He also wrote fiction, reviews, poetry, and various articles for the magazine, including insightful essays on aging. “Here in my tenth decade,” he wrote at the age of 93, “I can testify that the downside of old age is the space it leaves for bad news.”
Mr Angell, who was 101, died at his Manhattan home on May 20, his wife Margaret Moorman said. The cause was heart failure.
Among Mr. Angell’s most memorable stories for The New Yorker were his idiosyncratic first-person essays on baseball, which led to his induction into 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, in a memoir written 70 years later, vividly recalled the nodding motion of New York Giants left-hander Carl Hubbell, “who bowed twice from the hip before every delivery.”
The New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, knew of Mr. Angell’s interest in baseball and invited him to cover the sport in a leisurely, personal way that differed from the approach of most magazines and newspapers.
His first essays on baseball appeared in 1962 during the New York Mets’ debut season, whose daily misfortunes contrasted with the New York Yankees’ crosstown supremacy. But the hapless Mets developed a loyal following that Mr. Angell chronicled from the stands rather than the high perch of the press box.
“Those jubilant screams for the Mets were screams for us too,” he wrote, “and came from an ironic, half-understood realization that there’s more Met than Yankee in all of us.”
Mr. Angell’s writing on baseball proved original, compelling, and impossible to imitate. He collected his essays into a series of best-selling books, beginning in 1972 with The Summer Game.
“Apart from the elegance of his prose, the man deals in information, and plenty of it,” wrote Sports Illustrated reporter Ron Fimrite in 1991. “It is indeed his power of observation, his eye for the smallest detail, that sets him apart not only by most baseball writers, but by most writers, period.”
Mr. Angell understood, in a way few baseball writers before him had expressed, that the game was not owned by the millionaires who owned the teams, let alone the players on the field. Baseball belongs to the fans who follow the game with its mix of hope, joy and sorrow, tracing the journey of each season through the daily log of the newspaper notes.
“It represents chance and physical flight, accurately translated into numbers and history,” he wrote. “This overall neatness enables the baseball fan, with the help of experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality that makes a musician’s head tingle when he looks at a page of his score from ‘Don Giovanni’ looks ‘and actually hears basses and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.
At the end of each season, Mr. Angell prepared an annual summary and wrote detailed articles on other aspects of the game. One of his more celebrated 1975 New Yorker stories explored the mental struggles of pitcher Steve Blass, a former Pittsburgh Pirates World Series hero, who suddenly lost his ability to throw strikes.
„[I]It is a fact that a professional athlete – and especially a baseball player – faces a much more difficult task in trying to regain lost form than, say, an ailing businessman or even a ailing artist,” wrote Mr. Angell. “All that matters is his performance, which is measured against the stats with the utmost coldness. It’s one of the reasons athletes are paid so well, and one reason why the fear of failure — the unspeakable ‘suffocation’ — is their deepest and most private fear.”
He shaped his sets until they were solid and smooth, sweeping like a sailboat skipping over the whitecaps, gaining speed with each set. Some of his stories went deeper than baseball itself.
Being a fan really meant “caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is an ability or an emotion that’s almost gone from our lives,” Mr. Angell wrote in an essay purportedly about the 1975 World Series. “And so it seems possible that we’ve come to a time where it doesn’t matter what the care is about, how weak or stupid the object of that care is, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.” .”
Mr. Angell was a commentator on Ken Burns’ nine-part PBS documentary “Baseball,” which aired on PBS in 1994. In addition to six collections of baseball essays, he published A Pitcher’s Story (2001), about David Cone in the twilight of his career.
In 2014, Mr. Angell received the Baseball Hall of Fame’s JG Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor for a baseball author. The next year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the only person to have received both awards.
“In the last half century no one has written baseball better than The New Yorker’s Roger Angell,” wrote journalist Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated’s 2014 Field and What Koufax Did on the Hill… He’s the curator of our baseball souls.”
Roger Angell was born on September 19, 1920 in New York City. His father, Ernest, was a corporate attorney who later became national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. He also passed on a love of baseball to his son.
Ernest Angell’s marriage to the former Katharine Sergeant began to fall apart upon his return from military service in France during World War I. Roger later wrote that his father “adopted a Gaulish view of marriage and was repeatedly unfaithful to my mother after he came home.”
They divorced in 1929, and his mother married White, her New York colleague, without telling her son of her plans. Mr. Angell and an older sister lived primarily with their father and spent weekends with their mother and stepfather, often in Maine. He echoed New York writer Nancy Franklin’s assessment of his mother: “As an editor, she was maternal, but as a mother, she was editorial.”
He attended the private Pomfret School in Connecticut and graduated from Harvard in 1942 with a bachelor’s degree in English. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, first as a gunnery instructor in the United States and later as a military journalist. From 1947 to 1956 he was an editor at Holiday, a travel and culture magazine, before joining the New Yorker.
Mr. Angell’s mother began working at the New Yorker in 1925, the year it was founded. Decades later, after taking over her old office as editor-in-chief of fiction, he found a mirror and makeup she had left behind.
As an editor, Mr. Angell was a tweedy, easy-going figure known for his ability to spot new talent and hone the prose of established writers. He encouraged writers to strive for simplicity, clarity, and a distinctive voice—and to keep the reader in mind.
“He’s a gentle editor and a master of psychology,” short story writer Beattie told The Washington Post in 1982.
Mr. Angell continued to write about baseball and other subjects into his 90s, collecting his autobiographical essays into two volumes, Let Me Finish (2006) and This Old Man: All In Pieces (2015).
From 1976 to 1998, one of Mr. Angell’s assignments at The New Yorker was to write a year-end poem entitled “Greetings, Friends!” in which he romped through the past 12 months, producing a bubbly verse in which pop culture, world affairs and inside jokes took flight.
In 2008, after a 10-year absence, Mr Angell resumed his annual rhyming Jeu d’Esprit:
On a wintry lawn we’ll dance until dawn
Mit Sheryl Crow und Wally Shawn,
J. Lo, Mo (the brave Yankee),
Beyonce and Ben Bernanke
“Let’s see TS Eliot try that,” New Yorker editor David Remnick quipped in 2014.
Mr. Angell’s first marriage to the former Evelyn Baker ended in divorce. His second wife, 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 as his second wife lay on her deathbed she said to him: “If a year after my death you have not found another, I will come back and haunt you.”
In 2014 he married Moorman, who survives him, 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 published an autobiographical essay, This Old Man, which won a National Magazine Award and was one of the most-read articles in The history of The New Yorker. He wrote that he had macular degeneration, arterial stents, and nerve damage from shingles. His hands were gnarled from arthritis. Yet despite the decrepitude of old age and the loss of loved ones, Mr. Angell retained a sense of strength.
“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 shoulder within reach.” Those of us who have lost that, no matter what age, never lose longing: just look at our faces.
Carried by his cane, Mr. Angell reported from his New Yorker office well into the 1990s, reading submitted short stories, and writing a blog about baseball, in keeping with the times.
In 2014, he wrote of the death of the dreaded Don Zimmer, who donned a baseball uniform for 66 years as a player, manager, and coach, and how Mr. Angell was a timeless symbol of all the accumulated knowledge, experience, and humor of his craft:
“He was a baseball character from a bygone era: charmingly familiar, tough and enduring, stuffed with plays and shots and statistics and anecdotes and wisdom culled from tens of thousands of innings. Baseball is here to stay, unchanged, or so we thought as kids, and Zimmer sitting there seemed to say to us, yes, you’re right, see you tomorrow.”
