One of the greatest sportswriters of all-time, Roger Angell, passed away yesterday.
Why am I posting this on a St. John's board?
Angell immortalized the 1981 NCAA baseball game between St. John's and Yale in the pages of The New Yorker when Ron Darling and Frank Viola combined for the greatest pitching duel anyone had ever seen at any level of baseball.
www.newyorker.com
"The two pitchers held us—each as intent and calm and purposeful as the other. Ron Darling never deviating from the purity of his stylish body-lean and leg-crook and his riding, down-thrusting delivery, poured fastballs through the diminishing daylight. He looked as fast as ever now, or faster, and in both the ninth and tenth he dismissed the side in order and with four more strikeouts.
Viola was dominant in his own fashion, also setting down the Yale hitters, one, two, three, in the ninth and tenth, with a handful of pitches. His rhythm—the constant variety of speeds and location on his pitches—had the enemy batters leaning and swaying with his motion, and, as antistrophe, was almost as exciting to watch as Darling’s flare and flame.
With two out in the top of the eleventh, a St. John’s batter nudged a soft little roller up the first-base line—such an easy, waiting, schoolboy sort of chance that the Yale first baseman, O’Connor, allowed the ball to carom off his mitt: a miserable little butchery, except that the second baseman, seeing his pitcher sprinting for the bag, now snatched up the ball and flipped it toward him almost despairingly. Darling took the toss while diving full-length at the bag and, rolling in the dirt, beat the runner by a hair."
Why am I posting this on a St. John's board?
Angell immortalized the 1981 NCAA baseball game between St. John's and Yale in the pages of The New Yorker when Ron Darling and Frank Viola combined for the greatest pitching duel anyone had ever seen at any level of baseball.
THE WEB OF THE GAME
THE SPORTING SCENE about the Yale vs. St. John's University game at Yale field in New Haven, in mid-May. Two first rate pitchers were playing at the …
"The two pitchers held us—each as intent and calm and purposeful as the other. Ron Darling never deviating from the purity of his stylish body-lean and leg-crook and his riding, down-thrusting delivery, poured fastballs through the diminishing daylight. He looked as fast as ever now, or faster, and in both the ninth and tenth he dismissed the side in order and with four more strikeouts.
Viola was dominant in his own fashion, also setting down the Yale hitters, one, two, three, in the ninth and tenth, with a handful of pitches. His rhythm—the constant variety of speeds and location on his pitches—had the enemy batters leaning and swaying with his motion, and, as antistrophe, was almost as exciting to watch as Darling’s flare and flame.
With two out in the top of the eleventh, a St. John’s batter nudged a soft little roller up the first-base line—such an easy, waiting, schoolboy sort of chance that the Yale first baseman, O’Connor, allowed the ball to carom off his mitt: a miserable little butchery, except that the second baseman, seeing his pitcher sprinting for the bag, now snatched up the ball and flipped it toward him almost despairingly. Darling took the toss while diving full-length at the bag and, rolling in the dirt, beat the runner by a hair."