An Angell at Spring Training

What I know about spring training I know because of Roger Angell. With conversational elegance and a tireless spirit, he has described this annual baseball ritual as a romantic interlude, more experience than sport, that surely can’t be as romantic as Angell makes it seem.

Angell, a renowned editor and essayist at The New Yorker, has resided, figuratively, since 2014 in Cooperstown, N.Y., at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. No writer may be more deserving.

I’m now working on my sixth decade, and one of my most passionate baseball memories is the dog-eared paperback of an Angell essay collection that sat on my bedside nightstand for much of my youth. Late Innings: A Baseball Companion, published in 1982, is biblical in its importance to my lifelong embrace of the game, an irreplaceable tract of colloquial wit and human observations. People live at the center of every Angell paragraph, people with foibles and talents and stories worth telling. He writes with his eyes more than his hands, a testament to watching and listening and eternal curiosity.

It is now February, with fits of warmth sneaking through, and time to reemphasize this eternal marriage between baseball’s springtime rebirth and Angell’s words.

A consideration as for how spring training has changed and remained the same, through the works of one author.