The Roger Angell Baseball Collection Quotes

“Tebbetts is seventy-four years old, and scouts for the Indians. He listened to our conversation about pitches and pitchers, and muttered, “Sometimes I watch one of these young pitchers we’ve got, and I tell my club, “This man needs another pitch. By which I mean a strike.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“THERE’S NOTHING LIKE AN all-expense-paid late-winter vacation under the palms and within sight and sound of batted baseballs to give a sensitive man a deeper appreciation of the nature of guilt.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“field directorship because the Philadelphia front office”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“for winning is the ultimate mystery that gives all sport its meaning.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“General Eckert was hired in 1965, apparently because he knew absolutely nothing about baseball and thus would be certain to keep his hand off the tiller; he was fired for the same reason, when it was noticed that the unskippered vessel had drifted toward a bank of nasty-looking reefs.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“I’ll take both—pro football (preferably via television, because of the instant replay) for its violence and marvelously convoluted machinery, and baseball (preferably from a seat behind first base) for its clarity, variety, slowly tightening tension, and acute pressure on the individual athlete”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“Baseball is cerebral and unemotional; the other, fast-growing professional sports, most notably pro football, are dense, quick, complex, dangerous, and perpetually stimulating.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“Lolich was starting with one less day of rest. He pitched the first two innings like a man defusing a live bomb, working slowly and unhappily, and studying the problem at length before each new move.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“The Tigers, having racked up two second-inning runs off Washburn, sent fifteen men to the plate in the third and tied a famous Series record by scoring ten runs in one inning. Jim Northrup hit a grand-slammer into the right-field bullpen, Kaline and Cash had two hits apiece, the top three Tiger hitters scored six runs, and eight men reached base before the first out was made, and my totals indicated six singles, one homer, four walks, one hit batsman, one sacrifice bunt, four disheartened pitchers, and one bollixed scorecard. This kind of rockslide is not quite the rarity it might seem, and whenever it happens I am left with the impression that all the players involved are mere bystanders at a statistical cataclysm. The batters become progressively more certain that each hit will drop in for them, the fielders less surprised by each unreachable fly or untouchable grounder, the pitchers more and more convinced that their best stuff will be bombed. In the end, there seems nothing to do but wait until the riot exhausts itself and probability can again be placed under the rule of law.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“with luck, you can improve yourself in the happiest fashion, which is to learn something you thought you already knew.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket

“By the time you’ve learned it all, by the time you’re really proficient, you’re almost too old to go on catching.”
― Roger Angell, The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket