The end of this game may never come: Roger Angell and The summer game.

Abstract

When Roger Angell first began to write about baseball. he chose to sit not in the press box. but the stands. where he could get the feel of the game as it appeared from there. Angell considered himself lucky. because his first few years of baseball reporting coincided with the birth of the New York Mets. "the greatest fan story of all. " Eventually. he made his way to the press box and to the clubhouse. but his main Job. as Angell conceived of it. was to continue to try to give the feel of things. "And this was the real luck." said Angell. a fiction editor and general contributor at The New Yorker. "for how could have guessed then that baseball. of all team sports anywhere. should turn out to be so complex. so rich and various in structure and aesthetics and emotion. as to convince me. after ten years as a writer and forty years as a fan. that I have not yet come close to its heart?" (Summer Game x). Clearly. however. Angell comes as close or perhaps closer than Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, James Thurber, Red Smith, and a bevy or other talented writers fascinated by baseball, one or America's most enduring rituals. Angell's first collection or essays on baseball, The Summer Game, was published in 1872. Spanning the ten seasons from 1862 to 1871, The Summer Game is divided into six parts. Yet it is in the book's final chapter, "The Interior Stadium," that Angell not only discovers baseball's heart, but shows it to us. The national pastime is a part or our heritage; it stands for a simpler and better time. By giving ourselves over to baseball, we are renewed, both personally and collectively, and that act or renewal is performed within the interior stadium. At the ballpark, time is defeated. Keep hitting, keep putting men on base, and the game can continue forever. Since players like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Mickey Mantle exist outside time, they remain forever young. In the interior stadium, a place we all share, Cobb, Ruth and Mantle play side-by-side with Brett, Gooden, and Boggs; thus, with each new generation or fans, baseball is reborn. Thanks to The Summer Game, so are we, for Angell's book is the ultimate interior stadium.