He additionally wrote fiction, critiques, poems and miscellaneous items for the journal, together with revelatory essays about rising previous. “Here in my tenth decade,” he wrote at 93, “I can testify that the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news.”
Mr. Angell, who was 101, died May 20 at his dwelling in Manhattan, stated his spouse, Margaret Moorman. The trigger was congestive coronary heart failure.
Among Mr. Angell’s most memorable tales in the New Yorker have been his idiosyncratic first-person essays about baseball, which led to his enshrinement in the writers’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014.
In his youth, Mr. Angell watched Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play at Yankee Stadium. He witnessed Joe DiMaggio’s rookie season in 1936 and vividly recalled, in a memoir written 70 years after the reality, the pitching movement of New York Giants left-hander Carl Hubbell, “gravely bowing twice from the waist before each delivery.”
New Yorker editor William Shawn knew of Mr. Angell’s curiosity in baseball and invited him to cowl the sport in a leisurely, private manner that was totally different from the strategy of most magazines and newspapers.
His first essays on baseball appeared in 1962, throughout the debut season of the New York Mets, whose day by day misfortunes have been in distinction to the crosstown preeminence of the New York Yankees. Yet the hapless Mets developed a loyal following, which Mr. Angell chronicled from the bleachers, relatively than the lofty perch of the press field.
“These exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves,” he wrote, “and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us.”
Mr. Angell’s writing about baseball proved to be authentic, spellbinding and not possible to mimic. He collected his essays in a collection of best-selling books, starting in 1972 with “The Summer Game.”
“The elegance of his prose aside, the man deals in information, lots of it,” Sports Illustrated reporter Ron Fimrite wrote in 1991. “It is, in fact, his power of observation, his eye for the minutest detail, that sets him apart not only from most baseball writers but also from most writers, period.”
Mr. Angell understood, in a manner that few baseball writers earlier than him had expressed, that the recreation was not the possession of the millionaires who owned the groups, and even of the gamers on the subject. Baseball belongs to the followers, who observe the recreation with its mingled sense of hope, pleasure and sorrow, tracing every season’s path by means of the day by day log of the newspaper field rating.
“It represents happenstance and physical flight exactly translated into figures and history,” he wrote. “This encompassing neatness 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.”
At the finish of every season, Mr. Angell ready an annual abstract roundup, and he wrote in-depth items on different elements of the recreation. One of his extra acclaimed New Yorker tales, from 1975, examined the psychic struggles of pitcher Steve Blass, a onetime World Series hero of the Pittsburgh Pirates who all of the sudden misplaced his means to throw strikes.
“[I]t is a fact that a professional athlete — and most especially a baseball player — faces a much more difficult task in attempting to regain lost form than an ailing businessman, say, or even a troubled artist,” Mr. Angell wrote. “All that matters is his performance, which will be measured, with utter coldness, by the stats. This is one reason that athletes are paid so well, and one reason that fear of failure — the unspeakable ‘choking’ — is their deepest and most private anxiety.”
He formed his sentences till they have been stable and glossy, breezing alongside like a sailboat skipping throughout the whitecaps, gathering pace with every phrase. Some of his tales revealed themselves to be about topics deeper than baseball itself.
Being a fan was actually about “caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives,” Mr. Angell wrote in an essay ostensibly about the 1975 World Series. “And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.”
Mr. Angell was a commentator for Ken Burns’s nine-part PBS documentary “Baseball,” proven on PBS in 1994. In addition to 6 collections of baseball essays, he revealed “A Pitcher’s Story” (2001), about David Cone in the twilight of his profession.
In 2014, Mr. Angell obtained the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor for a baseball writer. The subsequent 12 months, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the solely individual with each honors.
“Over the last half-century, nobody has written baseball better than Roger Angell of The New Yorker,” journalist Tom Verducci wrote in Sports Illustrated in 2014. “What he does with words, even today at 93, is what Mays did in center field and what Koufax did on the mound … He is the curator of our baseball souls.”
Roger Angell was born Sept. 19, 1920, in New York City. His father, Ernest, was a company lawyer who later turned nationwide board chairman of the American Civil (*101*) Union. He additionally handed on a love a baseball to his son.
The marriage of Ernest Angell and the former Katharine Sergeant started to disintegrate after his return from navy responsibility in France throughout World War I. Roger later wrote that his father “adopted a Gallic view of marriage and was repeatedly unfaithful to my mother after he came home.”
They divorced in 1929, and his mom married White, her New Yorker colleague, with out telling her son of their plans. Mr. Angell and an older sister lived primarily with their father and spent weekends with their mom and stepfather, usually in Maine. He agreed with an evaluation of his mom by the New Yorker writer Nancy Franklin: “As an editor she was maternal but as a mother she was editorial.”
He attended the non-public Pomfret School in Connecticut and graduated from Harvard in 1942 with a bachelor’s diploma in English. He served in the Army Air Forces all through World War II, first as a stateside gunnery teacher and later as a navy journalist. He was an editor at Holiday, a journey and tradition journal, from 1947 to 1956, earlier than becoming a member of the New Yorker.
Mr. Angell’s mom started working at the New Yorker in 1925, the 12 months it was based. Decades later, after he took over her previous workplace as the chief fiction editor, he discovered a mirror and make-up that she had left behind.
As an editor, Mr. Angell was a tweedy, unhurried presence identified for his means to determine new expertise and to sharpen the prose of established writers. He inspired authors to attempt for simplicity, readability and a particular voice — and to maintain the reader in thoughts.
“He is a gentle editor and a master of psychology,” short-story writer Beattie instructed The Washington Post in 1982. “He knows just how to handle individual writers and goes over everything, word by word, really line-editing the story into being.”
Mr. Angell continued writing about baseball and different topics into his 90s, gathering his autobiographical essays in two volumes, “Let Me Finish” (2006) and “This Old Man: All In Pieces” (2015).
From 1976 to 1998, certainly one of Mr. Angell’s jobs at the New Yorker was to compose an end-of-year poem known as “Greetings, Friends!” wherein he romped by means of the earlier 12 months, producing a bubbly verse wherein popular culture, world affairs and inside jokes took flight.
After a 10-year absence, Mr. Angell resumed his annual rhyming jeu d’esprit in 2008:
By wintry garden we’ll dance until daybreak
With Sheryl Crow and Wally Shawn,
J. Lo, Mo (the doughty Yankee),
Beyoncé, and Ben Bernanke
“Let’s see T.S. Eliot try that,” New Yorker editor David Remnick quipped in 2014.
Mr. Angell’s first marriage, to the former Evelyn Baker, led to divorce. His second spouse, the former Carol Rogge, died in 2012 after 48 years of marriage. Two daughters from his first marriage predeceased him: Callie Angell in 2010 and Alice Angell in 2019.
Mr. Angell wrote that when his second spouse was on her deathbed, she instructed him, “If you haven’t found someone else by a year after I’m gone, I’ll come back and haunt you.”
In 2014, he married Moorman, who survives him, together with a son from his second marriage, John Henry Angell; a stepdaughter, Emma Quaytman; a half brother; a half sister; three granddaughters; and two great-granddaughters.
When Mr. Angell was 93, he revealed an autobiographical essay, “This Old Man,” which received a National Magazine Award and was certainly one of the most generally learn items in the New Yorker’s historical past. He wrote that he had macular degeneration, arterial stents and nerve injury from shingles. His arms have been gnarled from arthritis. Yet, regardless of the infirmities of age and the lack of these pricey to him, Mr. Angell retained a way of vigor.
“I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight,” he wrote, “together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces.”
Carried alongside by his cane, Mr. Angell continued to report back to his workplace at the New Yorker deep into his 90s, studying short-story submissions and, adapting to the instances, writing a weblog about baseball.
In 2014, he wrote about the dying of the redoubtable Don Zimmer, who placed on a baseball uniform for 66 years as a participant, supervisor and coach and who, like Mr. Angell, appeared an ageless image of all the gathered information, expertise and humor of his craft:
“He was a baseball figure from an earlier time: enchantingly familiar, tough and enduring, stuffed with plays and at-bats and statistics and anecdotes and wisdom accrued from tens of thousands of innings. Baseball stays on and on, unchanged, or so we used to think as kids, and Zimmer, sitting there, seemed to be telling us yes, you’re right, and see you tomorrow.”