This is an utterly enjoyable collection of essays about the quadrangular game.
Angell's earliest piece, from 1962, almost seems to be about a different sport. This is the time when Stan Musial and Duke Snider were still active; when the Braves hadn't yet left Boston for Milwaukee; when the Mets were an expansion team; when a pitcher who wasn't producing was begrudged his star-level salary of $27,500. That's thousand, with a T.
Angell knows when to get out of the way and just let the players and coaches tell their stories, as he does in a profile from 1990 of Bill Rigney, former manager and infielder for the Giants. A grace note to set context, and then Angell just lets the interview happen.
But he also brings an urban, literary sensibility to his writing. He slips a non-obvious allusion to Swann's Way into an early story, and "Early Innings" is his own Proustian memory exercise, recollections of the game from the 1920s and '30s.
There is this image, from a game played on a gloomy April day in Boston:
Fenway Park has a grimy red brick exterior, with two upper stories of narrow windows set above the main gates, and the look of the place on this gray, soggy morning reminded me of old photographs of turn-of-the-century workers filing in to work at the long red brick textile mills in Lowell and Lawrence.
A supporter of New York teams, Angell can still maintain some perspective about the cult of the Yankees. He calls Monument Park, beyond center field in Yankee Stadium, a "Kremlin wall of the sport where twelve panegyrical... embronzements" can be found.
There are recaps that deal with a season in a few pages; there is a long story of watching a single college game with Joe Wood, who pitched for Boston in the 1912 World Series; there is a one-sentence sketch of the 2002 Angels pitching staff, anchored by "Olmec-visaged" Francisco Rodriguez. One more image, the best of the bunch, taken from a profile of Bob Gibson in retirement in 1980, will have to suffice:
([Frank] Robinson was a right-handed slugger of fearsome power, whose customary stance at the plate was that of an impatient subway traveller leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train)...
