Random Roger Angell Passage (Plus)

[G-Fafif]

When chance and valiant play now and then produced a genuine late-season pennant thriller you watched breathlessly because of its rarity and because of the oblivion that awaited the losers. There were no wild-card second chances, and no one had to wonder whether baseball holding its own against the N.F.L. Baseball wasn't better then; it was just different. It may have felt traditional, or more likely just frozen, since the sport had changed at such a glacial pace.

[G-Fafif]

From Roger Kahn, Memories of Summer, on covering the World Series when it was the end all and be all of American sport.

The night before the 1952 Series was to begin at one-thirty in the afternoon at Ebbets field ... Bob Cooke led me into a festive hall at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn Heights. This was the Hospitality Room for baseball people and sportswriters covering the Series. Here buffet tables beckoned with roast chicken, baked ham, and prime ribs of beef. Four bars offered a dozen different drinks. There was a carton of Camel cigarettes on every table. All this bounty was offered up for free, it was utterly free, to every accredited sportswriter and baseball man. In the large hall, six hundred people milled about, gulping free food, drinking free drinks, smoking free cigarettes, and talking baseball. [Describes meeting Dolph Camilli, who wants to talk baseball with him] I was being welcomed into a restricted club. It was elitist, all-male, almost entirely white, an avatar of what has become Politically Incorrect. I was thrilled to join. (That is not to say that I didn't start knocking down walls as soon as I got my bearings.) Baseball was The Game and everyone knew it was the game and its elitism was deeply engrained. Football? A nice exercise for college boys. Basketball? John Kieran, who launched the famous column, "Sports of the Times," said, "Basketball doesn't write." Tennis? Clubby. Hockey? Canadian. Golf? "Listen," said Burt Shotton, the Dodger manager who preceded Dressen. "Any game where a fifty-year-old man can beat a thirty-year-old man, ain't a sport. Argue with that." [Describes a little more talking baseball with Camilli and Billy Herman] I lingered in the big room very late, talking baseball with professionals who truly knew the game, a roomful of heroes sprung fully formed from mythology to life.

[MFS62]

When I read those snippets from Angell and Kahn, and I remember that Bill Madden was inducted into the writers' wing of the Hall of Fame this year, I just want to hurl.

Later

[G-Fafif]

Angell, visiting San Francisco, 1975:

I dressed all wrong for it, of course. The game that Stoneham and I had fixed upon was a midweek afternoon meeting between the Giants and the San Diego Padres in late June � a brilliant, sunshiny day at Candlestick Park, it turned out, and almost the perfect temperature for a curling match. I had flown out from New York that morning, and I reported to Stoneham's office a few minutes before game time. He shook my hand and examined my airy East Coast midsummer getup and said, �Oh, no, this won't do.� He went to a closet and produced a voluminous, ancient camel's-hair polo coat and helped me into it� [When] we went back to Stoneham's office, I took off the polo coat, and Stoneham hung it up in the closet again. I suddenly wondered how many Giants games it had seen.

[G-Fafif]

Roger Angell, from today's Sporting Scene blog:

Today my shriveled, Old Giants Fan cortex is suffused with happy thoughts for this young, freshly crowned World Championship edition of my old nine, which beat up on the Texas Rangers in the now concluded Series, winning four out of five games, and allowing them but a single run (and a single base-runner past second) over their last twenty-one innings. Two of the young, homegrown Giants starters, Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner, didn�t allow a run, and the third, the eccentric and delightful Tim Lincecum, out-pitched his celebrated (and far wealthier) opposite number, Cliff Lee, in the 3-1 finale last night. This was the Giants� first World Series win since 1954, when they played uptown from me at the Polo Grounds, and my glowing thoughts just now extend toward a slew of variously talented, fervent but disappointed heroes of mine who strove mightily in the years since then without ever waking up to this sort of morning: Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, John (the Count) Montefusco, Atlee Hammaker, Will Clark (whose eloquent swing, seen in time-frame sequence, is up on a bulletin board in my study), Jeff Leonard (whose home-run trot sometimes featured a broken-wing effect, left or right, to show up the pitcher); and a particular pal, the late Bill Rigney, a one-time Giants utility infielder who went on to manage the club (and two others) for a total of six years but never took them to the home port of October. Outpitched, outhit, and outmanaged, the powerful Rangers, who had easily dismissed the Yankees in the A.L.C.S., took an ugly sort of beating�a mugging�in these games, and it will take a while to figure out why. Their players, dispersing now toward their families and golf courses and hunting pastures, will be bad company for the next few weeks. This took away their pride, and they won�t recover it until they can bat and throw again in March and April, and resume the chancy, everyday winning and losing that comes with their trade. No such relief is available to their fans, who were exulting in their team�s first World Series in its fifty-year history, and now have only their ticket stubs and dorky outsize Ranger hats to show for it. I�m no hankie-waver, but I believe that we victory-stuffed Yankees fans or recently enriched Red Sox Nation loonies have little notion of this deep local pain, nor quite remember the quivering first joys of giving ourselves to the hopeless early Mets. Even in Dallas, sudden losing, catastrophe at the very end, is the price of caring, and remission comes slowly. We old baseball-capital types secretly patronize these dispersed Dallas hordes, I sense, but what owe them right now is a dab of pity. Players have little awareness of fan angst, but I�ve not forgotten an amazing late-summer conversation I had with the iconic, forty-year-old Willie McCovey at Candlestick Park, in 1978, at a time when his contending Giants had just dropped five out of six games and were beginning a customary September slide toward oblivion. �The fans sitting up there are helpless,� he said. �They can�t pick up a bat and come down and do something. Their only involvement is in how well you do. If you strike out or mess up out there, they feel they�ve done something wrong. You�re all they�ve got. The professional athlete knows there�s always another game or another year coming up. If he loses he swallows that bitter pill and comes back. It�s much harder for the fans.�

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I could have worked on those few paragraphs for 40 years and not gotten them as right as Angell seemed on one swing.

That part about the Rangers was exactly what I thought but could not express -- an ugly sort of beating indeed.

[metirish]

Just great , what a treasure he is.

[Theoldmole]

A joy to read.