Once More Around the Park

I'm only half-joking with my title for this review, but I think that speaks to the loyalty and intensity with which baseball fans follow their sport and favorite teams. That said, I say God bless Roger Angell for his insightful writings about the greatest of games. This book is an awesome and vital collection of essays, articles and stories that go beyond simple retelling of the games and innings and moments that are only the most visible aspects of the game. As a lifetime baseball fan, Angell puts into words ideas that I can only feel -- thoughts like, and I paraphrase because I've already lent the book out, "Baseball is cumulative. It rewards the stayer." I think Angell is at his best when he waxes poetic as opposed to explaining pitching or catching mechanics, but even his lesser essays shine a light on the game that most baseball fans don't have access to on their own. There's only one other baseball collection which I think eclipses this one, and that is "A Great and Glorious Game" by Bart Giamatti, the former Commissioner and academic. Not surprisingly, Angell also recognized Giamatti's genius, and wrote about it while Giamatti was still alive and acting as President of the National League. The story is one of my favotites in this collection. This book is a gem, and even when he writes specifically about his love of the Mets or Sox, I know it's from a true fan of the game and appreciate how important the game is to him, and, in turn, to me.

I have been fortunate enough to share a love of baseball and a particular interest in the Mets and the Red Sox with Roger Angell, though I've not followed him into his current infatuation with the Yankees. As a result, I've not only read all of his books, his name is also one of the few whose appearance in The New Yorker's Table of Contents suffices by itself to get me to buy the magazine.Since 1962, which was fortuitously the inaugural year of the Mets, Mr. Angell has written several baseball essays a year for The New Yorker. There's always one on Spring Training and one on the World Series, then a couple of mid-season updates. The earliest pieces, covering the years 1962 to 1972, were collected in The Summer Game (1973). Subsequent five year chunks appeared in Five Seasons (1978), Late Innings (1982), and Season Ticket (1988), then came Once More Around the Park (1991), which mostly reprinted selections from those prior volumes, all of which are, disgracefully, out of print.Baseball has attracted an extravagantly talented assortment of writers but no one has ever written more beautifully about the intricacies and every day charms of the game than Angell, nor captured the idiosyncrasies of individual players in greater detail. It's impossible to match his prose, so let's allow him to speak for himself : * Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in 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. Its feel and heft are the beginning of the sport's critical dimensions; if it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams heavier or lighter, the game of baseball would be utterly different. Hold a baseball in your hand ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun. -"On the Ball", Five Seasons * 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... Any persistent effort to destroy this unique phenomenon, to "use up" baseball's time with planned distractions, will in fact transform the sport into another mere entertainment and thus hasten its descent to the status of a boring and stylized curiosity. -The Summer Game * Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep h