"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, "The Summer Game,",1972's classic book on the game of baseball. Angell, who died Friday at the age of 101, was a long- time writer for The New Yorker magazine, and was its chief fiction editor for years. His writings on baseball are classics, and reading them, like watching a ballgame, could give the feeling of stopped time. He had the rare distinction of being an inductee in both the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The New Yorker editor David Remnick has a loving tribute to the iconic Angell, writing:
"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."
(photo: Angell interviewing Barry Bonds. Eric Risberg/AP)
