EVERY TEAM SHOULD WEAR 101:

Angell served in the U.S. Army and worked at Holiday Magazine before migrating to The New Yorker. He began writing actively about baseball in 1962, when his first Spring Training feature, "The Old Folks behind Home," appeared in The New Yorker. William Shawn, the magazine's editor at the time, wanted more sports-related content to complement the short stories, poetry, analysis pieces and movie reviews that typically filled the magazine. Angell, who grew up in New York and started following the Yankees and Giants during the 1930s, was happy to comply. 

Angell demonstrated his perceptivity immediately. Explaining why the New York Mets, who compiled an abysmal 40-120 record in their inaugural 1962 season, prompted rabid fan enthusiasm that the perennial champion Yankees rarely inspired, he wrote, "There is more Met than Yankee in every one of us." 

In his most famous passage, from his signature piece, "The Interior Stadium," Angell presented an impossible yet intoxicating notion: "Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young." 

In his review of the 1975 World Series, Angell defended the loyalty of fans everywhere: 

"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. ... 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. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift." 

Angell described great ballplayers in terms everyone could understand. For example, he relished Mays' baserunning: "... Seeing him drift across a base and then sink into full speed, I noticed all at once how much he resembles a marvelous skier in midturn down a steep pitch of fast powder. Nobody like him." 

Sandy Koufax's pitching astounded Angell as much as the hitters the left-hander bedeviled. "...(T)he fastball, appearing suddenly in the strike zone, sometimes jumps up so immoderately that his catcher has to take it with his glove shooting upward, like an infielder stabbing at a bad-hop grounder. I remember some batter taking a strike like that and then stepping out of the box and staring back at the pitcher with a look of utter incredulity -- as if Koufax had just thrown an Easter egg past him." 

Angell even profiled the ball itself to explain the game's appeal: "Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance -- thrown hard and with precision. ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun." 

Angell summoned his powers of description to detail Jeter's mannerisms as he settled into the batter's box: "The between-pitches bat tucked up in his armpit. The fingertip helmet-twiddle. The left front foot wide open, out of the box until the last moment, and the cop-at-a-crossing right hand ritually lifted astern until the foot swings shut." 

Ever the fan's voice, Angell didn't hide his sentiment if he favored a particular team. An example of this accented his coverage of the classic Red Sox-Yankees one-game playoff for the 1978 AL East title, which New York captured, 5-4. The Red Sox had the potential tying run on third base when Carl Yastrzemski, Boston's hero of heroes, popped out to end the game. Angell's bitter conclusion read, "I think God was shelling a peanut."

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