Classic Baseball Articles from The New Yorker

[marzoumanian]

https://www.newyorker.com/books/doub...ading-baseball

Here's a bunch of classic baseball pieces by some great writers, including Roger Angell and John Updike. Angell is my favorite. I miss his writing. His style was laid back and easy, like a sunny summer afternoon at any MLB ballpark with a beer or lemonade in your hand and the roar of the crowd in your ear. I've read many of his books and look forward to reading his piece on Bob Gibson from 1980. Enjoy!

[toppcat]

Roger Angell turns 100 next month!

[Snapolit1]

Thanks. Looking forward to reading many of them.

Originally Posted by marzoumanian

https://www.newyorker.com/books/doub...ading-baseball

Here's a bunch of classic baseball pieces by some great writers, including Roger Angell and John Updike. Angell is my favorite. I miss his writing. His style was laid back and easy, like a sunny summer afternoon at any MLB ballpark with a beer or lemonade in your hand and the roar of the crowd in your ear. I've read many of his books and look forward to reading his piece on Bob Gibson from 1980. Enjoy!

[Leon]

If I am not mistaking The New Yorker had Jefferson Burdick's first ever article on baseball cards.

Correction, it seems Burdick's first article was in Hobbies Magazine. The New Yorker had some other kind of baseball card article, I believe.

[marzoumanian]

Here's the scoop, Leon. I just Googled "The New Yorker baseball cards" and found that in the August 13, 1990 issue Mark Singer wrote a SHORT piece about Mr. Burdick's collection at the Met. The focus was on the donation itself and the critical role Burdick played in the hobby. I tried to read it just now BUT you need to "sign up" for archive access. Good memory!

[Leon]

Originally Posted by marzoumanian

Here's the scoop, Leon. I just Googled "The New Yorker baseball cards" and found that in the August 13, 1990 issue Mark Singer wrote a SHORT piece about Mr. Burdick's collection at the Met. The focus was on the donation itself and the critical role Burdick played in the hobby. I tried to read it just now BUT you need to "sign up" for archive access. Good memory!

In further googling, According to George Vcheck the Kaw Chief Stamp Journal from 1936 had a baseball card article.
Not sure why I was thinking 1929.
Here are a couple of interesting pieces from way back in those days...

[MikeGarcia]

...and every couple of years they have some really neat covers...

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[irishdenny]

Seems Mr Burdick was Pretty Hip wit the lingo back in 39'...
Referring to Cards and Info about them as being "Dope",
Really shows how Cool "The Man" was fir his time & even ahead of it!

Love the way he operated... His friendly organized demeanor has always added to his character in order to accomplish his goal. He was definitely the right man fir the job!

"Dankz Leon... !"

[ThomasL]

I know of at least two articles in the New Yorker that were related to the Black Sox scandal. One (which I recently found) talks about Hod Eller's pitching performance and the more famous one was from a Nov 1959 issue "Requiem for a Southpaw" about the author living next to a post banishment Lefty Williams which is the only real non-Eliot Asinof reference to a threat on Williams life during the 1919 World Series (something that there is no proof of and several baseball minds now believe didnt happen at all....I still say it is possibly true)

[ThomasL]

Oct 7, 1950 "Shine Ball" by James Maxwell, who was a 7yo Reds fan in 1919, is a reminiscence about Hod Eller and the 1919 World Series

[marzoumanian]

For any Roger Angell fans out there I thought I would cut and paste this short piece about him turning 100 this year. He doesn't write baseball articles for the New Yorker anymore BUT it is well worth searching out any one of his seven baseball books through Amazon or any other means. You will not regret it. Masterful writer. Happy 100th birthday, Roger! And thank you Mark Singer for being at the ceremony described below.
Peace and stay healthy!


Dept. of Hoopla
September 14, 2020 Issue
Roger Angell at a Hundred
Raising a glass to The New Yorker legend—born five years before the founding of this magazine, and a contributor for the past seventy-six—as he celebrates a milestone birthday.

By Mark Singer
September 7, 2020


Born five years before the founding of this magazine—but a contributor for only the past seventy-six—Roger Angell has spent his one-hundredth summer in customary fashion. In late June, he and his wife, Peggy Moorman, drove a spring-chicken ’97 Volvo wagon from their COVID refuge, in the Catskills, to Brooklin, Maine, and settled into their gray-shingled camp on a point overlooking Eggemoggin Reach, with Deer Isle in the near distance. Angell began coming to Brooklin in 1933, the summer before he turned thirteen. That was the year his mother, Katharine Sergeant Angell White, and his stepfather, E. B. (Andy) White, each a foundational source of The New Yorker’s DNA—Katharine primarily as a fiction editor and nurturer of writers, Andy as progenitor of the magazine’s editorial voice—bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse, with an attached barn, in North Brooklin, situated above a large pasture, pond, and woods that sloped down to a gravelly beach on Allen Cove, on Blue Hill Bay.

When Angell returned to Brooklin this year, he anticipated observing certain seasonal and quotidian routines: admiring the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta of wooden sailboats; morning round trips with his walker to the Center Harbor Yacht Club (“a porch surrounding a Ping-Pong table,” in his description); a 6:30 p.m. Scotch-and-water (plenty of ice and a side of cheese, crackers, and olives), in time for the news (usually NBC, always PBS); postprandial Yanks/Mets/Bosox broadcasts; and periodic visits to the Brooklin Cemetery, where, in the shade of an expansive oak, six headstones mark the graves of Katharine and Andy White, Roger’s brother Joel White, his daughters Callie and Alice Angell, and his wife of forty-eight years, Carol Rogge Angell (1938-2012). Next to Carol’s is an identical seventh, a slender marble slab engraved with his own name and birth year, standing by. Although Angell spent five-plus decades as a fiction editor and is best known for his matchless œuvre of baseball writing, including seven books and scores of blog posts, his most widely read essay for the magazine was “This Old Man,” a ninety-three-year-old’s unflinchingly intimate account of what one discovers, savors, bears, rues, and forgives in the late chapters of a very long-lived life. He recalls a threat from Carol as her death neared: “If you haven’t found someone else by a year after I’m gone I’ll come back and haunt you.” He obliged in the summer of 2014, when he and Moorman married a week or so before he was inducted into the writer’s section of the Baseball Hall of Fame; the following winter, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters—a dual distinction uniquely his.

One non-routine engagement: According to the chronometer, Angell won’t segue into his second century until September 19th, but various friends of Friend Memorial Public Library, in the center of Brooklin, decided to celebrate early. On a sunny Saturday in early August, an ample crowd gathered on the front lawn of the library’s modest white Greek Revival home. Among them were grownups in summer hats, dogs, children sitting cross-legged in the grass, relatives from near Portland (three hours down the coast), and Angell’s stepdaughter, Emma Quaytman. Absent, alas, were his son, John Henry Angell, et famille, grounded in Portland on the opposite coast. Also absent was a particular nephew, Steve White, president and chief owner of the renowned Brooklin Boat Yard—away delivering, yes, a boat with his partner, Jen Sansosti.


Perched on a wooden stool on the porch was the honoree, dressed in blue cotton pants, a blue-and-white checked button-down shirt, penny loafers, purple face mask, and his signature WoodenBoat ball cap. The preliminaries included music by a three-piece string band and recitations of thank-yous to a long list of volunteers. Then a convivial woman with short blond hair was introduced—Janet Mills, the governor of Maine—to certify the occasion with an official proclamation of Roger Angell Day.

Before getting to the whereases, she said, “In Maine, while we brag about our ponds and peninsulas, our gardens, our granite, our grandkids and green fields, and goats old and young, our woods, our words and our language are the dearest thing to us. That is why I’m here to honor a premier wordsmith, Roger Angell—someone who has used words to elevate us, to inspire us, to get at the truth. He tells it straight. He writes about winning and he writes about the pain of loss and regaining life again.”

Angell had his own list of thank-yous, as well as an apology to “everybody else in town who has been discommoded by this interruption to their wonderful Saturday and going about their business, large numbers of whom have little or no interest in an old guy from away. I am from away. I will always be from away, and I don’t mind. I’m away from New York City, which I love—I love New York; I love leaving New York to come up here, and I love going back there. I’m a New Yorker through and through, but I think I also qualify as a Brooklin regular, and I’m very proud of this.”

One request: “I want you all please to keep your distance—social distance—be very careful. And if there’s any impulse to rush the podium here and pick me up on your shoulders and carry me around, resist that.” ♦

[MikeGarcia]

..Thanks for that ; I'm late to the party....Roger Angell and Audax, Minor were my heroes of the sportsworld's chronicles. Oh and Barney Nagler. ..May we all stay healthy until 100. Thanks again.

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