Roger Angell Heads to Cooperstown

Roger Angell is the greatest of all baseball writers. Today, the game has recognized the fact. This July, along with Joe Torre, Bobby Cox, and Tony La Russa, Roger will be celebrated in Cooperstown, New York, the site of the Hall of Fame. He will receive the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, which has previously gone to the likes of Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Ring Lardner, and Damon Runyon. With respect to all the writers in the lifetime lineup card, Roger is the cleanup man. I.M.H.O., anyway. I am not quite sure how the exhibits will look, but I will be happy to see one of Roger’s tweed jackets, a spiral notebook shoved in the pocket, hanging right next to Ruth’s No. 3 and Gehrig’s No. 4.

Not to be peevish, but the award is a teensy bit belated, as there has been heated discussion for years in press-box circles about whether Roger, as a “magazine and book man” (as one voter called him), could fairly stand beside the beat writers, the men and women who attend every game and write up every contest, from the mid-August sleeper in the rain to the Homeric season-ending classics on All Hallows’ Eve. It’s good to see that the guild gave up its perquisites to honor the outlier. The truth is, though, that Roger, who is more accustomed, it is true, to writing on a more capacious deadline, is a versatile player; he can write quickly when the occasion, and the technology, demands it of him. When Mariano Rivera pitched his second-to-last game this year, Roger checked in the next morning on our Sporting Scene blog:

Mariano came on with one out in the eighth, and surrendered a single but no runs, and along the way gave us still again his eloquent entering run from deep center field; the leaning stare-in with upcocked mitt over his heart; the reposeful pre-pitch pause, with his hands at waist level; and then the burning, bending, famed-in-song-and-story cutter. All these, seen once again, have been as familiar to us as our dad’s light cough from the next room, or the dimples on the back of our once-three-year-old daughter’s hands, but, like those, must now only be recalled.

Upcocked. Reposeful. Our dad’s cough in the next room. All on deadline and without evident strain. (You try it!) But perhaps we can credit it to experience, to sufficient time in the press box. Roger is ninety-three. Unlike Mariano, he has not abandoned the field. He’s at the office nearly every day, reading fiction for the magazine, writing, kibbitzing, and advising. His devotion to writing, editing, and the magazine is as it ever was. The other day, he handed in an essay that is as fine a thing as I have read in many months, and it will run soon.

This is all to say: Roger, congratulations! Congratulations from us at the magazine and from your readers.

And, as a holiday bonus, here is a kind of mini-anthology, a taste of the best of a marvellous writer and man.

“Up at the Hall,” from August 31, 1987, about his visit as a skeptical baseball pilgrim to the Hall of Fame.

“Down the Drain,” from June 23, 1975, about the pitcher Steve Blass’s sudden inability to throw strikes.

“Distance,” from September 22, 1980, about the career of the great St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson.

“The Web of the Game,” from July 20, 1981, about a college matchup between Yale and St. John’s that featured future big-league pitchers Ron Darling and Frank Viola.

“Before the Fall,” from March 26, 2001, about the pitcher David Cone’s final innings.

“Long Voyage Home,” from November 22, 2004, about the Boston Red Sox first World Series win since 1918.

“So Long, Joe,” from November 5, 2007, about the manager Joe Torre’s departure from the Yankees.

“Mo Town,” from September 23, 2013, about the retirement celebration for Mariano Rivera at Yankee Stadium.

Photograph by Mary Altaffer/AP.