“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
Teetering into my first full day since yesterday's Covid diagnosis, I find myself dripping with cold sweat, nose running, wanting only to take a nap, a long nap. But today demands I undertake a writing project not even on my thought horizon at two yesterday, an eleventh hour cry for relief to a federal judge in a complicated construction case. I will get it done, cutting corners with my dictaphone and producing something serviceable if not a masterwork.
Peg called from the operating room an hour ago to recommend my Florida doc call in a scrip for something called Paxlovid, which supposedly will knock down the symptoms. Unfortunately my doctor is old school, and has always insisted that I physically appear in his office to pick up my prescription on a piece of paper. Maybe this misery will provide the impetus to switch family physicians after two decades.
Thinking this morning of the passing of a friend I never met, Roger Angell, sports writer for the New Yorker. Gone too soon, at 101.
I first ran across Angell during my travels as a young lawyer, when I'd grab a copy of the New Yorker at a magazine kiosk on some concourse at Hartsfield or Stapleton or O'Hare. Looking back on it, my Republican bona fides were already in question back then, given my choice of reading material.
I wasn't necessarily looking for Angell's essays, but if that Thursday night flight home was anywhere between March and the beginning of November, there he'd be, writing as a true artist about a game he loved without sounding like a complete sap. That's where he and I diverged a little, I guess--being a complete sap myself, I've always loved Field of Dreams. Angell never cared for it. (Footnote: Neither has Peg, ever since we were watching it together and in one scene Kevin Costner pulled out a garden hoe to start working in a field containing several hundred acres of corn. "Anybody who'd buy that has obviously never lived on a farm," my lovely wife observed. "I've never lived on a farm," I replied, pouting a little).
No, Angell was the kind of guy who knew how to fill out the scorecard in his program, who could describe poetically a graceful swing or the bottom falling out of a slider. There in my economy class seat six miles above the grand dark emptiness of the rural South, reading light the only illumination in my section, I'd find delight in a conversation with an old, wise friend who loved to talk about baseball just as much as I did.
Years later, many years later, it was the spring of 2021 and I found myself entering the sixth month of our Corning adventure, living on Pine Street at the Sinclaire House and trying to find our footing during a profoundly disorienting time for us and everyone around us. Normalcy felt at a premium, but a couple weeks earlier pitchers and catchers had reported for spring training back in Florida and in Arizona's Cactus League. Maybe I could find my seasonal rhythm by reading a little baseball.
Being a Bowman, I approached the task by finding a list of the greatest baseball books of all time, and there near the top was Roger Angell's The Summer Game, a compendium of his essays written about the 1972 season. I downloaded the book, and savored the feeling of the writing, a voice from another time.
Here's just a little slice to tempt you:
“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.”
Ah, to be able to write like that. A tonic for a harried soul.
On a more personal level, my evenings curled up with the book brought back a vanished moment in my life, sitting on the back porch with Dad at our house on Lee Ann Drive in Marietta, both of us eating roasted peanuts, him with a Budweiser and me with a Coke or maybe a grape Koolaid, fireflies arcing through the blackness of the woods behind our house. We almost always brought a transistor radio to listen to the Braves, then about as far from this year's World Champions as they could be, but with a scorecard that provided a lineup of the heroes of my youth: Phil Niekro, Hank Aaron, Dusty Baker, Ralph Garr, Darrell Evans. In a household that was always in flux and turmoil, those nights of baseball felt like bedrock goodness.
And Angell's book brought all of that back, although he was always a Mets guy and so didn't waste a lot of ink on the land of Chief Nokahoma. But there curled up in bed next to P each night with The Summer Game, I found myself back among those old giants of the game, just as the mostly unchanging nature of baseball allows me to capture a little of that joy whenever it's playing in the background, as it often is here at Tara.
If you're interested, a much better writer than me captured the essence of Angell's writing career in this homage over the weekend in the NYT.
So the world just changed, a light that was part of the constellation of my life has gone out, but the game and I go on.
Back to the less uplifting task of drafting a couple federal court motions. No rest for the wicked, or the very sick.
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