Last September marked the 100th birthday of baseball writer Roger Angell, a bittersweet occasion for longtime admirers like myself. While certainly pleasant to think of him still around and hopefully enjoying life, I find myself floored, too.
Time’s passage is a dominant theme of this, Angell’s first and most famous book on the sport: “Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
While focused on the transitory nature of youth as seen in the lens of a national pastime, The Summer Game is exactly that, a book that somehow remains forever young.
The book collects baseball articles Angell wrote for The New Yorker magazine between 1962 and 1971. Each season gets its own article, including a rundown of postseason highlights.
Angell’s book catches baseball in one of its most remarkable transformations, as television and competition from football began to change the sport, in Angell’s eye mostly for the bad. Early stirrings of free agency and the shuttering of major ballclubs for other climes were also sources of unrest. Divisional playoffs were introduced.
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| A day at the ballpark, 1965. Catcher Johnny Roseboro tussles with opposing pitcher Juan Marichal (#27) as Sandy Koufax jumps in. Image from https://thinkbluela.com/2014/07/what-would-sandy-koufax-have-done/ |
The ability to find beauty and involvement in artificial commercial constructions is essential to most of us in the modern world; it is the life-giving naivete. But naivete is not gullibility, and those who persistently alter baseball for their quick and selfish purposes will find, I believe, that they are the owners of teams without a following and of a sport devoid of purpose.
Angell’s first piece, “The Old Folks Behind Home,” covers the spring training scene in Florida in 1962. This is funny and yet poignant essay about the elderly fans in the stands watching meaningless games in a kind of gentle fog somewhere between now and then. Angell records the conversations of old men complaining about dry skin and a woman’s angry reaction when a young spectator calls out Duke Snider as “grandpa” – “Now, really, I think that’s very offensive!”
It’s not Hunter Thompson at the Kentucky Derby, but it has that same kind of snarky vibe, and sets a wry, whimsical tone.
Angell moves on to the World Series and the Yankees’ seven-game victory over the San Francisco Giants, the 20th championship for the Bombers in 40 years. The 1962 World Series wasn’t that notable, but it marked the last Yankee triumph in the Fall Classic for the next 15 years.
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| Angell on Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford, a mainstay of their 1950s-1960s glory: "Ford stands on the mound like a Fifth Avenue bank president. Tight-lipped, absolutely still between pitches, all business and concentration, he personifies the big-city, emotionless perfection of his team." Image from https://twitter.com/MichaelATorrez3. |
What followed was a different kind of baseball, one without dynasties though many of the usual suspects from season to season. Three get much of Angell’s attention: the Los Angeles Dodgers, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Baltimore Orioles. Also sneaking in to win a championship during this ten-year stretch were the Detroit Tigers (in 1968) and Pittsburgh Pirates (in 1971).
None of them dominate The Summer Game like the New York Mets, introduced in 1962. The Mets’ early days are the subject of three essays here, as well as an appreciation piece for the ballclub’s first home, the Polo Grounds, which was torn down after the 1963 season.
Angell warmed to the Mets early, and never looked back. He records taking a 14-year-old to watch a Mets home game in 1962, where the visiting Dodgers ran up 12 runs in five innings:
“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.”
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| The Mets arrived at the Polo Grounds in 1962 with high spirits and low results. From left to right, Frank Thomas, Gil Hodges, Don Zimmer, and Roger Craig. Image from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/16/b7/5f/16b75f88f2e2f6ec38bbc9e97b147891.jpg |
Unlike other writers, specifically Jimmy Breslin, Angell depicts the early, fumbling Mets with warmth and class, offering some original takes as to why the town took to them so fast. Being underdogs made the Mets easier to cheer for; their onfield successes felt more earned and their failings let fans see in the players more than a little of themselves.
The Mets made their own championship run in 1969, winning the World Series in just five games against the Orioles, one of the best teams in baseball that year or any other. Angell captures the improbable nature of the excitement they generated: “Disbelief persists, then, and one can see now that disbelief itself was one of the Mets’ most powerful assets all through the season.”
Angell also devotes attention to 1962’s other expansion team, the Houston Astros, in particular their new home in 1965, the Astrodome.
Baseball’s first-ever indoor park is another modern development the middle-aged Angell admits not loving, though he takes some pleasure in describing the stadium’s unusual contours and the affable, knowledgeable fans. Team owner Roy Hofheinz explains: “This place was built to keep the fans happy. They’ve got our good seats, fine restaurants, and our scoreboard to look at, and they don’t have to make a personal sacrifice to like baseball.”
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| Officially named "Harris County Domed Stadium," the Astrodome was billed the eighth wonder of the world when it opened in April 1965. Angell admits it offers more comfort than battling Texas mosquitoes on a hot night. Image from https://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/remembering-carl-yastrzemski-s-triple-crown-50-years-ago-1.13302908 |
The more I read this Astrodome piece, “The Cool Bubble,” the more I realized it captured everything I enjoy in Angell’s writing.
While recounting actual seasons in an exciting manner, the secret to Angell’s specialness is a focus on aesthetics over strategies or statistics. This is not to say he doesn’t comment on the odd batting stances or pitching motions of certain players, or statistical variances from year to year:
The 1968 season has been named the Year of the Pitcher, which is only a kinder way of saying the Year of the Infield Pop-up.
The fact Angell wrote for an audience of Eastern elites is hard to miss. He references Horace when joking about aging athletes (“Eheu fug!”) and dubs owners “megatheriums” for failing to pursue more player-friendly policies.
Sometimes a cloying fustiness creeps into his polished prose:
The World Series of 1965, in which the Dodgers defeated the Minnesota Twins in seven games, was no classic; it was, however, an entertainment of more than sufficient interest, and only the most thrill-surfeited fan could ignore its distinctive omens, curiosities, and pleasures.
But Angell I think was aware of the clash, and plays it up self-mockingly to establish what becomes a uniquely cultured yet humble tone. He’s an outsider in the tobacco-spitting world of baseball, and quite aware of that.
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| Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemski at the 1967 World Series. Angell observes: "There was something sad here – perhaps the thought that for Yastrzemski, more than for anyone else, this summer could not come again." Image from https://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/remembering-carl-yastrzemski-s-triple-crown-50-years-ago-1.13302908. |
This was the first of four such books Angell produced in the 1970s and 1980s chronicling consecutive baseball seasons in multi-year clumps. A minor negative of this first volume is Angell’s remove from the field. Angell doesn’t even seem to interview any player directly until 1967, when Boston Red Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg shows off a glove marked with the numbers of batsmen he pegged in games.
Angell’s account of the 1963 World Series involves going into various taverns around New York City and taking in the Dodgers’ four-game sweep of the Yankees with locals. This actually works as a recounting of Big Apple nightlife in days of yore, capturing odd moments of humanity (woman playing with makeshift voodoo doll, man apologizing for blocking the TV when he ducks in for a whiskey and chaser) while Sandy Koufax fans a record 15 batters on TV. Still, Angell does better when he goes to the park.
Giants manager Charlie Fox notes the satisfaction of having Willie Mays’ name to write into his lineup card, while Roberto Clemente of the Pirates explains his approach to Angell a year before he would die in a plane crash: “I gave everything I had to this game.”
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| Willie Mays shares a moment at the park in his 1960s heyday. The other gentleman is my dad. |
Orioles manager Earl Weaver provides some perspective after losing to the Mets in the 1969 World Series: “You can’t just sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddam plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”
That’s a key takeaway from The Summer Game; how easy it is to appreciate baseball when one devotes even a little attention to it; how it manages to simultaneously encapsulate our past while allowing us to escape a less-happy present. He writes:
Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own.
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| Roger Angell at a 100th birthday celebration in August, 2020, held in his home community of Brooklin, Maine. Photo by Kevin Madden from https://friendml.org/2020/07/30/roger-angell-birthday-celebration/. |
As a Mets fan, The Summer Game is a marvelous time machine in its own right regarding the team’s amazing first decade of existence, and indeed the whole culture of the 1960s, which somehow managed to be both laid-back and amped up when seen now. Angell notes the oddity of seeing transistor radios at Dodger home games, and press conferences where players were suddenly holding court like foreign dignitaries.
Angell explains his approach in a brief foreword:
I wanted to concentrate not just on the events down on the field but on their reception and results. I wanted to pick up the feel of the game as it happened to the people around me.
In this way and others, The Summer Game succeeds wonderfully.
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