Roger Angell Quotes & Sayings

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 knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me. — Roger Angell

Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and lowlights, dingers and shutouts, streaks and slumps. — Roger Angell

I've been lucky. I've met a lot of baseball people, and I've learned to value people who talk - people who talk well and in long sentences and even long paragraphs. — Roger Angell

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 over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection. — Roger Angell

Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions. — Roger Angell

Baseball's absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all — Roger Angell

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night. — Roger Angell

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought. — Roger Angell

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way. — Roger Angell

A recent study of three thousand New England high-school kids shows that students with B averages or better enjoyed seventeen to thirty-three minutes more sleep and went to bed ten to fifty minutes earlier than students with C averages. — Roger Angell

Hold a baseball in your hand ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun. — Roger Angell

Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance - thrown hard and with precision. — Roger Angell

Infield practice is more mystic ritual than preparation, encouraging the big-leaguer, no less than the duffer in the stands, to believe in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that playing ball is a snap. — Roger Angell

I'm feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I've forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I've begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb. — Roger Angell

I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be. — Roger Angell

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us - Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass - swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come. — Roger Angell

Those who live by the wall must die by the wall. — Roger Angell

The best defense against partisanship is expertise. — Roger Angell

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 is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all. — Roger Angell

Tiant, noted for odd pitching mannerisms, is also a famous mound dawdler. Stands on hill like sunstruck archeologist at Knossos. Regards ruins. Studies sun. Studies landscape. Looks at artifact in hand. Wonders: Keep this potsherd or throw it away? Does Smithsonian want it? Hmm. Prepares to throw it away. Pauses. Sudd. discovers writing on object. Hmm. Possible Linear B inscript.? Sighs. Decides. Throws. Wipes face. Repeats whole thing. Innings & hours creep by. Spectators clap, yawn, droop, expire. — Roger Angell

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 our half-lidded eyes. — Roger Angell

What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind. — Roger Angell

My favorite urban flower, the baseball box score — Roger Angell

Everyone knows the best volume of the encyclopedia is the one with ships-S. — Roger Angell

Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around. — Roger Angell

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it. — Roger Angell

Right from the beginning, I have been a Tiger fan and nothing else," Max Lapides said this summer. "Other men can happily go to ball games wherever they happen to find themselves - not me. My interest is the Tigers. They are the sun, and all the twenty-three other teams are satellites. — Roger Angell

What really makes baseball so hard is it's retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game. — Roger Angell

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 is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers' youth, and even back then ... there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped. — Roger Angell

Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time. — Roger Angell

Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment - ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay - and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins. — Roger Angell

The fearful happenings of the second game need not be lingered over, being now as well known as the circumstances surrounding the fall of Troy. Until the gods began their heavy-handed meddling, it was a fine, fast game, with the Dodgers having somewhat the better of it. — Roger Angell

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 cut fastball. — Roger Angell

Once I could persuade these guys that all I wanted to hear from them was what they did - Tell me what you do - once you can persuade someone that this is all you're after, you can't shut them up because we're all fascinated by what we do. — Roger Angell

I couldn't get to sleep until four in the morning. Nobody knew. You pick up the morning paper in Chicago, and it says, 'N.Y. at Detroit (n.).' I mean, doesn't a man have a Constitutional right to the box scores? — Roger Angell

The press box at Wrigley Field in Chicago is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park's second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate. — Roger Angell

I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember. — Roger Angell

The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked. — Roger Angell