Roger Angell > Quotes

“This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. 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. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
― Roger Angell, Game Time: A Baseball Companion – Roger Angell's Forty Years of Joyful Observations

“Baseball's clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher's windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.”
― Roger Angell

“The best defense against partisanship is expertise.”
― Roger Angell

“my favorite urban flower, the baseball box score”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“Tiant, noted for odd pitching mannerisms, is also a famous mound dawdler. Stands on hill like sunstruck archeologist at Knossos. Regards ruins. Studies sun. Studies landscape. Looks at artifact in hand. Wonders: Keep this potsherd or throw it away? Does Smithsonian want it? Hmm. Prepares to throw it away. Pauses. Sudd. discovers writing on object. Hmm. Possible Linear B inscript.? Sighs. Decides. Throws. Wipes face. Repeats whole thing. Innings & hours creep by. Spectators clap, yawn, droop, expire.”
― Roger Angell, Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion

“Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world's champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.”
― Roger Angell, 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. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. 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.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“I couldn’t get to sleep until four in the morning. Nobody knew. You pick up the morning paper in Chicago, and it says, ‘N.Y. at Detroit (n.).’ I mean, doesn’t a man have a Constitutional right to the box scores?”
― Roger Angell, Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion

“Right from the beginning, I have been a Tiger fan and nothing else,” Max Lapides said this summer. “Other men can happily go to ball games wherever they happen to find themselves—not me. My interest is the Tigers. They are the sun, and all the twenty-three other teams are satellites.”
― Roger Angell, Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion

“Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.”
― Roger Angell

“Tebbetts is seventy-four years old, and scouts for the Indians. He listened to our conversation about pitches and pitchers, and muttered, “Sometimes I watch one of these young pitchers we’ve got, and I tell my club, “This man needs another pitch. By which I mean a strike.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“field directorship because the Philadelphia front office”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“THERE’S NOTHING LIKE AN all-expense-paid late-winter vacation under the palms and within sight and sound of batted baseballs to give a sensitive man a deeper appreciation of the nature of guilt.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“A recent study of three thousand New England high-school kids shows that students with B averages or better enjoyed seventeen to thirty-three minutes more sleep and went to bed ten to fifty minutes earlier than students with C averages.”
― Roger Angell

“, if awful, impression of watching a dotty inventor preparing to jump off the Eiffel Tower with a parachute made of pillowcases.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“The fearful happenings of the second game need not be lingered over, being now as well known as the circumstances surrounding the fall of Troy. Until the gods began their heavy-handed meddling, it was a fine, fast game, with the Dodgers having somewhat the better of it.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“Lolich was starting with one less day of rest. He pitched the first two innings like a man defusing a live bomb, working slowly and unhappily, and studying the problem at length before each new move.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“Collectively, the Mets are still both too young and too old to afford any but the most modest ambitions, but I think the time has arrived when they can look at each other with something other than pure embarrassment.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“for winning is the ultimate mystery that gives all sport its meaning.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“Bob Allison fouled one, took two balls, swung and missed, swung and missed, and winter descended on the northlands.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“They booed Jay lightly; they didn’t mind seeing him suffer a little—not with that $27,500 salary he won after a holdout this spring. They applauded Koufax, the Dodger pitcher, who was working easily and impressively, mixing fast balls and curves and an occasional changeup, pitching in and out to the batters, and hitting the corners. Koufax looked almost ready for opening day.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“Baseball is cerebral and unemotional; the other, fast-growing professional sports, most notably pro football, are dense, quick, complex, dangerous, and perpetually stimulating.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“Morning training sessions at Chain-O’-Lakes Stadium, in Winter Haven, were studied with a mixture of excessive optimism and unjustified despondency by the immense Boston press corps, which has traditionally been made uneasy by success.”
― Roger Angell, The Summer Game

“General Eckert was hired in 1965, apparently because he knew absolutely nothing about baseball and thus would be certain to keep his hand off the tiller; he was fired for the same reason, when it was noticed that the unskippered vessel had drifted toward a bank of nasty-looking reefs.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“There is something about a martini, A tingle remarkably pleasant; A yellow, a mellow martini; I wish I had one at present. There is something about a martini Ere the dining and dancing begin, And to tell you the truth, It is not the vermouth— I think that perhaps it’s the gin.”
― Roger Angell, Let Me Finish