Losing is the bane and bugbear of every professional athlete's existence, but in baseball the monster seems to hang closer than in other sports, its chilly claws and foul breath palpable around the neck hairs of the infielder bending for his crosshand scoop or the reliever slipping his first two fingers off-center on the ball seams before delivering his two-and-two… — Roger Angell Copy Share
Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before… — Roger Angell Copy Share
Infield practice is more mystic ritual than preparation, encouraging the big-leaguer, no less than the duffer in the stands, to believe in… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
What really makes baseball so hard is it's retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
“Right from the beginning, I have been a Tiger fan and nothing else,” Max Lapides said this summer. “Other men can happily… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
Losing is the bane and bugbear of every professional athlete's existence, but in baseball the monster seems to hang closer than in other sports, its chilly claws and foul breath palpable around the neck hairs of the infielder bending for his crosshand scoop or the reliever slipping his first two fingers off-center on the ball seams before delivering his two-and-two… — Roger Angell Copy Share
We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I… — Roger Angell Copy Share
Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver… — Roger Angell Copy Share Image
Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before… — Roger Angell Copy Share
Friends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television close-up of Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it… — Roger Angell Copy Share
