The Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk came out of his crouch, Mr. Angell wrote, like “an aluminum extension ladder stretching for the house eaves.”

These names are best kept in mind rather than boxed and put away somewhere. Old letters are engrossing but feel historic in numbers, photo albums delightful but with a glum after-kick like a chocolate caramel. Home movies are killers: Zeke, a long-gone Lab, alive again, rushing from right to left with a tennis ball in his mouth; my sister Nancy, stunning at seventeen, smoking a lipstick-stained cigarette aboard Astrid, with the breeze stirring her tied-up brown hair; my mother laughing and ducking out of the picture again, waving her hands in front of her face in embarrassment—she’s about thirty-five. Me sitting cross-legged under a Ping-Pong table, at eleven. Take us away.

More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

My favorite Angell piece is his Steve Blass profile from 1975.

I like to think there's something about writing well about baseball that extends your lifespan.

“...Koufax was back on the mound, and this time was performing very close to his peak. By the end of seven innings, he had faced only one more than the absolute minimum number of batters, and he wound up with a four-hit shutout and ten strikeouts. It was the twenty-second time this year that he had struck out ten or more batters in a single game. There were other things to admire that afternoon (Willie Davis’s three stolen bases, for instance, and the Twins’ not falling apart again), but I concentrated on watching Koufax at work. This is not as easy as it sounds, for there is the temptation simply to discredit what one sees. His fast ball, for example, flares upward at the last instant, so that batters swinging at it often look as if they had lashed out at a bad high pitch. Koufax’s best curve, by contrast, shoots down, often barely pinching a corner of the plate, inside or out, just above the knees. A typical Koufax victim — even if he is an excellent hitter — having looked bad by swinging on the first pitch and worse in letting the second go by, will often simply stand there, his bat nailed to his shoulder, for the next two or three pitches, until the umpire’s right hand goes up and he is out. Or if he swings again it is with an awkward last-minute dip of the bat that is a caricature of his normal riffle. It is almost painful to watch, for Koufax, instead of merely overpowering hitters, as some fastball throwers do, appears to dismantle them, taking away first one and then another of their carefully developed offensive weapons and judgments, and leaving them only with the conviction that they are the victims of a total mismatch. Maybe they are right, at that; the records of this, Koufax’s greatest year, suggest as much. In the regular season, he won twenty-six games, struck out three hundred and eighty-two batters (an all-time record), and pitched his fourth no-hit game — a perfect game, by the way — in as many years, which is also a new record. In the Series, he won two shutouts pitched within three days of each other, and gave up exactly one earned run in twenty-four innings. He was the difference between the two clubs; he won the Series.”

His repertoire begins with an exaggerated mid-windup pivot, during which he turns his back on the batter and seems to examine the infield directly behind the mound for signs of crabgrass. With men on bases, his stretch consists of a succession of minute downward waggles and pauses of the glove, and a menacing sidewise, slit-eyed, Valentino-like gaze over his shoulder at the baserunner. The full flower of his art, however, comes during the actual delivery, which is executed with a perfect variety show of accompanying gestures and impersonations.

The title of 'World's Best Baseball Writer' is vacant for the first time in 60 years or so.

He did as much to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine’s nearly century-long history. His prose and his editorial judgment left an imprint that’s hard to overstate. Like Ruth and Ohtani, he was a freakishly talented double threat, a superb writer and an invaluable counsel to countless masters of the short story. He won a place in both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the Baseball Hall of Fame—a unique distinction.

...a perfect variety show of accompanying gestures and impersonations.

I can almost bring Yogi back in memory, up at the plate, powerfully round and thick and bearish in his work-smudged pinstripes, with his head (in a cap, not a helmet) tipped a little, as if to give him more height while he stares out at the pitcher. The pitch is up, out of the strike zone, but Berra slashes at it anyway—it’s up by his eyes, because the force of his swing has dropped him down—and he drives it distantly. He runs hard, startling you again with his speed and strength, and rounds first base at full speed, leaning sideways like a racing car, then pulls up in a shower of dirt and scrambles back to the bag. I’m on my feet, yelling and laughing with everyone else. Yogi, Yogi—there's no one else like him. The laughter isn’t sweet; it’s all wonder.

This Old Man” is the best piece of writing that anyone over 90 has ever produced. Nothing really comes close.

By the way, he wrote the above paragraph at 94. I'm not going to live to 94, but if I accidentally do, I will not be capable of such excellence. I am 42, and I am already not.

Herman Wouk enters the room.