Baseball has been played in America for a very long time, at least since 1846, which is 176 years. That’s longer than American football (first game: 1869) and basketball (invented: 1891). Of these 176 years, Roger Angell personally witnessed the greater part.
Angell was born in September 1920. It was a formative year for baseball, because in 1920 a man named George Herman Ruth, nicknamed Babe, switched from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees. Ruth played for the Yankees for fourteen years, and during that time he became one of the greatest baseball players in history – a legend. When he was still active, he held all the important records that can be held in this game. To this day, Babe Ruth is still the third-best hitter of all time with 714 homers.
Roger Angell never played baseball, at least not professionally. But he has delved into the game like few of his compatriots. Angell, a son of Manhattan circles and a Harvard graduate, was actually the fiction editor at the very posh and well-known magazine The New Yorker. This position was held before him by his mother, authors such as John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov New Yorker brought. Angell initially wrote short stories himself, but in 1962 he turned his attention to baseball instead of literature. In the decades that followed, he wrote for the New Yorker countless reports and essays on baseball as well as some of the best books on the subject.
You might find that strange because after all, baseball is just a sport. But the fact that a highly intellectual, literary demanding magazine like the New Yorker afforded a baseball correspondent shows that baseball is much more, at least in the USA. Baseball is sometimes referred to as “America’s pastime.” That sounds like free time and a hobby, which on the one hand is not true – baseball is hard work for the players and a billion-dollar business for the sports industry. On the other hand, it’s true, because baseball is more closely and deeply interwoven with American everyday culture than any other sport.
Baseball is America’s summer sport. The season lasts from April to October, during which time the 30 professional teams each play an incredible 162 games. That’s more than 2400 games – per year. And then comes the postseason with the playoffs and the championship, the World Series. Baseball accompanies Americans every day for more than half the year. One can only imagine how many baseball games Roger Angell must have seen during his time as a reporter.
Angell was an ardent fan and shrewd journalist in equal measure
Angell became the country’s foremost baseball chronicler, the sport’s Poet Laureate, because of the way he wrote: knowledgeable, vivid, elegant, passionate. Angell was a journalist, but he was also an ardent fan New Yorker There is an anecdote that Angell’s editor-in-chief made him baseball correspondent because his cheeks reddened with excitement when he once explained to him the precise, almost ballet-like choreography of a double play.
In fact, Angell loved baseball so much that he didn’t want to pledge his allegiance to just one team. He was known as a supporter of the New York Mets, but he also liked the New York Yankees and even the Red Sox from Boston when he had to. In terms of German football, that’s like being a fan of FC Bayern Munich, TSV 1860 Munich and Borussia Dortmund.
Roger Angell saw the great Babe Ruth play when he was a little boy. This year he was fortunate enough to witness the reincarnation of Ruth on the field – Shohei Ohtani, believed to be the only person in the world who can both throw 100-mile fast balls and hit 100-mile fast balls. As a baseball reporter, but even more so as a baseball fan, you couldn’t ask for a better staple to hold your life together. Roger Angell passed away on Saturday at the age of 101.
