Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on Pro Sports Teams and Their Fans)

“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. 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.” —Baseball writer and chief New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell (1920-2022), Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977)

I took the image accompanying this post at a night game at Yankee Stadium in late August 2014. That season, the Bronx Bombers finished second in the American League East, with their worst record since 1992.

But fans like me came out that night because we knew this would be one of our final opportunities to see “The Captain,” Derek Jeter, in the last of his 20 seasons as a Hall of Famer with the Yankees.

Professional sports have grown even more “commercially exploitative” in the half-century since Roger Angell wrote the above. The miracle is that they still retain such a powerful hold on their fan base.

It just goes to show that, in its imperviousness to reason, rooting for one’s favorite team is a form of faith. With baseball resuming following the All-Star break, teams still in the hunt for the postseason hope to reward those fans in their staunch belief.

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on the Beauty of Baseball’s Opening Week)

“Baseball has begun. East and west, this is the week of the unfurled bunting, the flexed mayoral or gubernatorial wing, the restored hope, the repainted seat, the April fly ball falling untouched on resodded turf, the windblown shout, and the distant row of pitchers and catchers huddling deeper into their windbreakers as the early-spring sunlight deserts the bullpen. Now everything counts; from now until October, every pitch and every swing will be recorded. In another month, some order will begin to emerge from the standings. Infields will have hardened, some arms and expectations will have gone bad, and enormous crowds will pour out for their first weekend doubleheaders. The long season will engage us once again.”—Baseball essayist and former New Yorker chief fiction editor Roger Angell, The Summer Game (1972)

Okay, traditional day doubleheaders are becoming an increasing rarity because of major league baseball’s attempt to maximize the dollars. But the owners still recognize, even in their usual money-grubbing way, that the diamond, grass and the players who run there are objects of hope and, sometimes, joy for millions.

Play ball!

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on How a Baseball Is Useful and Beautiful)

“Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance—thrown hard and with precision.”— Roger Angell, Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977)

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on the Steadiness of Joe Torre)

“What has set apart the Torre era is not just winning but a sense of attachment and identification that he effortlessly inspired among the fans and the players and the millions of sports bystanders. Already known by the fans as a strong-swinging Brooklyn-born catcher (and, later, a third baseman) with an eighteen-year career with the Braves, the Cardinals, and the Mets, and then for his long tenure as a semi-distinguished manager of the same three teams, he became a sudden celebrity, a Page Six sweetheart, in his first season with the Yankees, when his brother Frank Torre, another former major leaguer, underwent successful heart-replacement surgery the day before the last game of the World Series. The fourth game, in which the Yankees, trailing the Braves by 2–1 in the Series and 6–0 on the scoreboard, came back to win in extra innings, beginning their rush to the championship, changed New York to a Yankee town overnight. Torre’s composure and steadiness in hard times became as familiar as his odd, tilting trudge from the dugout to the mound to call in a fresh pitcher. A habitual modesty interwoven with an awareness of the difficult daily grind powerfully secured him to his players. Whenever someone brought up the batting title and National League M.V.P. award he had captured in 1971 with a .363 average, he threw in a reminder about his .289 mark the following year. Mid-July often brought on a retelling of a game of his as a Mets third baseman in 1975, when he batted into four double plays and also committed an error. This ease with himself and his profession set the tone in his pre-game and post-game press conferences, delivered every day to thirty or forty writers, plus TV and radio and Japan.”—New Yorker fiction editor and baseball writer Roger Angell, “Comment: So Long, Joe,” The New Yorker, November 5, 2007

When I heard a few days ago, as I had hoped for the last few years, that Joe Torre had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, there really was only one baseball writer whom I wanted for a “Quote of the Day” about the former Yankee manager.

On more than one occasion, Roger Angell has written lyrically about what he called “the web of the game,” in a classic piece on a collegiate mound deal between future big-leaguers Ron Darling and Frank Viola. 

But six years ago, as the New York Yankees allowed Torre to walk away from the job, under circumstances they mistakenly hoped to spin to their advantage, Angell--perhaps inspired by the example of his subject’s “habitual modesty”--turned in a piece more subdued than usual for him but equally inspired. 

It aptly capturing the qualities, “composure and steadiness in hard times,” that lent the Torre-led Yankees what they had not enjoyed in 20 prior years under George Steinbrenner: normality. (Is it any wonder that the manager’s relationship with the diva-ish Alex Rodriguez was so uneasy?)

The Bronx Bombers have long since mended fences with Torre, and, following the news of the Hall of Fame enshrinement, they have taken the rapprochement with their former skipper to the next level by announcing they will retire his number. 

(The blogger at Bleeding Yankee Blue speaks for many of us when he wonders about the possibility that the Yankee brass might one day also honor the “Core Four” who came to prominence under Torre—Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada—who would “stand at the mound on George Steinbrenner's birthday [July 4] and have their numbers retired together.”)

As it happens, Cooperstown is joining the Yankees in correcting an injustice, though hardly as stinging a one. 

For years, the Baseball Writers' Association of America did not include Angell on its roster because membership was largely confined to writers who either cover baseball full time or write about the game for a newspaper, news service or major website. Angell’s ad hoc pieces at The New Yorker (where, of course, he labored for years as a fiction editor) somehow didn’t count, no matter how graceful.

Now, however, these baseball scribes have fittingly voted to give Angell its annual J.G. Taylor Spink award for "meritorious contributions to baseball writing." A long time coming, and infinitely well deserved.

(The photo accompanying this post—of Torre in another pennant race in September 2005, heading to the dugout after changing pitchers—illustrates the kind of walk to which Angell refers in the above quote.)

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on the Polo Grounds in the ‘20s and ‘30s)

“I liked it best when we came into the place from up top, rather than through the gates down at the foot of the lower-right-field stand. You reached the upper-deck turnstiles by walking down a steep, short ramp from the Speedway, the broad avenue that swept down from Coogan’s Bluff and along the Harlem River, and once you got inside, the long field within the horseshoe of decked stands seemed to stretch away forever below you, toward the bleachers and the clubhouse pavilion in center….Everything about the Polo Grounds was special, right down to the looped iron chains that separated each sector of box seats from its neighbor and could burn your bare arm on a summer afternoon if you weren’t careful. Far along each outfield wall, a sloping mini-roof projected outward, imparting a thin wedge of shadow for the bullpen crews sitting there: they looked like cows sheltering beside a pasture shed in August.”—Roger Angell, Let Me Finish (2007)

(Photo shows the Polo Grounds on opening day, 1923, with newly built Yankee Stadium in the background; image from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on 'All Sporting Memories')

"All sporting memories are suspect - the colors too bright, the players and their feats magnified in our wishful recapturing. The surprising rally or splendid catch becomes incomparable by the time we fight free of the parking lot, epochal before bedtime, transcendental by breakfast." – New Yorker baseball writer extraordinaire and fiction editor Roger Angell, "7 Mets Redux," in Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977)

(See today’s “This Day in Baseball History” post for one particular venue where sporting memories were created)