Saunders: Farewell Roger Angell, you helped my fall in love with baseball and writing

Roger Angell, the American essayist who wrote about baseball with insight, compassion and probing humor, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.

He was one of my boyhood heroes. I’ve always longed to write like him.

My dad, Dusty Saunders, the longtime Rocky Mountain News journalist, who is 90 years old, introduced me to Angell’s writing when I was a teenager. Over the years he gave me a number of Angell’s books. On Christmas morning in 1988, his gift was Angell’s collection of essays, “Season Ticket.” My dad inscribed it with the words, “Love on Christmas, 1988. To my favorite sportswriter — Pops.”

I met Angell many years ago at Scottsdale Stadium before a Cactus League game between the Rockies and the Giants. With his baseball cap, white mustache and round-rimmed glasses, I recognized him quickly. I introduced myself as a fellow baseball writer and tried to impress him with my memory of his words.

“I loved ‘The Summer Game,’ especially your chapters on the 1962 Mets,” I told him. “I still remember your line about Choo Choo Coleman, about how he caught curveballs like a man battling bees.”

He smiled at me, and at my effort, and then corrected me. A little bit sternly.

“I believe I wrote that he handles curveballs like a man fighting bees,” he said. “But thanks for reading my book.”

He was right, of course. I went back and looked it up:

“The Mets catching is embarrassing. Choo Choo Coleman and Norm Sherry, the two receivers, are batting .215 and .119 respectively. Neither can throw and Coleman, who is eager and combative, handles a curveball like a man fighting bees.

“He is quick on the basepaths, but that is an attribute that is about as essential for catchers as neat handwriting.”

Angell once described Willie Mays chasing down a ball hit to deep center as “running so hard and so far that the ball itself seems to stop in the air and wait for him.”

One of my favorite players growing up was Bob Gibson, the Cardinals’ ferocious Hall of Fame pitcher. In an essay in The New Yorker, he penned an intimate character sketch of Gibson.

Gibson recalled how he was knocked down by a pitch from Tom Seaver, who was retaliating for Gibson throwing at John Milner during a spring training game.

Wrote Angell: “Gibson sounded almost like a veteran samurai warrior recalling an ancient code of pain and honor.”

We live in the Twitter era when so much content is a mean, crass, a mile wide and an inch deep. We don’t have time, or so we think, for the thoughtfulness and appreciation of well-crafted stories.

Angell was a man and a writer from a different era. Angell, like my father, helped me fall in love with baseball.

Angell, who was inducted into the writer’s wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, wrote eloquently about what it meant to be a fan.

“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,” he wrote in his book “Five Seasons.” “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.”

Back in ’62, Angell fell hard for the Mets, that famously terrible team that lost 120 games. He took his 14-year-old daughter to a Dodgers-Mets game at the Polo Grounds to soak in New York’s crazy love affair with its new team.

In the “Summer Game,” he wrote: “I was keeping score and after I jotted down the symbols for their seven singles, two doubles, one triple, three home runs, three bases on balls and two stolen bases … the Dodgers half of my scorecard looked as if a cloud of gnats had settled on it. I was pained for the Mets, and embarrassed as a fan.”

“Baseball isn’t usually like this,” I explained to my daughter.

“Sometimes it is,” she said. “This is like the fifth grade against the sixth grade at school.”

In the New York Times’ fine obituary on Angell, he’s quoted as saying, “Baseball is a great game for writers because it’s just the right pace. You can watch the game and keep score and look around and take notes. Now and then you even have time for an idea.”

Angell also said he loved the way “baseball will stick it to you; it means to break your heart.”

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