"The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the 'Field of Dreams' thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie."

"It's mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons. In 'Fields of Dreams' [sic] there's a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good, and they're talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition. What is that? That dreaminess, I really hated that." 

Said Roger Angell, quoted in this August 2000 Salon article, which I'm seeing today because it's partially quoted "Roger Angell, Who Wrote About Baseball With Passion, Dies at 101/In elegantly winding articles for The New Yorker loaded with inventive imagery, he wrote more like a fan than a sports journalist" (NYT). That obituary, by Dwight Garner, was published 3 days ago, but it's linked in a new "Conversation" between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens. Stephens calls Garner a "magnificent writer" writing about another magnificent writer.

Among the Angell quotes that Garner cherry-picked for the obituary: 

"He was not only the greatest of baseball writers; he had also lived long enough to see Babe Ruth, of the Yankees, at one end of his life and..."

"... Shohei Ohtani, of the Angels, at the other. Age conferred authority. When Roger covered the Yanks in their late-nineties heyday, Joe Torre, the team’s heavy-lidded chief, would sometimes interrupt one of his avuncular soliloquies to a clutch of young reporters and look to him for affirmation: 'Roger, am I getting that right?' Sitting in his office, Roger, much like Torre, held court, telling stories about playing Ping-Pong with James Thurber, editing William Trevor and Donald Barthelme, and watching ballgames with the Romanian-born artist Saul Steinberg, who would put on a flannel Milwaukee Braves uniform before sitting down in front of the TV.... Roger died on Friday. He was a hundred and one.... His father, Ernest Angell, was a Harvard-trained lawyer who went on to lead the American Civil Liberties Union. His mother, born Katharine Sergeant, was educated at Bryn Mawr and became this magazine’s first fiction editor, a close editorial partner to Harold Ross. After divorcing Ernest Angell, she married another founding eminence at the magazine, E. B. White. Mrs. White, as she was known at the office, neglected to tell Roger the news of her wedding; Roger, who was nine at the time, heard about it only a couple of days later, through a relative who had read about it in Walter Winchell’s newspaper column.... Eventually, Roger led the fiction department; he was, as he often said, 'doing my mother’s job in my mother’s office.'... In 1962, he and the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, discussed the idea of his writing about baseball...."

Writes David Remnick in "Remembering Roger Angell, Hall of Famer/In the course of a well-lived century, he established himself as the most exacting of editors, the most agile of stylists, a mentor to generations of writers, and baseball’s finest, fondest chronicler" (The New Yorker).

"I have so far resisted writing 'the baseball gods' in here but now give up."

"The baseball gods don’t toy with the players, but they enjoy writing tough little S.A.T.s on the odd evening."

Writes Roger Angell, who's written about baseball for a very long time. "I’ve been watching baseball since 1930 and have never seen...." What was it that he'd never seen that broke his career long silence about the baseball gods? Perhaps you were watching the other night.

"Some among us (I am one of them) can recall a time when the baseball and the players were the lone attractions, barring a few outfield signboards."

"Nothing more, not even an organist. You watched and waited in semi-silence, ate a hot dog, drank a Moxie, watched some more, yelled when something happened, kept score, saw the shadows lengthen, then trooped home elated or disconsolate. It was a public event, modestly presented, and private in recollection."

The recollection of Roger Angell (on the occasion of the Baltimore game that was played without spectators).

"Without private evidence, I will take a pass on the frail case of Jon Lester and the Twittered glob of something-or-other in his glove."

"Cheating was more blatant and more fun in the old days, when the Giants’ Gaylord Perry would smilingly stand with upraised arms while an ump frisked him for K-Y Jelly or other skulking lubricants. When a Phillies pitcher, Kevin Gross, allowed sandpaper to fall out of his glove, he indignantly denied that he’d been doctoring the ball. No way! A great dad, he’d been employing idle dugout moments to fashion a little birdhouse for his daughter."

The great old Roger Angell is blogging the World Series, with better words and better memories than anybody else.

He's 93!

In case you don't want to take a pass on the Twittered glob of something-or-other, here's "'Giant booger' or rosin? Jon Lester says he doesn't have a cold."