RIP Roger Angell

Not sure I get that or, even if I understand what you're fully saying, would agree.

What's an example?

A fiction editor at the New Yorker is a square peg in a round baseball world, or vice versa?

 

Totally different people, different personality types, different social mores, but he made both worlds his own. Hell, even being an editor AND a writer is tough double duty for most of us. I sure couldn't have done it.

 

Not sure I agree.

Their pinkies may point to the sky when drinking tea, but snobby socialite literarians are probably way more into baseball than we'd ever know.

 

Oh, sure, many of 'em may like baseball. But they're miles away from the culture of baseball shared by the sport's participants.
We interrupt this extremely mild disagreement for an anecdote. For the spring and summer of 1987, I was the Yankees writer for the Village Voice, appearing every other week. Well, I'd been reading the Voice since I was a teenager, and it still had all the old lefties like Nat Hentoff and Jack Newfield on the staff, and Bob Christgau as music editor. I was pretty much in awe of these guys and then discovered these stalwart crusaders for social justice were also all big Yankee fans! The team that was the symbol of ruthless American capitalism since well before I was born. I had a very tough time keeping a straight face when asked about the team in the office.

 

Went looking for something based on your post but forgot what it was I was looking for, and went up the wrong hole, far down a tangent, and found this, which has nothing to do with Angell other than baseball, and it riffs off HST.

https://cornellsun.com/2006/02/22/going-gonzo-for-spring-baseball-with-hunter-s-thompson/

 

I hears ya. Ordered the first three books off Amazon last night and am awaiting their arrival.

 

Nothing like that.

Just that Roger Angell's contribution to American letters is probably broader and deeper (if less obvious) as the fiction editor of the New Yorker in those years than it is as our most thoughtful, stylish, erudite baseball writer.

Sports and literature are longtime companions, and Angell is part of that continuum. Plimpton and the Paris Review; Oates or Mailer or Hemingway at the fights; DFW and tennis, etc., etc., etc.

 

Hard to know. Who were the fiction editors of the New Yorker in those years?

 

Remembering Roger Angell, Hall of Famer

 

Raises an interesting question.

Are there more readers of literary fiction in America, or more readers of literary baseball writing?