered it, and did it well, and actually did it better than anybody else. The satisfaction and the happiness just radiated from him. And I think that if you wanted to understand the writing of Roger Angel,

you could throw a dart at just about anything. It's all so good. And you'd hit a home run. But I go back to 1975 and that World Series, the Reds and the Red Sox, of course, the Carlton Fisk home run in game six. And I sort of think of baseball being at a high point and certainly its best baseball writer at a high point as well.

Because there's something in there that I think really captures Roger as a writer, and again, it gets back to the passion and the caring. We love baseball, and that's what makes it special, because we care about it. It makes us care. And Roger cared about it deeply in that way, but also about his writing, and I think that comes across in his writing, and I think that's why people respond to it. He never pretended to be a dispassionate observer. He was an admitted fan and brought that perspective across in his writing.

So caring, that is what Roger, I think, does best when it comes to writing about and explaining the game of baseball. And this is what he wrote in 1975 after that fantastic World Series. A caring 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 haphazard flight of a distant ball, seems a small price to pay for such a gift. And that's Roger Angel, the passion, the caring, and for us, the work that he has produced truly is a gift.

Hi, my name is Levi Weaver, and I cover the Texas Rangers for The Athletic. There are so many things in life that don't live up to the advertisement. The photo of the hamburger at the drive-thru looks nothing like the soggy meat disc you end up with. The car commercial might lead you to believe your life will be an eternal curve-hugging pass through autumn leaves on a mountain, but really you just end up parking it in the parking lot like anything else. College is the ultimate dream until you get there and realize it's just a lot of doing your own laundry. Roger Angel's writing is the advertisement for baseball. The way he draws on imagery and metaphor, putting the reader in the park, it makes the game simultaneously larger than life and also small enough to inhabit. But with Angel and baseball, it's a rare occasion where the

advertisement isn't misleading, it's transformational. Baseball, we already know we love baseball, that was never in question, but a good baseball game can become transcendental after reading his thoughts. He doesn't write like a traditional old coffee-stained baseball scribe. He writes like a poet. So it's not so much that he adds color to baseball, it's that he's so gifted at uncovering what was already there and we just missed. To bring the metaphor back to the car, it's almost like his writing has the ability to walk you out to the parking lot and show you a secret button that enables your car to fly. It's magic, what he does. And we're all better off for his existence.

I'm Holly M. Wendt, contributor to the 2016 and 2020 Baseball Prospectus Annual and director of creative writing at Lebanon Valley College. At LVC, I also teach a baseball and literature course in which Roger Angel is a cornerstone of the curriculum for many obvious reasons. But Roger Angel is also part of the heartbeat of my writing life, full stop. He was the writer who first taught me that writing about baseball could be beautiful writing first, as attentive to the sentence as to the score. Those thrilling kicks of present tense in the interior stadium, making form echo function with a deaf seamlessness as quickly as passing in and out of daydream. Every word has been a gift. That care and attention to detail, too, was what first opened

up writing about baseball to me. It was a model of creative writer by training, not a journalist, not an analyst, not a person with any kind of press pass could follow. Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Angel, for your writing and your eye, as keen in the read of a swing as a turn of phrase, and for helping us all to see so much more. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks for listening, as always, and thank you to the 32 guest participants who shared their thoughts about Angel. If you're a baseball writer and weren't aware we were doing this, I'm sorry I missed you. I hope I make it to my 100th birthday, but however long I live, if at some point even a fraction as many impressive people are willing to

say something nice about me, I will consider it a life well lived. If you measure your success by your positive impact on others, Roger Angel is at the top of the Baseball Writer leaderboard, and probably close to the top of a lot of other leaderboards too. As I mentioned earlier, you can find a link to the transcript of this episode on our show page. You can also find links to many of the Angel pieces discussed on this episode, as well as some recent written appreciations of Angel

and even an interview from this week by Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal, who did ask Angel for his thoughts on this strange season. And here's what he had to say. It's like nothing else we've ever seen. The empty stands are very strange. I can understand this business of putting a batter on second base, but it goes against every baseball instinct that I have,

because the heart of the game is that you have to earn every base, and suddenly that's been abrogated. Seven-inning games, I guess I understand, but seven is a very different game than nine. I think baseball should be brisker, but not shorter. I hate the idea that you want to get the game over with. I always felt as a fan, if the game went into extra innings, great, more baseball. And if it stretched on into extra innings and ended up with more and more extra innings, all the better. That just about sums up how I feel too. And I hope that

Roger has more and more extra innings himself. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Derek Wisner, Skylar Thompson, Philip O'Hara, Darren Fessel, and Ross Balaban. Thanks to all of you. Please send us your questions and comments via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then.