THOMA COLUMN | Angell in the outfield: A master passes

May 23—A confession of hubris: When I started writing this column in the ancient days of 1989, I envisioned it as combining Bill James and Roger Angell.

It is no surprise that it falls short of that standard.

James is still with us, but Angell died last week at age 101. His real job was fiction editor of the New Yorker, a job he essentially inherited from his mother, but his public prominence came from his periodic baseball essays, written with a grace and élan that was both inspiring and intimidating.

There are, scattered about my home, four collections of Angell's baseball essays from the New Yorker: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, Late Innings, Season Ticket. (Also A Pitcher's Story, a 2008 book about David Cone.)

All are elegant, informative, even ahead of their time; read his 1982 spring training essay on catching, and you will find a discussion with notable backstops about what we now know as pitch framing.

Angell reportedly rejected the description of himself as "baseball's poet laureate" and despised the overt sentimentality that permeates the likes of "Field of Dreams." His essays were filled with observed descriptions conveyed in lengthy sentences and paragraphs, many of which contain images that have stayed with me years later.

Afterward, in the noisy Chicago clubhouse, I saw two Chicago coaches, Kerby Farrell and Marv Grissom, sitting silently side by side in front of their lockers. They had their pants and spikes off, their feet were propped up, and they were comfortably balancing paper cups of beer on their stomachs. Their seamed, down-home country faces were still alight with the game. As I passed, Farrell nodded his head once and said, "Hum-DINGER."

— From "The Flowering and Subsequent Deflowering of New England"

That particular essay (one of my favorites) marked a notable change in Angell's baseball writings. He started doing the magazine pieces in 1962 — not coincidentally the first year of the New York Mets — and for several years they were strictly observational, based on what he saw from the seats and on the tube.

But his piece on the tumultuous 1967 American League pennant race and following World Series set him on the path of actual reporting.

He eventually settled into a pattern of three essays a year: One out of spring training, in which he explored the techniques of one particular aspect of the game; another from midseason, generally about a particular personality; and one recapping the season and World Series.

He had a unique advantage and burden: None of them were published immediately after the fact.

That spring training essay might hit print around the All-Star Game. The season recap might appear in midwinter.

Angell wrote with no immediate deadline, and the result had no immediate timeliness. He had more time to hone his prose than do the beat writers, but he needed that prose to still feel relevant weeks and months later.

In truth, even the earliest of his essays (collected in The Summer Game) stand up a half-century later. But some of my favorites are midseason ones from the 1970s and 80s:

—"Down the Drain," his 1975 piece on the collapse of Steve Blass' pitching career.

—"The Web of the Game," 1981, about attending a college game pitched by Ron Darling and Frank Viola with deadball hurler Smokey Joe Wood. Darling famously threw 11 no-hit innings for Yale, but Viola and St. John's won 1-0.

—"Quis," from 1985, written at the peak of Dan Quisenberry's bullpen brilliance. (The Season Ticket compilation contains an afterword about the submariner's almost immediate decline.)

Season Ticket, the final compilation, ends in the summer of 1987, which is a long time ago. But if you are unfamiliar with Angell's work, it will still reward your attention.

Edward Thoma is at ethoma@mankatofreepress.com. Twitter: @bboutsider.