By Bill Trott

Roger Angell died Friday, at 101. He was a baseball writer for The New Yorker, and had a unique perspective that included intellectual enlightenment, a reader’s view, and poetry. His essays about baseball were admired by many, including a national reputation.

According to The New York Times, Angell was also the fiction editor at The New Yorker and helped write the works of Woody Allen, John Updike, Woody Allen, etc. His wife Margaret Moorman said that Angell died from congestive heart disease.

Angell, who was conceived in New York City on Sept. 19, 1920, is a product of a literary family. Katharine Angell, his mother, was The New Yorker’s first fiction editor. His stepfather, E.B., was also a writer. White, who wrote the children’s novels “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little,” co-authored Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” writing guide and also wrote for The New Yorker.

Angell served in the military at the time he first appeared in the magazine in 1944. His debut story was titled “Three Ladies in the Morning” and it took him just three days to complete the short story. In 1956, he joined the editorial staff and became a full-time editor. Later, he would contribute to general-topic essays as well as movie reviews and the magazine’s Christmas poem.

When William Shawn became the longtime editor of The New Yorker, and knew very little about baseball, Shawn gave him a job. Angell was sent to Florida spring training to see “what you find.”

He found a new passion in writing about baseball, or to tell his tale of being a fan. Angell began his career with the New York Mets. This was a group of unproven and castoff players trying to win over baseball fans.

A FAN’S TALE

Angell was freed by the New Yorker from all of his wordage limitations, deadlines, and objectivity worries that beat reporters had to face, which allowed him to become a new kind of sportswriter. Some sportswriters cannot call a baseball “a little lump of physics”, or “this simple and sensual object.”

Although his style was sometimes rambling and filled with a lot of digressions, it was elegant, flowing and informative.

In 2006, he stated that “For some reason” he had written in the first-person and described himself as a fan. I was afraid to speak to players. “I didn’t know what it was like to be a journalist so I reported from the stands.”

Angell’s thoughtful essays are collected in many books. His most notable work includes a biography of Bob Gibson (the prickly, overpowering St. Louis Cardinals pitcher) and an analysis on hitting called “One Tough way to make a living.”

Angell’s body of work led Saturday Review magazine calling him the “best baseball writer ever.”

Angell stated that he was once accused of being a poet-laureate of baseball, which had always pissed him off. Angell spoke to Salon.com 2000. People who say that don’t know me, because I have been reporting a lot of the time, aren’t really my friends.”

Angell edited The New Yorker’s works by Updike and Garrison Keillor as well as Vladimir Nabokov, Ann Beattie, Allen, and Allen. Ann Beattie told The Associated Press that Angell suggested to him once that he stop trying to be funny.

Angell was 93 when he wrote this 5,000 word piece about the end of life for The New Yorker in February 2014. Angell, without being sarcastic, wrote about missing his deceased friends and relatives, which included his second wife, who was killed in 2012, and his daughter, who took his life. He also spoke of his longing for intimacy, and how he never stops trying to find it.

    “I know how lucky I am and secretly tap wood, greet the day and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds,” he wrote. I’m alive and well in an upstate facility. Although disasters and decline can be devastating, my thoughts do not remain there.

    In the meantime, he said he was memorizing poems and reciting them while walking his dog and enjoying humor, “even jokes about death.”

This essay served as a frame for “This Old Man”, his last book in 2015. It was a collection essays, reviews, profiles, and reflections on life and death.

As Angell turned 100, The New Yorker continued to publish Angell’s articles. Angell wrote about voting right before the 2018 November congressional elections. In 2019, he wrote an article about The New Yorker’s relationship to the D-Day invasion in World War Two.

Angell married three times. She was most recently with writer Moorman in 2014.

Bill Trott wrote and reported; Eric Beech added reporting; editing by Peter Cooney, Diane Craft