Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance - thrown hard and with precision.
Roger AngellSports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.
Roger AngellI think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember.
Roger AngellOur stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.
Roger AngellFriends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television close-up of Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face โฆ. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all.
Roger Angell