Roger Angell, who turned 100 in 2020 and died on Friday, said he liked writing about baseball because its unhurried pace gave him time to think. Here are his thoughts.
“Baseball is not life itself, although the resemblance keeps coming up.”
– 1988 book “Season Ticket”
“I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.”
– Angell’s book “The Summer Game”
“Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
– Essay titled “The Interior Stadium”
“The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the ‘Field of Dreams’ thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie. It’s mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks… In ‘Fields of Dreams’ there’s a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good and they’re talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition.”
– Interview with salon.com in 2004
“Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger … You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it.”
– From the essay collection “Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion”
“I think the real fans are the fans of terrible teams because they know what good baseball is and they know how far their own players fall short. The rallying cry that has always struck me as so poignant and beautiful is, ‘Come on, you bum!’ which means, ‘We know you’re no good but we want to win.'”
– People magazine in 1982
“Baseball is absorbing and sometimes thrilling but it is also unrelenting; it is rarely pure fun for any of us, players or fans, for very long. Except at Cooperstown.”
– The New Yorker in 1987 after a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York
“This is not something I aimed for; it just happened. It’s just pure luck. Just take your meds and brush your teeth and do your stretching and get a whole lot of luck. That’s the way you do it.”
– MLB.com interview in September, 2020 on turning 100.
(Compiled by Bill Trott; Editing by Diane Craft)
