The Bard of Baseball : Hailed as Poet and Pioneer, the New Yorker’s Roger Angell Says He’s Just a Sportswriter

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. —  Last fall, when the Oakland A’s flattened the Boston Red Sox in the American League playoffs, most baseball writers rounded up the usual suspects--balls, bats and outs--to describe Beantown’s stunning collapse.

Writing on tight deadlines and with limited space, they had little choice. But one scribe, seeking his muse in the old Roadrunner cartoons and with considerably more time on his hands, saw things a bit differently:

“The Sox in late innings reminded you of Wile E. Coyote, running off the rim of a mesa,” he wrote. “Suddenly aware that there is nothing firm or sustaining under his feet, he waves a feeble goodby and drops from view, followed by his eyebrows.”

It isn’t the first time that Roger Angell crafted an unforgettable image and made baseball come alive. For 30 years, he’s been dazzling readers of the New Yorker magazine with masterful accounts of the national pastime, and his long, probing essays have set a standard for sports journalism.

To many followers he is, quite simply, the best in the business.

But as he sits behind home plate on a March afternoon in Scottsdale Stadium, the man who has been called the dean of American baseball writers seems uncomfortable with such praise, waving it off with mild irritation. In his nylon jacket, floppy hat and sunscreen, he looks like any other fan in the cozy 5,000-seat park--and Angell wants to keep it that way.

“You know, there are a great many people who write about baseball and know a lot more about it than I do,” he says, settling in for an exhibition game between the A’s and the San Francisco Giants. “I just do what I do, and I certainly won’t be the one to judge my own writing.”

A Giants batter cracks a single to left, and a murmur of applause ripples through the lazy, sun-drenched crowd. Angell, a gray-haired man of 70 who looks young for his years, records the single neatly on his score card and tries once again to shift the spotlight away from himself. Given his druthers, he would talk about the new baseball season, which opens Monday.

“Look, the real beauty of what’s happening here is baseball itself: the fans, the great talent of the players out on the field,” he says, smearing himself with suntan oil and balancing a beer unsteadily on the seat. “Really, I don’t see why somebody’s writing should get so much attention.”

In Angell’s case, however, it’s a reflex action. Every year, thousands of readers wait for his New Yorker articles to arrive, usually in the spring, midseason and fall. Others pore through published collections of his essays, savoring a look at earlier seasons. Although there are many talented baseball writers at work today--Peter Gammons, Thomas Boswell and Jim Murray, to name a few--Angell’s books and commentaries are in a league all their own.

“Roger chronicles baseball players and events better than anyone I know,” says Al Rosen, a former American League all-star and now general manager of the Giants. “He digs deeper than most writers and has an eye for the human detail of the game--the humor and the emotions--that’s just amazing.”

Charles Einstein, a journalist who compiled the four-volume “Fireside Book of Baseball,” an anthology of the game’s best writing, puts it more bluntly. Angell, he says, is a true pioneer--and an oracle for fans across the country.

“There’s a purity to what he does, and people depend on him for the inside track,” Einstein says. “Who else uses his kind of imagery? There’s nobody else who does it so well, and by now he’s like an old friend.”

Everybody, it seems, has his favorite Roger Angell moments. When he visited Dodger Stadium in 1965, for example, the New York native took one look at the Taj O’Malley and compared it to a suburban supermarket:

“It has the same bright, uneasy colors . . . turquoise exterior walls, pale green outfield fences, odd yellows and ochers on the grandstand seats,” he wrote. “And there is a special shelf for high-priced goods--a dugout behind home plate for movie and television stars, ballplayers’ wives and transient millionaires.”

Angell once invoked Mozart to describe the compact beauty of a box score:

“Its encompassing neatness,” he noted, “permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of ‘Don Giovanni’ and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.”

On other occasions, Angell elevates baseball to pure metaphysics. After the Red Sox lost a heartbreaking playoff game to the New York Yankees in 1978, he reflected on the injustice of having slugger Carl Yastrzemski make the final out, concluding: “I think God was shelling a peanut.”

Ever since he first visited spring training camps in 1962, Angell has been expanding the frontiers of baseball writing. Freed from the limits of time and space that constrain most reporters, he has developed a highly personal style--and a humorous, fan’s-eye view of the game--that is widely imitated.

It’s a dream job, one that many journalists would kill for. But the most telling aspect of Angell’s success is that he has won the respect of players, usually a tough crowd to please.

In part, it’s because he speaks their language. Drawing on extensive interviews, for example, the veteran writer has produced essays on the art of catching, relief pitching and infield defense that are widely praised by players and managers.

To be sure, Angell’s work has sparked some criticism. Once, when he saw young ballplayers on the field convulsed with laughter, he remarked wistfully that a fan would never know what they were talking about. A cynic in the press box commented that the players were obviously talking about sex--and that Angell should have known better. Another baseball writer grouses that the New Yorker writer has a “perverse affinity” for the Oakland A’s executives, presumably because their cerebral approach to the game mirrors his own.

But these are quibbles.

Dave Righetti, a Giants relief pitcher, says Angell commands instant respect when he walks on the field, because players and managers know that he will ask them serious, knowledgeable questions.

“He glamorizes the game without distorting it,” says Righetti. “And every year he brings out the real flavor of baseball, the crack of the bat and the smell of the grass, like clockwork.”

It began on an editor’s whim about 30 years ago. Angell recalls that William Shawn, who ran the New Yorker, told him to check out the spring training scene. Shawn wanted more sports articles but was looking for a fresh new voice. Angell was eager for the job but seemed an unlikely candidate.

A short-story writer and essayist, he was also fiction editor at the New Yorker, a post he still holds. Over the years, he has worked with authors such as James Thurber, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and Garrison Keillor. His mother, Katharine, was managing editor of the magazine and his stepfather was E. B. White, the legendary author and essayist who wrote the “Talk of the Town” column for the elite journal.

Although Angell enjoyed baseball and was an avid Giants fan, he had written infrequently about the game, never dreaming that his views would reach a wider audience. That changed in 1962, when he flew down to catch spring-training contests in Ft. Lauderdale and St. Petersburg, Fla.

Blessed with a sharp eye for detail, Angell began writing about the “geezers and geezerettes” who flocked to the ballparks.

In his first essay, “The Old Folks Behind Home,” he captured the beguiling innocence of baseball on a hot afternoon, writing: “The old people all around me hunched forward, their necks bent, peering out at the field from under their cap bills, and I had the curious impression that I was in a giant aviary.”

It might have been a one-shot assignment, but Angell was lucky enough that spring to witness one of baseball’s greatest stories--the birth of the New York Mets. The hard-luck team lost 120 of the 160 games it played that year, a modern record, and Angell followed the soap opera with baffled wonder.

Early in the season, he attended a game where the Dodgers scored 12 runs against the Mets in four innings, collecting seven singles, two doubles, one triple, three home runs, three walks and two stolen bases. Angell had taken his 14-year-old daughter along and wrote that he was plainly embarrassed:

“Baseball isn’t usually like this,” I explained to my daughter.

“Sometimes it is,” she said. “This is like the fifth grade against the sixth grade at school.”

Soon, he began exploring a central theme: the loyalty and suffering of fans. Why, he asked, would anyone pay to see the Mets, when the cross-town Yankees--cool, superior and unbeatable--were far more professional?

As he watched the Mets lose yet another game, Angell found the answer in his soul and those of 50,000 screaming New Yorkers around him. They were banging on drums and blowing foghorns like it was the seventh game of the World Series.

“These exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us,” he concluded. “I knew for whom the foghorn blew; it blew for me.”

Since that epic season, Angell has been steady on the beat, churning out articles on pennant races, fading old-timers, hot rookie prospects and quirky, little-known elements of the game. His collected articles have been featured in four books, and a fifth selection of essays, “Once More Around the Park” (Ballantine, $18.95), will be published this month.

Much has changed since Angell first wrote about the Mets, and in some respects baseball seems unrecognizable.

Journeymen players who once begged owners for a $5,000 raise now sign million-dollar contracts. The sport that once served up heroes and role models is plagued by incidents of drug abuse and gambling. Television networks control the scheduling of key games, and superstars sign autographs for $50 a pop.

Baseball has gone big-time, and perhaps the most telling change has been in spring training itself.

The quiet, idyllic world of morning calisthenics and late-afternoon pepper games that Angell once described has become highly commercialized. Tickets to games in Florida and the Arizona league are sold out weeks before the season begins, and fans are lucky to get bleacher seats on the day of a contest. Hordes of tourists crowd into the small stadiums, and vendors hawk T-shirts as if they were at a rock concert.

Still, it’s a far cry from the tension and hurly-burly of the regular season. On a quiet afternoon in Arizona, Angell pulls out a spiral notebook, kicks back in his seat and begins jotting down random impressions. He avoids making predictions about the upcoming season, finding the practice ludicrous, but offers up shrewd insights into the game at hand. It’s early in the third inning, and the rites of spring are in full swing:

Kids beseech A’s star Ricky Henderson for autographs . . . a baby in Pampers crawls in the stands above the Giants dugout . . . the aroma of barbecued hot dogs hangs over the park . . . fans taunt Jose Canseco, the moody A’s slugger, with cries of “Head case! Head case!” . . . an elderly couple doze off, oblivious to the noise.

As he takes it all in, Angell’s wife, Carol, banters with him about ballplayers they’ve known and cracks a joke about baseball groupies. The stadium announcer asks people to give a big hand to the ballpark’s elderly volunteers (“They’ve been telling you where to park your cars for 24 years!”). Somewhere, there is pain and confusion. But not in Scottsdale.

“I don’t know how much longer we’re going to see this kind of scene,” sighs one fan sitting nearby. “It makes you kind of sad for the old days.”

Angell, however, isn’t biting. If there’s one thing he hates, it’s knee-jerk nostalgia that shuts out the new. None of this blather about fathers and sons playing catch on a field of dreams. Enough already with the old Brooklyn Dodgers. No more weepy choruses of Willie, Mickey and the Duke.

“It’s easy to get sentimental, but so what?” he says. “We shouldn’t be heartbroken about the changes in baseball just because it was a game we knew long ago. You say it once, and that’s all there is. I’ve not gone into that very much in my writing, because I don’t think it’s productive.”

What he does emphasize is clarity and style, a reminder that Angell is just as interested in the art of writing as in the mechanics of pitching. His prose seems effortless, but the writer says it doesn’t come easy. He confesses to long, sleepless nights in which he worries about an upcoming New Yorker piece, wondering if, at long last, he has lost his touch.

Once, Angell described a sure-fire cure for such insomnia:

“I would invent a No-Star baseball game, painstakingly selecting two nines made up of the least exciting baseball players I could remember . . . and playing them against each other in the deserted stadium of my mind,” he wrote.

“Three or four innings of walks, pop-ups, foul balls and messed-up double plays, with long pauses for rhubarbs and the introduction of relief pitchers, would bring on catalepsy.”

Writers’ Angst apparently ran in Angell’s family. He remembers E. B. White anguishing over his work, closeting himself in a study for hours at a time and being filled with self-doubt. If there was one rule that White taught his stepson, it was that an author has to think clearly in order to write well.

Angell, who was born in New York City, began applying that lesson after he graduated from Harvard University in 1942.

He worked as a magazine editor for the Air Force and then as a writer for Holiday magazine. He wrote short stories and essays in the 1940s before joining the New Yorker full time in 1956. Although Angell is primarily known for his sports pieces, readers also know him as the author of “Greetings, Friends!,” an annual celebrity-studded Christmas poem that appears in the magazine. On occasion, he also has written film criticism.

Angell lives with his wife in Manhattan and has three grown children. Never one to hide his baseball loyalties, he confesses to being a Mets fan, a Giants fan, an A’s fan, a Red Sox fan and, sometimes, a Yankees fan. With his family in tow, he attends an average of 40 to 50 games a year.

Does it ever get stale? Angell chuckles and says the game is as fresh and exciting now as it was when he first nervously approached players for interviews in 1962. If it wasn’t, he’d have hung up his spikes long ago.

“The great thing about Roger is that he doesn’t sink into all these cliches and maudlin thoughts, that baseball was great 20 years ago but it isn’t now,” says Corey Busch, executive vice president of the Giants.

“He sees the good, the bad and the ugly in baseball, but he doesn’t get cynical. He’s always discovering new things, and that’s important, because you could spend a lifetime learning about this sport and still not know it all.”

Take the case of the Girl Who Threw Heat.

In 1984, a woman enrolled at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York asked Angell if a female could ever play for the Yankees.

The student, a talented athlete, was quite serious, and Angell answered that, no, he didn’t think so. “I’d hate to say never . . . but never,” he said.

But that was several years before he saw a 14-year-old girl slinging fastballs on a diamond in Phoenix after an exhibition game. No one was around, her father was catching and, by golly, that girl could throw.

“She was a left-hander, and she had a terrific curve ball,” Angell recalls, with a delighted grin. “She was standing on the mound and she had great breaking stuff. It was really impressive. It was just popping in the glove.”

Is America ready for a Sandra Koufax? The mere thought of it fills him with satisfaction.

“There’s always something new,” Angell says, turning back to the game, where the Giants are beginning to rally. “We’re out here in the sun, and it’s another season. It’s perfect. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”