Roger Angell was the personification of baseball history: Adler – The Athletic

Last summer, Roger Angell greeted me at the door of his Manhattan apartment and asked the question on everyones mind: Hi Lindsey, the legendary writer and editor, who died Friday at the age of 101, said in June 2021. What the hell is going on with the New York Yankees?

It was my first time meeting Angell, my hero and the writer who first opened my eyes to the potential beauty that can be found in baseball writing. I became a baseball writer too late to run into Roger in the press box, as many of my peers had done routinely for years before my arrival, but not too late to spend an afternoon talking about ballplayers and the inconsistent offense of the team I cover.

Angell covered baseball like no one else. He came to it late in life at age 42 and was unconventional in his literary approach to chronicling the game hed loved since he was young. He had luxuries that most writers never get. He wrote for The New Yorker, which gave him space, time, and freedom to explore topics that moved him, rather than being beholden to the day-to-day issues and performances that drove most baseball writing then and now. Angell recognized that his position was cushier than that of a newspaper beat writer, but the reality is that it wasnt the time and expansive word limits that created the conditions for Angell to do unique work. It was his humility, curiosity, and creativity in his perspective of the game and approach to reporting that ultimately set his prose apart.

I went to Angells home last summer hoping to write a profile of the writer whose work had inspired me most as a developing writer, but never found a way to do justice to the experience of hearing his stories and having him ask mine. My idea going into the afternoon was to ask Roger how he would write about Roger at this state of his life; I found quickly that he was much more interested in the way each of us perceived and covered our subjects instead of making him one himself.

That afternoon, I sat on Angells couch and petted his dog, Andy, named for Angells stepfather E.B. White, as we exchanged stories about reporting and the quirks of the ballplayers we each had known. At 100 years old, Angells tales had long been codified. As a passionate reader of his work and the interviews hes given over the years, very few of them were new to me.

Angell was the personification of baseball history to me. I was born in 1990; Babe Ruth might as well have been the subject of a parable given the respective eras in which we lived. It was meaningful to me that Angell had seen Ruth play, and had run into him on the street once as a child. There was, as long as Angell was around, someone I knew of to whom Ruth was a very real person and player.

There were only a few things that Angell and I had in common. He was Harvard educated and deeply reverent to his family, especially his mother, Katharine Sergeant Angell White. I have no college education, no important family ties. We were both dog owners, New Yorkers (him of the born-and-raised variety, me of the passionate transplant type), and big fans of Ron Darling as a person as much as a player. He wrote about baseball largely in an era that was long gone before I even gained an appreciation for the sport.

That afternoon last June, I found our biggest commonalities were that we were each baffled wed ever become baseball writers, and that we were endlessly fascinated by the things that make ballplayers tick.

Angell saw the creative brilliance of ballplayers, and gravitated toward the ones who couldnt help but stand out. His eyes lit up as he talked about his time writing about the late Royals pitcher Dan Quisenberry. He won over Bob Gibson, he wrote a whole book about the complicated but endearing David Cone, he took on the mysterious case of Steve Blass and the yips. Toward the end of his life, his eyesight was going, as was his hearing, but he tuned into SNY regularly to hear Keith Hernandez and Gary Cohen exchange quips with Darling.

Proximity to professional baseball and its players can lead to quick disillusionment with what seems like relative magic when observed from the stands. Angell saw players as complicated but fascinating, and it was a relief to both of us to learn that the players he wrote about and the ones I cover now still fundamentally operate in the same way. These are professional athletes, people who are treated by society as near-deities, and whose personalities adapt in kind. But they are also uniquely talented, and contort their emotional impulses and physical attributes to compete at the games highest level, usually chasing the emotional highs and validations of success.

What makes baseball players difficult and frustrating is what makes them compelling. Angell was typically amused by their quirks rather than turned off by them.

Angell never lost a sense of wonder for their talents and the complexities of a game that often looks quite simple, even as the sport itself became unrecognizable to him in recent years. It is incomprehensible to me to think of the game as it evolved throughout the course of Angells lifetime. He was born at the start of the live ball era, he was 26 years old when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, he was alive for all 27 Yankees World Series championships and was old enough to remember 26 of them. He watched Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, Roberto Clemente, and told me last year that Jacob deGrom reminded him of Gibson.

He was once described as baseballs poet laureate, but I considered him something else. He was baseballs living history, its institutional memory, and one of its all-time greatest ambassadors for the magic of the game.

What was intended to be an interview for a story turned into two people gossiping about baseball and the process of writing about it, a 100-year-old and a 31-year-old with the same obsession. It was clear to me that Angell did not see himself the way I did: As compelling and talented as the baseball players who had fascinated him for his entire life.

He was the insiders outsider, the man who sat in the press box doodling in his notebook while those around him raced to meet deadlines. He was cognizant of his privilege in upbringing and in his assignments for The New Yorker, but many people have had less success with more opportunities.

I left that day without a story, covered in dog fur and feeling a bit closer to the legacy of the sport that has given me a passion and a career. I took a photo with Angell to send to Ron Darling and David Cone, and then got on the subway to go write about the Yankees drama of the day.

Angell approached his reporting with humility and curiosity. He wanted to understand and in turn, furthered the understanding of his readers. The game of baseball and the industry that covers it have both changed to the point of near-unrecognizability in the nearly 60 years since Angell got his first assignment to write about baseball, but his work and his legacy were never left behind.

Angells work is unreplicable, but his values are not.

(Photo of Angell in 2006: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

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Roger Angell was the personification of baseball history: Adler - The Athletic