which is titled Angell in the Outfield, and is about the wonderful writer Roger Angell, being honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame.
If you love baseball and/or love good writing and you do not already know the work of Roger Angell, long-time fiction editor of The New Yorker, it is long past time for you to address that deficit.
This column by Dowd lacks any snark.
It is a tribute to a great writer.
It is well written, for example (see below, my sneaky way to get you to keep reading!) -
It begins like this:
ROGER ANGELL takes off his brown J. Press sports coat and blue cap, yanks out his hearing aids, stashes his cane, and sits down for a shave and haircut at Delta barbershop at 72nd and Lex., the same spot he’s patronized for 40 years. “I don’t see Henry Kissinger doing any interviews in a barbershop,” he says dryly.
Not bad writing, and a sense of the sharpness of mind of the 93 year old Angell, who stays sharp, according to the piece, by memorizing poetry and writing blogs. In the paragraph where she offers that, Dowd sources it by linking to
This Old Man, a piece by Angell from the February 17 2014 edition of the magazine. It is worth reading as in introduction to Angell, as you can tell by its opening paragraph:
Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.
Allow me to offer two more paragraphs from this wonderful column from Dowd:
The lover of books and words — who else would use “venery” in a story and write the world’s longest palindrome? — crisply shepherded John Updike, Donald Barthelme and William Trevor, as he himself became so luminous that Sports Illustrated compared him to Willie Mays, the player Angell calls so thrilling he “took your breath away.” It’s refreshing that a sport that has become tarnished by the desire to amp itself up — on steroids, merchandise and video — should honor someone so unamped.
(On this, the one criticism of this column I would offer is the failure to link to a source for that palindrome (which I located in
this piece, words spoken by an insane war veteran in a government hospital:
Marge, let dam dogs in. Am on satire: Vow I am Cain. Am on spot, am a Jap sniper. Red, raw murder on G.I.! Ignore drum. (Warder repins pajama tops.) No maniac, Ma! Iwo veritas: no man is God. — Mad Telegram.)
A good part of Dowd's column includes Angell's response to questions she asked, for example:
When I ask him if the Jacques Barzun quote “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” was outmoded, he scoffs: “I didn’t write about baseball because I was looking for the heart and soul of America. I don’t care if baseball is the national pastime or not. The thing about baseball is, it’s probably the hardest game to play. The greatest hitters are only succeeding a third of the time. If you take a great athlete who’s never played baseball and put him in the infield, he’s lost.”
When you read the penultimate paragraph (which I will not share in hopes you will go an read this entire wonderful column), you will see how it serves to set up her final sentence:
At least somebody around here knows how to play this game.
And trust me, that is about much more than baseball.
Do yourself a favor and go read it.
Peace.