The Summer Game

Summary: A collection of Angell’s essays covering the ten seasons of Major League Baseball from 1962 to 1971.

This year we lost Roger Angell, the long time writer for The New Yorker, at the ripe old age of 101. He was a shaping force at the magazine as well as being considered by some, “The Poet Laureate of baseball.” I knew of Angell’s writing, but it was not until now that I discovered why he was so esteemed. Quite simply, he gave words to what any of us who love the game feel about its attraction. The final essay of this book, “The Interior Stadium” gets as close as anything I’ve read to describing the game’s mystique:

“Form is the imposition of a regular pattern upon varying and unpredictable circumstances, but the show more patterns of baseball, for all the game’s tautness and neatness, are never regular. Who can predict the winner and shape of today’s game? Will it be a brisk, neat two-hour shutout? A languid, error-filled 13-2 laugher, A riveting three hour, fourteen-inning deadlock? What other sport produces these manic swings?”

The Summer Game collects articles Angell wrote for The New Yorker from 1962 to 1971, which is quite wonderful because this was the time when I most avidly followed the name, reading The Sporting News and watching every World Series game I could (when I was not in school). He begins with spring training at the camp of the New York Mets, who were destined to become New York’s lovable losers until late in the decade, when they became champions. He describes games at the old Polo Grounds before Shea Stadium was built and the “Go” shouters.

He traces the championship teams of the sixties and especially the World Series matchups between them: the Yankees and the Dodgers, the Giants, the Cardinals, the Red Sox, the Twins, the Mets, the Reds, the Orioles, and the Pirates. There are all the stars I grew up with–Mays, Maris, and Mantle, Koufax and Gibson and the generation that followed, Yastrzemski, Rose and Perez, Clemente and Stargell.

As the players changed, so did the stadiums. Angell describes the demise of the old box-like stadiums with seats close to the game for the bigger stadiums in the round, used for multiple sports in many cases but with fans much more distant. It is ironic that most of these stadiums that were “new” when Angell wrote have since been demolished in favor of parks much more like the old fields with modern amenities. Even the shiny new Astrodome, although still preserved, no longer serves as a baseball venue.

The heart of the book is Angell’s accounts of the World Series games of each year. He brings back memories of the dominating performances of Koufax and Drysdale, and of Bob Gibson, who broke the hearts of Boston fans in his showdown with Jim Lonborg. Gibson, pitching his third game of the series was dead tired but hung on to win 7-2. Likewise, he reminds me of the hopes fulfilled when the Pirates in nearby Pittsburgh overcame the dominating Orioles of Earl Weaver to win the 1971 World Series. Some have criticized his inning by inning, sometimes play-by-play approach, but for me, it was a walk back in time, a reminder of great baseball of the past. He fills in the detail and drama of those games long tucked away in the recesses of memory.

He describes a game in transition as leagues expanded, playoffs were introduced and old stars faded as new names like Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, and Reggie Jackson came on the scene, as TV revenues grew and with them, salaries, and new stadiums. And yet, it is the same summer game, played on a diamond, between baselines, nine players in the lineup on each side, fans in the seats behind first or third, filling out scorecards, rooting for the home team, vicariously sharing in the glory of the game.

Thank you Roger Angell! One can only hope there will be baseball in heaven so that Roger Angell can write about it. show less

YES, HE IS THE POET LAUREATE OF BASEBALL: There are some great baseball writers. Roger Kahn and Pat Jordan come to mind. Roger Angell is the very best of them all. This book is as much a part of my youth as family vacations. I have read this book numerous times, often just picking up random pages and reading for hours until sleep overtook me. There is something about New York City, the 1950s, and the Brooklyn Dodgers that contributed to the axiom that the best sportswriting is baseball writing. Angell is it, in its purest form. Jaques Barzun, a French writer, visited America around the turn of the century to discover what de Toqueville had found some 70 years earlier. Barzun concluded that, "In order to know America, you have to know show more baseball." To a current generation of young baseball enthusisasts who want to grasp what an older generation felt about this game, I recommend "The Summer Game" above all others. "Five Seasons" might be next, but "The Summer Game" is the best of the lot. It carries forward from Angell's 1950s experiences, and is part of his reportage for The New Yorker. Somehow he infuses the high art literacy necessary for a publication of this sort with the most lyrical, dead-on anlaysis of baseball ever. He starts with the 1962 Mets, and covers them over several Casey Stengel Polo Grounds seasons. No description ever conveys the wackiness of those lovable losers better, or the old-style devotion of New York fans of the by-gone era. This is the Brooklyn Dodger contingent transferred to Polo and Shea. Angell covers the '67 Red Sox, the '68 World Series (McClain vs Gibson overshadowed by Lolich), the Amazin' Mets, the Bay Area in their season of two division champs (1971), and other events, always including the World Series' played between '62 and '71. His writing about Dodger Stadium and Dodger fans in 1966 demonstrates the best of the "new age" Los Angeleno baseball enthusiasts, the modernists if you will. It describes vividly how an era has turned. He paints a picture of a beautiful new stadium bathed in Califrnia sunlight that is pure romanticism. To a young California reader, as I once was, it was the most perfect imagery. STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
STWRITES@AOL.COM show less

Compilation of Roger Angell’s essays about baseball, written for the New Yorker during the 1962 – 1971 seasons. He recaps each year’s World Series, but most of the highlights for me were the sections of local flavor, such as visiting Spring Training, describing the rollercoaster ride of a New York Mets fan, covering the early days of the Houston Astrodome, observing the arrival of “sports as entertainment” (which continues to this day), recounting the French terms used by the dual-language Montreal Expos, putting forth views on expansion and the attendant increase in playoffs (which was just beginning back then), and relating the sights and sounds of what it was like to attend games in various stadiums across the country. The show more last essay, The Inner Stadium, explores the timelessness of baseball, and how events and players can be clearly recalled from memory no matter how much time has passed. Angell’s prose is top notch, evoking the spirit of the period in a vivid manner. His love of the game shines through. Published in 1972, it is a product of its time, so there are a few references that may not sit well with women or other groups. Highly recommended to baseball fans, especially those interested in reading about the history of the game. show less

I always try to read a baseball book in February. Down in Florida and Arizona, spring training is underway as players prepare for the season. Likewise, reading about the sport is sort of my version of getting into shape for the season. And there just is no baseball writer better suited to rekindling a fan's love with baseball than Roger Angell.

Angell, longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker and frequent contributor of articles about baseball to that magazine, is a splendid writer regardless of the subject, but his unabashed love for the game imbues his essays with an elegance and insight that is rare. Today more than ever, there is no shortage of coverage of your favorite team or sport, but no one can both clearly describe the action, show more explain it, and elevate it above the mundane like Angell.

The Summer Game pulls together essays Angell wrote between 1962 and 1972. There's an essay from nearly every World Series during that span, including the Amazin' Mets who went from their founding season in 1962 (when they lost 120 games) to winning the World Series just seven years later. The 1960s were a time of great upheaval and chance for baseball — the league expanded from 16 teams to 24, the season expanded from 154 games to 162, the playoffs expanded from just the World Series to add a preliminary round of games, television began to dominate the coverage and change the way the game was played and watched (the first night World Series game was played in 1971; in 2015 every game was played at night), new stadiums were built with all the charm of tin cans, players were on the cusp of gaining free agency and million-dollar salaries. Angell chronicles each of these changes with thoughtful clarity and consideration; the book is worth reading strictly for this historical record of a tumultuous decade but Angell's writing makes it so much more than that.

Of course, I can't make such a claim and expect you all to take my word for it, so here are some examples of his mastery.

Sometimes Angell tackles the "big picture", as when he wrote in 1966 about the first-ever domed stadium, the Houston Astrodome, and the unwelcome introduction of the big flashy scoreboard that is now ubiquitous:

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. Whatever the place of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own. 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.

But he didn't always write on such an abstract level. Describing a 1962 spring training game in Florida, A watery wash of indigo clouds hung lower and lower over the field during batting practice, deepening the greens of the box-seat railings, the infield grass, and the tall hedges in center field, and for a time the field, a box of light in the surrounding darkness, resembled an aquarium full of small, oddly darting gray and white fish.

He was there in 1962 when the New York Mets played their first season, and he marveled at the way jaded New Yorkers embraced a team that lost 120 out of 154 games:

It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand-man audience made up exclusively of born losers — leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines — who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless cause.

Even his play-by-play game descriptions were a level above the ordinary:

But no lead and no pitcher was safe for long on this particular evening; the hits flew through the night air like enraged deer flies, and the infielders seemed to be using their gloves mostly in self-defense.

And he had a knack for describing players that made you feel they were standing right in front of you, like Detroit Tigers pitcher Mickey Lolich: He pitched the first two innings like a man defusing a live bomb, working slowly and unhappily, and studying the problem at length before each new move.

Or Tommie Agee of the Mets: I’ll bet that a lot of local Little Leaguers have begun imitating Agee’s odd batting mannerism — a tiny kick of the left leg that makes him look like a house guest secretly discouraging the family terrier.

Or Baltimore Orioles pitcher Dick Hall: Dick Hall is a Baltimore institution, like crab cakes. He is six feet six and one-half inches tall and forty years old, and he pitches with an awkward, sidewise motion that suggests a man feeling under his bed for a lost collar stud. … Hall is almost bald; he has ulcers, a degree in economics from Swarthmore, a Mexican wife, four children, and an off-season job as a certified public accountant; and he once startled his bullpen mates by trying to estimate mathematically how many drops of rain were falling on the playing field during a shower.

Maybe I didn't need Angell to make me fall in love with baseball all over again this spring. But I can't imagine a better companion for the season to come. show less

Few works of art are truly timeless. Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Beethoven’s Fifth. Michelangelo’s David. Add to that list Angell’s “The Summer Game.” The book, a collection of essays Angell originally penned for “New Yorker” magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s, recreates an era both nostalgic and immediate. Long retired superstars like Jim Palmer, Denny McLain, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Wille McCovey, Wille Stargell, Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, and Jerry Koosman—to name just a few—come back to life in these pages. And Angell is so skilled at describing the action and nuance of each game and each play that the reader is transported to the action. Angell puts you in the stands right next to him.

Angell’s writing show more reveals his love of the language as much as it showcases his love of the game of baseball. For example, while discussing the Pittsburgh Pirates’ propensity for populating their pitching staff with monosyllabically named hurlers, he writes, “This year’s Buccos recklessly disposed of Mudcat Grant, but with Blass, Briles, Moose, Lamb, and Veale still on hand (I plan an extensive footnote on this startling incursion of ungulates), and the club’s coffers now heavy with championship loot, they can easily swing a deal for Vida Blue that should bring them safely through the seventies.” I know of no other writer past or present who talks about baseball with such wit and skill.

Angell appreciates baseball’s enduring paradox—a game that seems so simple is rife with endless possibilities for complexity. And despite the sport’s evolution (during the time when Angell wrote these pieces, both leagues were undergoing expansion, and divisional play—along with league playoff series—had recently been adopted), the game on the field remains familiar and pure (PEDs notwithstanding). If you love baseball, read this book, and lose yourself in the sublime. show less

From 2022:
Roger Angell is, or rather was, a celebrated Baseball writer who did most of his writing from the fan’s perspective. This book had been on my reading list for probably 10 years or so and it took me this long to get to it. Which says something about how long my reading list is and why I haven’t read that one book you recommended to me a couple years ago yet. What made The Summer Game so surprisingly interesting to me was that a good portion of it deals with the first few seasons of the Baltimore Orioles as they try to patch together a contending team. For me, the book shadowed my experience of becoming a shiny new real fan of baseball and the Orioles this year. I picked them randomly based on a completely subjective set of show more criteria and what I accidentally got in return was a surprising club that looked to be on the rise at last. I knew none of this at the time, of course, but neither did Angell realize what Baltimore was going to do with their seasons at the time he wrote about them. So, in that way the book was a pleasing echo. show less

Beautiful essays about baseball in the 60's and early 70s. Angell's love of the game comes through in his elegant, economical style. As well as Angell writes about the sport on the field, he is also equally eloquent about the relationship between fans and the sport. His description of the Astrodome and how the new stadium favors those in the luxury boxes is prescient. Angell has an attachment to the Mets and his writing about their early, awful days is both heart breaking and funny. His love of Willie Mays is poignant when he urges the Say Hey "kid" to retire at 40, since seeing Mays in such decline is so painful.
One of the very best baseball books.