Roger Angell, baseball writer, 1920-2022

Roger Angell, who has died at 101, was not merely the greatest, most lucid writer on baseball; a distinction for which there has long been stiff competition. He was also the personification of the New Yorker magazine: literate, witty and quirky. He graced its pages with his words and as an editor for nearly 80 years, from his first short story, published in 1944, to his final essays on life as an old man.

He was to the New Yorker manor born. His mother was its first fiction editor after its birth in 1925, a job he inherited 30 years later, working from the same office. His stepfather was EB White, already a noted essayist on the publication. As a child he used to memorise the captions of every cartoon.

Baseball writing came later on the suggestion of William Shawn, the editor in chief, who knew nothing about the game but understood its place in American life and its appeal to the best American writers, such as John Updike for starters. Rather like cricket, it is a contemplative sport, featuring long passages of apparent inaction, though the wheels are always churning, until all hell breaks loose.

That suited Angell’s style. He liked to sit in the stands, with the paying public, rather than in the press box with its constant chatter. As he wrote, he also talked endlessly with the players and managers to get a deeper understanding of all the nuances.

His end-of-season wrap-up essays became mandatory reading, as did his profiles of the actors, such as the intimidating St Louis Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson of the 1960s and 1970s. Angell got him to admit in retirement that, yes, he did throw at hitters but only if they dared to lean across the plate. “The outside corner is mine and don’t you forget it”, Gibson growled.

He painted exquisite verbal pictures of players in action. He likened the unique high-kicking delivery of another great pitcher, Juan Marichal of the San Francisco Giants, to “some enormous and highly dangerous farm implement”. But the balls Marichal threw, as the likes of Henry Aaron and Pete Rose told him, were the epitome of perfect control.

Angell was born on September 19 1920, in Manhattan to Ernest Angell, a lawyer, and Katharine Sergeant. After their divorce and her marriage to White, he lived mostly with his father, went to Harvard, like his father, and during the second world war joined the army, where he was a magazine editor. His first New Yorker short story, “Three Ladies in the Morning”, was bylined Cpl Roger Angell.

He joined the magazine in the 1950s as a fiction editor, taking over his mother’s list of clients, who included Updike, James Thurber and Vladimir Nabokov, before developing his own; not least Ann Beattie, whom he encouraged, even while sending rejection letters to her for two years.

David Remnick, the New Yorker’s current editor, described his editing style as “devoted, open-minded and sometimes hard-knuckled”. Angell himself said he was more of a “taker outer” than a “keeper inner”. 

He was also writing for the gosippy Talk of the Town section as well as producing humour pieces. His wit showed up in his annual in-house holiday poems. One of them, in 2008, was typically eclectic: “By wintry lawn we’ll dance til dawn/ With Sheryl Crow and Wally Shawn/ J.Lo, Mo (the doughty Yankee) / Beyoncé and Ben Bernanke.”

When he was 93 he wrote a New Yorker essay, “This Old Man”, which became one of the most widely read articles in the magazine’s history. It spoke of macular degeneration, arterial stents and hands gnarled with arthritis, but it was not despairing: “I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing.”

Just before his second wife, Carol Rogge, died in 2012 after 48 years of marriage, she told him that “if you haven’t found someone else by a year after I’m gone, I’ll come back and haunt you”. Two years later he married Margaret Moorman, who survives him along with his adopted son John Henry from his second marriage.

I never met Angell but we shared one coincidence. In 1962, Shawn asked him what a double play was in baseball. Happy with the response, he suggested Angell should write about the sport. Four years later, Gordon Newton, the FT’s editor, asked the same question of a young applicant for a junior foreign desk job. He liked the answer and hired me. Thank you, Roger Angell.