Roger Angell

LAST DECEMBER, three of us travelled to Boston College to hear Roger Angell read from his works. We did not leave enough time for the rather lengthy Green line ride, so by the time we trudged up Comm. Ave., the session had already started. As we approached Gasson Hall, we all noticed a striking sight: Visible in the rightmost gothic window of the stately church was a slouching, balding, bespectacled man speaking from the altar. Roger Angell was preaching baseball.

The symbol seems more appropriate for Angell than for any of the sports other scribes. Baseball is loved for its everyday consistency, and the majority of its sportswriters are equally reassuring and revered for their predictable accounts. But it is the Ron Guidrys and Pete Roses that continue to redefine baseball excellence and make the park worth coming to. In the baseball-writing world, Roger Angell serves as the dazzling star, who not only plays the game but shapes it, enchanting baseball fans and others for the past 20 years. The long, expansive articles, the smooth, artistic personal accounts offer a written baseball experience available nowhere else.

Angell, 26 years a fiction writer for The New Yorker and currently a senior fiction editor for the magazine as well as occasional baseball writer, explains that his primary interest lies in good writing, not following players around from park to park and each familiar hotel. "I don't want to give the impression that I had to write about baseball that the only way I could be involved with baseball was writing about it," he said in a recent telephone interview. The man whose mother was an editor of The New Yorker and whose stepfather was E. B. White says he always knew he would be a writer. "I don't really think of myself as being a sportswriter, I'm really a writer who has happened to come to sports."

Despited carefully making this distinction, Angell objects to many of the labels that often come with it. Unlike less eloquent colleagues, such as Thomas Boswell, whose latest book is brashly titled How Life Imitates the World Series, Angell insists that "I'm not writing about baseball as a means of writing about our society or our times. I have never had that in mind and I hope to God I don't do it." The author of two fiction books shows a keen concern for his image in the baseball world. "I used to be called a poet of baseball which I strongly resented," Angell says. He further grits his teeth at the word "essay" so often used to describe his works. "There's an implication here that this isn't really reporting. I consider myself a reporter and I work very hard. I do a lot of digging and talking to people," he says.

What singles out Angell, aside from his smooth prose, is his often subjective, personalized technique. He certainly plays favorites with teams and players, unafraid to hope, in print, for a Mets win--because they won't win too many games--or a Red Sox pennant--became he is an unabashed fan. This luxury, unavailable to those writing daily on the beat, has helped "connect myself with the fans."

The fans, consciously or unconsciously, have become a rasion d'etre for Angell's craft. "The fans are really important," he says, explaining that "they're there not just to enjoy the sport but to see that it's done right." This collection of 40-million spectators has received some sort of dedication in each of Angell's books, and the acknowledgement in Late Innings seems most urgent. "I care about baseball, I often think that it's maligned and ill-treated in a very slovely and shabby way by the people who claim to own it." he says. Without hesitation, he adds, "I think you and I are the owners of baseball."