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‘I Don’t Want to Be an Oracle.’ Baseball Writer Roger Angell at 100.
Talking extra innings—and a milestone birthday—with the celebrated chronicler of the summer game
By Jason Gay / Wall Street Journal
Sept. 17, 2020
When I was young, and starting to obsessively read books about sports, my father gave me two paperbacks: Roger Angell’s “The Summer Game” and “Five Seasons.” I had no idea it was possible to write about sports like Angell could: at great length, in sublime detail, as focused on the humans under the uniforms as it was on the stats and scores.
Angell turns 100 years old on Sept. 19. The legendary New Yorker writer and fiction editor—who was honored with the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award in 2014—spoke to me this week via telephone from his home in Manhattan, where he’d recently returned after spending the summer in Maine. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I want to get your thoughts about this very strange baseball season. But before I get to that, I want to ask you about Tom Seaver, whom we recently lost. What made him different?
His pitching and his personality. Certainly in the first years he was around, he was boyish, collegiate, extremely intelligent, excited and happy to be there. He was the personification of the sense of pleasure that real fans get out of baseball. He seemed to enjoy every minute of it. His intelligence shone around him all the time.
The extraordinary thing about Tom’s [pitching] was that enormous stride with his lead foot. It seemed to cover 10 yards, that lead foot, and his stride was so long, that it also brought him dropping down vertically, straight down. It was sort of a piston-like action, and the power he got from the dropdown was part of the pitch. His right knee was always dirty because he ended up with his knee in the dirt. Amazing. Nobody else is quite like him.
This baseball season that we have right now: 60 games, no fans, expanded playoffs, double headers played with seven inning games. They’re starting extra innings with a runner on second base. What do you think of this short, radical season?
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 much 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 extraordinary 16-inning [1986 National League Championship Series] game with Houston and the Mets that tied up New York for hours and hours was absolutely amazing—like nothing else anybody’s ever experienced. I wrote at length about it. All over town, they’re making announcements about the score—from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. When it was over, I heard from somebody who was running around the reservoir in Central Park and they [described] it as a sigh that went over the city. [Wrote Angell in 1986: It came from everywhere around the Park, he said, and wasn’t a shout or a roar but a sudden great murmuring of the city. The Mets had won.
Another revolution in baseball is statistical. There are so many ways now to use data to analyze performance and make strategic decisions. What do you think of this?
I think some of the new stats are useful. Good baseball played by Major Leaguers is so far beyond us—it’s the hardest game in the world to play well. And what underlies [the stat revolution] is, I think, a conscious and effective way to get some of this back, to say, “We know better. We know what the batters are doing. They don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s understandable, but it doesn’t add to the joy of the game for me. I’m not very statistical by nature, so I could be wrong about this. And I know a lot of people now use these stats and talk about them with interest. But also, it’s part of the huge alteration of the game itself. People tilting their swings and swinging for homers and striking out in huge numbers. This is a gigantic change in the game. I think home runs are OK, but on the whole, I prefer a triple.
What did you think about the Astros’ scandal, when they were caught banging on those trash cans, signaling pitches to their teammates?
I think it’s cheating, but it’s not new. The 1951 Giants did the same thing. They had somebody watching from center field in the Polo Grounds, and then sending a signal. I loved that team. I’m so happy they won. But that was cheating, and I’m not in favor of cheating.
The current Giants have a nice player in Mike Yastrzemski—Carl’s grandson.
Y-A-S-T-R-Z-E-M-S-K-I.
You did that right off the top of your head.
Well, that’s the first thing you learn in baseball. You have to learn how to spell Yastrzemski.
If you were given a time machine, and you could go back and watch any baseball player of any era, who would you choose?
Well, the people I’ve seen. I guess I would start with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Willie Mays, most of all. To me, Mays is the greatest player ever, but who knows. All the athletes today are so great. It’s really hard to compare with players of a different era, but Mays is still No. 1 to me. I would want to see Carl Hubbell. Jim Palmer, Seaver. A whole number of people, I have a lot [of names]. Pedro Martinez. I would bring back Ted Williams in a minute. Willie McCovey. Dan Quisenberry—
The Kansas City Royals submarine pitcher!
The submariner and one of the most delightful people I ever wrote about.
Regarding writing: there’s always anxiety about the future of publishing, but good writing endures. Why do you think that is?
My real profession was as a fiction editor, and I was always concerned with the quality of writing and I thought about it a great deal. As an editor, I was a “taker-outer” rather than a “keeper-inner.” But structure in writing, and good writing, moves me as it does anybody, it moves me to extreme.
I’ve memorized quite a lot of poetry, which is very useful now that my eyesight is declining so rapidly. I have about 30-odd poems and stretches of plays from Shakespeare and John Donne to Ogden Nash. And these sustain me. When I go to sleep, I’ll say some of these poems to myself.
I never thought I would lose my eyesight. The biggest thing that has happened with my rapidly declining eyesight from macular degeneration is that I’m beginning to lose movies. I’ve been a big movie buff and watched movies over the years, with great happiness. But I can’t quite see the actors anymore.
Baseball, I can still follow because it’s more expansive. Individuals are spread out. I know who is where and what position. I can follow a game pretty well. I can’t see the break on the ball, but they’ll tell what the break is. And I can watch the batter’s reaction. I can follow the great Mets [broadcast] trio of Keith [Hernandez] and Ron [Darling] and Gary Cohen—they’re the best announcers in baseball, and great company over a span of two to three hours. Now the Mets are getting a new owner and I’m terrified that some way they will be thrown out. I hope not. I know Keith, I know Ron. I saw Ron pitch that great college playoff game—
Yale versus St. John’s. St. John’s threw Frank Viola. [In 1981, Darling pitched an 11-inning no-hitter for Yale, but lost.]
One of the great, great NCAA games. [I went with the former Major Leaguer and Yale coach] Smoky Joe Wood. He was 91 years old and living in New Haven. And I found a way to get him to come to the game and sit with us. He said, ‘This is the best college game I ever saw’ and he’d been to thousands of college games. Baseball can do that sometimes.
This 100th birthday, what does that number mean to you? Is it a milestone or merely a number?
I don’t know, I mean, I never set my sights on 100, or any other time. I was really gratified to reach 80, which was a while ago. We’re all living longer, thanks to doctors. I think I’m immensely lucky. I owe everything to doctoring and medical care and just pure, good luck.
Let me say one thing, it’s very important to me. None of this was planned. I never sat down and thought to myself, “Well, I’m going to write about baseball. I can make a career writing about baseball.” Never for a moment. Never, never.
I’ve been immensely lucky. I began writing in a time when you could talk to players on their own, and if you worked at it, you would get a few players who really were wonderful talkers. Plus, I had almost endless space in the New Yorker, and editors—William Shawn, Bob Gottlieb, Tina Brown, David Remnick—who gave me all this space and freedom and encouragement. I’m enormously grateful to them. I could write an 8,000 or 10,000 word piece if it commanded it. Those days have long gone by.
Your celebrated 2014 New Yorker essay “This Old Man,” dealt with aging and loss—it’s also very funny. People must ask you to impart wisdom like an oracle.
Well, I don’t want to be an oracle. I don’t want to be a sainted figure and I don’t want to be a model for anything.
What’s maybe surprising about that piece is that it’s full of jokes. I love jokes. I love short jokes. [That piece] might have my favorite short joke, about a beat-up workman, who has been on some hard piece of work all day, comes into a diner and he says: ”Give me a cup of coffee, a piece of pie and a few kind words.” And the waitress comes and puts down the pie. And he says, “Hey! Hey! Where are the kind words?” And she leans over and says: “Don’t eat the pie.”
Talking extra innings—and a milestone birthday—with the celebrated chronicler of the summer game
By Jason Gay / Wall Street Journal
Sept. 17, 2020
When I was young, and starting to obsessively read books about sports, my father gave me two paperbacks: Roger Angell’s “The Summer Game” and “Five Seasons.” I had no idea it was possible to write about sports like Angell could: at great length, in sublime detail, as focused on the humans under the uniforms as it was on the stats and scores.
Angell turns 100 years old on Sept. 19. The legendary New Yorker writer and fiction editor—who was honored with the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award in 2014—spoke to me this week via telephone from his home in Manhattan, where he’d recently returned after spending the summer in Maine. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I want to get your thoughts about this very strange baseball season. But before I get to that, I want to ask you about Tom Seaver, whom we recently lost. What made him different?
His pitching and his personality. Certainly in the first years he was around, he was boyish, collegiate, extremely intelligent, excited and happy to be there. He was the personification of the sense of pleasure that real fans get out of baseball. He seemed to enjoy every minute of it. His intelligence shone around him all the time.
The extraordinary thing about Tom’s [pitching] was that enormous stride with his lead foot. It seemed to cover 10 yards, that lead foot, and his stride was so long, that it also brought him dropping down vertically, straight down. It was sort of a piston-like action, and the power he got from the dropdown was part of the pitch. His right knee was always dirty because he ended up with his knee in the dirt. Amazing. Nobody else is quite like him.
This baseball season that we have right now: 60 games, no fans, expanded playoffs, double headers played with seven inning games. They’re starting extra innings with a runner on second base. What do you think of this short, radical season?
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 much 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 extraordinary 16-inning [1986 National League Championship Series] game with Houston and the Mets that tied up New York for hours and hours was absolutely amazing—like nothing else anybody’s ever experienced. I wrote at length about it. All over town, they’re making announcements about the score—from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. When it was over, I heard from somebody who was running around the reservoir in Central Park and they [described] it as a sigh that went over the city. [Wrote Angell in 1986: It came from everywhere around the Park, he said, and wasn’t a shout or a roar but a sudden great murmuring of the city. The Mets had won.
Another revolution in baseball is statistical. There are so many ways now to use data to analyze performance and make strategic decisions. What do you think of this?
I think some of the new stats are useful. Good baseball played by Major Leaguers is so far beyond us—it’s the hardest game in the world to play well. And what underlies [the stat revolution] is, I think, a conscious and effective way to get some of this back, to say, “We know better. We know what the batters are doing. They don’t know what they’re doing.” It’s understandable, but it doesn’t add to the joy of the game for me. I’m not very statistical by nature, so I could be wrong about this. And I know a lot of people now use these stats and talk about them with interest. But also, it’s part of the huge alteration of the game itself. People tilting their swings and swinging for homers and striking out in huge numbers. This is a gigantic change in the game. I think home runs are OK, but on the whole, I prefer a triple.
What did you think about the Astros’ scandal, when they were caught banging on those trash cans, signaling pitches to their teammates?
I think it’s cheating, but it’s not new. The 1951 Giants did the same thing. They had somebody watching from center field in the Polo Grounds, and then sending a signal. I loved that team. I’m so happy they won. But that was cheating, and I’m not in favor of cheating.
The current Giants have a nice player in Mike Yastrzemski—Carl’s grandson.
Y-A-S-T-R-Z-E-M-S-K-I.
You did that right off the top of your head.
Well, that’s the first thing you learn in baseball. You have to learn how to spell Yastrzemski.
If you were given a time machine, and you could go back and watch any baseball player of any era, who would you choose?
Well, the people I’ve seen. I guess I would start with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Willie Mays, most of all. To me, Mays is the greatest player ever, but who knows. All the athletes today are so great. It’s really hard to compare with players of a different era, but Mays is still No. 1 to me. I would want to see Carl Hubbell. Jim Palmer, Seaver. A whole number of people, I have a lot [of names]. Pedro Martinez. I would bring back Ted Williams in a minute. Willie McCovey. Dan Quisenberry—
The Kansas City Royals submarine pitcher!
The submariner and one of the most delightful people I ever wrote about.
Regarding writing: there’s always anxiety about the future of publishing, but good writing endures. Why do you think that is?
My real profession was as a fiction editor, and I was always concerned with the quality of writing and I thought about it a great deal. As an editor, I was a “taker-outer” rather than a “keeper-inner.” But structure in writing, and good writing, moves me as it does anybody, it moves me to extreme.
I’ve memorized quite a lot of poetry, which is very useful now that my eyesight is declining so rapidly. I have about 30-odd poems and stretches of plays from Shakespeare and John Donne to Ogden Nash. And these sustain me. When I go to sleep, I’ll say some of these poems to myself.
I never thought I would lose my eyesight. The biggest thing that has happened with my rapidly declining eyesight from macular degeneration is that I’m beginning to lose movies. I’ve been a big movie buff and watched movies over the years, with great happiness. But I can’t quite see the actors anymore.
Baseball, I can still follow because it’s more expansive. Individuals are spread out. I know who is where and what position. I can follow a game pretty well. I can’t see the break on the ball, but they’ll tell what the break is. And I can watch the batter’s reaction. I can follow the great Mets [broadcast] trio of Keith [Hernandez] and Ron [Darling] and Gary Cohen—they’re the best announcers in baseball, and great company over a span of two to three hours. Now the Mets are getting a new owner and I’m terrified that some way they will be thrown out. I hope not. I know Keith, I know Ron. I saw Ron pitch that great college playoff game—
Yale versus St. John’s. St. John’s threw Frank Viola. [In 1981, Darling pitched an 11-inning no-hitter for Yale, but lost.]
One of the great, great NCAA games. [I went with the former Major Leaguer and Yale coach] Smoky Joe Wood. He was 91 years old and living in New Haven. And I found a way to get him to come to the game and sit with us. He said, ‘This is the best college game I ever saw’ and he’d been to thousands of college games. Baseball can do that sometimes.
This 100th birthday, what does that number mean to you? Is it a milestone or merely a number?
I don’t know, I mean, I never set my sights on 100, or any other time. I was really gratified to reach 80, which was a while ago. We’re all living longer, thanks to doctors. I think I’m immensely lucky. I owe everything to doctoring and medical care and just pure, good luck.
Let me say one thing, it’s very important to me. None of this was planned. I never sat down and thought to myself, “Well, I’m going to write about baseball. I can make a career writing about baseball.” Never for a moment. Never, never.
I’ve been immensely lucky. I began writing in a time when you could talk to players on their own, and if you worked at it, you would get a few players who really were wonderful talkers. Plus, I had almost endless space in the New Yorker, and editors—William Shawn, Bob Gottlieb, Tina Brown, David Remnick—who gave me all this space and freedom and encouragement. I’m enormously grateful to them. I could write an 8,000 or 10,000 word piece if it commanded it. Those days have long gone by.
Your celebrated 2014 New Yorker essay “This Old Man,” dealt with aging and loss—it’s also very funny. People must ask you to impart wisdom like an oracle.
Well, I don’t want to be an oracle. I don’t want to be a sainted figure and I don’t want to be a model for anything.
What’s maybe surprising about that piece is that it’s full of jokes. I love jokes. I love short jokes. [That piece] might have my favorite short joke, about a beat-up workman, who has been on some hard piece of work all day, comes into a diner and he says: ”Give me a cup of coffee, a piece of pie and a few kind words.” And the waitress comes and puts down the pie. And he says, “Hey! Hey! Where are the kind words?” And she leans over and says: “Don’t eat the pie.”
