A Fan’s Notes

Roger Angell’s Five Seasons bears comparison with one other baseball book— Roger Angell’s The Summer Game (1972). The new book is even better than the first, and renders the game from various places of enlightened vantage. In The Summer Game Angell remained largely in the stands, describing the green mural as innings transpired before him—descriptions which blended the welcome repetitions of the game with its sudden minute varieties of action. He described a painting (a strange one, with moving figures) which carried its own light with it. Now in Five Seasons he describes baseball as if it were sculpture, which changes as you perceive it by walking around it, or as day’s light moves over the stone from pink dawn through white noon to yellow twilight. Now he writes not only observing the game itself, as the sport’s most articulate fan, but observing the work of professionals on the sidelines: owner, ex-player, roving scout. He writes of lawsuits and commissioners, players’ unions and free agents, lockouts and the DH and nighttime World Series TV spectaculars; he writes of Howard Cosell and Bowie Kuhn.

Still, the best of Angell renders the game on the field. He loves to describe Luis Tiant’s pitching motion, stylist on stylist; on page forty we hear, in Angell’s best note-taking manner:

DH

About the Author

Donald Hall

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Roger Angell’s Five Seasons bears comparison with one other baseball book— Roger Angell’s The Summer Game (1972). The new book is even better than the first, and renders the game from various places of enlightened vantage. In The Summer Game Angell remained largely in the stands, describing the green mural as innings transpired before him—descriptions which blended the welcome repetitions of the game with its sudden minute varieties of action. He described a painting (a strange one, with moving figures) which carried its own light with it. Now in Five Seasons he describes baseball as if it were sculpture, which changes as you perceive it by walking around it, or as day’s light moves over the stone from pink dawn through white noon to yellow twilight. Now he writes not only observing the game itself, as the sport’s most articulate fan, but observing the work of professionals on the sidelines: owner, ex-player, roving scout. He writes of lawsuits and commissioners, players’ unions and free agents, lockouts and the DH and nighttime World Series TV spectaculars; he writes of Howard Cosell and Bowie Kuhn.

Still, the best of Angell renders the game on the field. He loves to describe Luis Tiant’s pitching motion, stylist on stylist; on page forty we hear, in Angell’s best note-taking manner: