As indicated here, I have for the past several Aprils felt an added gram of dread when Opening Day came and went without comment by Roger Angell, the editor and baseball writer at The New Yorker who turned 101 on his most recent birthday. I should have saved it all for 2022 as he died yesterday. New York Times obit here. His colleague David Remnick's "Postscript," in The New Yorker, draws upon Angell's breezy but weighty—it's alchemy—essay on advancing decrepitude, "This Old Man," which I remember made me laugh out loud while I read it one day in a Target Starbucks. It can be funny when it's not you—yet. Before his wits deserted him, my dad liked to say that old age was not for the faint of heart.
I subscribe to The Gray Lady and The New Yorker so preemptive apologies if some of these links take you to a paywall. Fyi, as recently as a few months ago you could get the Times for $3 a week and, for $12, a tote bag and 12 issues of The New Yorker.
The Times obit mentions the "inventive imagery" with which Angell enlivened his baseball writing, and provides a few good samples, though not my own favorite: he said, of the effect made by an untouchable pitcher quietly accruing a string of strikeouts, grounders, and weak pops, that "the click of another passing inning is like someone closing a door in the next room." His wrap up of the 1975 baseball season, the one in which Carlton Fisk famously motioned from the batter's box for his big fly to stay fair, included what one might think of as an Answer to Critics:
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. Naivete—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
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