Roger Angell - Essays and Books

Essays and Books

Angell's earliest published works were pieces of short fiction and personal narratives. Several of these pieces were collected in The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970, ISBN 0-670-25916-0).

He first wrote professionally about baseball in 1962, when William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker (for which his mother and stepfather worked from the 1920s through the 1970s), had him travel to Florida to write about spring training.

Since then, Angell has translated a lifetime passion for baseball into a steady stream of elegantly written essays, most of which were originally published in The New Yorker, where he has worked as an editor since 1956. Many of these essays have been collected in a series of critically acclaimed, best-selling books:

• The Summer Game (1972, ISBN 0-670-68164-4)
• Five Seasons (1977, ISBN 0-671-22743-2)
• Late Innings (1982, ISBN 0-671-42567-6)
• Season Ticket (1988, ISBN 0-395-38165-7)
• Once More Around the Park (1991, ISBN 0-345-36737-5)
• Game Time, edited by Steve Kettmann, with an introduction by Richard Ford (2003, ISBN 0-15-601387-8)
• Let Me Finish (2006, ISBN 0-15-101350-0)

A Pitcher's Story (2001, ISBN 0-446-52768-8) is the book-length result of a year that Angell spent speaking with New York Yankees pitcher David Cone and Cone's family, friends and coaches.

Angell has been called the "Poet Laureate of baseball" but dislikes the term. In a review of Once More Around the Park for the Journal of Sport History, Richard C. Crepeau wrote that "Gone for Good," his essay on the career of Steve Blass, "may be the best piece that anyone has ever written on baseball or any other sport."

One of the most striking items from Angell's essays is one ultimately published in "Season Ticket", involving a spring training trip to see the Baltimore Orioles. While there, Angell interviews Earl Weaver, then the former Orioles manager, about Cal Ripken, Jr., who was about to start his rookie season. Angell quotes Weaver as saying about Ripken that, at whichever position the team decides (between shortstop and third base), "his manager can just write his name into the lineup every day for the next fifteen years; that's how good he is". Starting that year, Ripken in fact was written into lineups every day for more than fifteen years, setting the all-time consecutive games-played streak of 2,632 games. Angell's quote of Weaver stands as one of the most incredibly prescient (and well-documented) "first-guesses" in recorded literature.