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rc90041's review against another edition
5.0
A classic for good reason. Angell writes, as everyone knows, beautiful, lucid prose about a game that begs to be described, contemplated, and remembered long after the season's last out, replayed in the mind during the long nights of winter. As a Mets fan, I was probably unduly won over by his affection for the then-new team of lovable losers, and their year of miracles in 1969. Reading about Yastrzemski, Bench, Rose, Seaver, Ford, Mantle, Mays, Jackson, Blue, Ellis, Koufax, Clemente and other giants in these essays is both a pleasure and an education. Angell doesn't get so much into the nitty gritties and technical aspects of the game, but offers more painterly takes, with vivid descriptions of the personalities and physical beauty of the game.
frogsplash's review against another edition
4.0
Fantastic prose for a bygone era of baseball. Angell's got a gift for language.
tsharris's review against another edition
5.0
Beautifully written collection of essays from the 60s and early 1970s that not only captures a really great era of baseball - with a focus on the World Series - but functions as an impressionistic history of the period when the old system gave way to the big money era characterized by expansion, moving franchises, clashes between big and small market teams, and labor strife. It's actually remarkable how much this era was dominated by teams that would soon be considered small market (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Minnesota, St. Louis, etc.).
ladyzluvcooljim's review against another edition
5.0
The Summer Game by Roger Angell
I'll try to keep my gushing to a minimum, but it's just really nice when something so completely lives up to the hype. I tried my absolute hardest to not include the entire book in my Notable Quotable but the endeavor became nearly impossible once Angell started waxing poetic about the terrible, lovable 62 Mets. It's also really nice when someone takes something you love so much and can tell you exactly why you love it, across the spans of time and space.
Time and space? Well, yes - Angell wrote this book over the course of 10 seasons between 1962 and 1971, but if you had instead labeled those years 2011 to 2020, I wouldn't have noticed. The Mets were a terrible, embarrassing team at the start but later challenged for a World Series, teams threatening relocation in the name of (theoretical) financial gain at the expense of their fan bases, and baseball itself went through a talent-based existential crisis while featuring some of the greatest players to ever take the field.
Despite being so tickled by the accounts of the 1962 Mets (I've previously read "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?", but the fan perspective was an extra feather in the cap of the story of that wonderful team), what I'll remember from this book is how eerily similar conversations about the game are 50 years later and just how prescient Angell was watching this game as a fan. He adequately captured the new model of stadium, The Astrodome, that sought to capture the fan's attention with bells and whistles rather than the product on the field. The crisis invoked by the "Year of the Pitcher," in 1968, was broken down so comprehensively in just three pages that I had to mark it (183 - 186) even though I couldn't reproduce the totality of the quote.
Ultimately, though, this book serves as proof that once something good can be exploited for financial gain by people who are already richer than anyone ever needs to be, it will be a diluted and worse product as a result. Expansion - a necessity to bringing the Mets into the league! - meant it became much more difficult to follow the sport as a whole, more players (read: worse) playing the game than ever before, all in the name of making the sport more money than ever before; taxpayer-funded stadiums built to exploit the attention of upper-income fans, which increased the base of people to draw from but diluted their interest in the product; relocation, or to put it more bluntly, the shell game where a team that "doesn't make enough money" might make a little bit more for a few years by switching cities, alienating their fan base and present community.
All that said, this book also serves as proof that the game of baseball has survived the money-grubbing tomfoolery to still exist as a product worth watching. Sure, there's a group hoping for expansion to some cities that do really deserve a team. Sure, two teams are threatening relocation for financial gain. Sure, the commissioner's office is threatening tradition-altering rule changes in the name of making the game more entertaining. In fact, they've already done that. Sure, the change in emphasis on run-scoring and run-prevention has likely rendered pitchers to be mere throwers and batters to be mere swingers.
None of this has yet killed the game of baseball or what makes it so great. If tonight is a night between April and October, I'll surely be tuning in to watch the Mets.
Notable Quotable:
"'It don't seem any time at all since spring training last year.'
'That's because we're older now. You take my grandson, he's always looking forward to something. Christmas and his birthday and things like that. That makes the time go slow for him. You and me, we just watch each day by itself.'" (P. 11-12)
"What cheered me as I tramped through the peanut shells and discarded programs and out into the hot late sunlight was not just the score and not just Casey's triumph but a freshly renewed appreciation of the marvelous complexity and balance of baseball. Off hand, I can think of no other sport in which the world's champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every home-town fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy." (P. 15)
"I was pained for the Mets, and embarrassed as a fan. 'Baseball isn't usually like this,' I explained to my daughter." (P. 36)
"Instantly, however, I learned how wrong I had been. Gil's homer pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full, furious, happy shout of 'Let's go, Mets! Let's go, Mets!' There were wild cries of encouragement before every pitch, boos for every called strike. This was no Dodger crowd, but a huge gathering of sentimental home-towners. Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible." (P. 37)
"Sandy Koufax and I had learned the same odd lesson: It is safe to assume that the Mets are going to lose, but dangerous to assume that they won't startle you in the process." (P. 38)
"During this exciting foolishness, I scrutinized the screamers around me and tried to puzzle out the cause of their unique affliction. It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand-man audience made up exclusively of born losers - leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines - who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless cause. ... Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try - antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultation yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me." (P. 40-41)
"(The Mets, like France in the nineteen-twenties, have a missing generation between the too old and the too young.)" (P. 43)
"Good pitching in a close game is the cement that makes baseball the marvelous, complicated structure that it is. It raises players to keenness and courage; it forces managers to think about strategy rather than raw power; it nails the fan's attention, so that he remembers every pitch, every throw, every span of inches that separates hits from outs. And in the end, of course, it implacably reveals the true talents of the teams on the field." (P. 43)
"I entered the fiasco in my scorecard, nodding my head sadly; same old Mets." (P. 48)
"Watching baseball at the Polo Grounds this spring has made cruel demands on my objectivity. The perspiring earnestness of all the old and new Mets, their very evident delight in their own brief flashes of splendor, their capacity for coming up with the unexpected right play and the unexpected winning game, and the general squaring of shoulders visible around the home-team dugout have provided me with so much fun and so many surprises that my impulse is simply to add my voice to the ear-rendering anthem of the Met grandstand choir - that repeated, ecstatic yawp of 'Let's go, Mets!' backed by flourishes and flatted arpeggios from a hundred dented Boy Scout bugles. Caution forces me to add, under the yells, that this is still not a good ball team." (P. 50)
"The noisy, debris-throwing, excitable Met fans have inspired a good deal of heavyweight editorial theorizing this year. Sportswriters have named them 'The New Breed.' Psychologists, anthropologists, and Max Lerner have told us that the fans' euphoria is the result of a direct identification with the have-not Mets, and is anti-authoritarian, anti-Yankee, id-satisfying, and deeply hostile. Well, yes - perhaps. But the pagan apres-midi d'un Met fan, it seems to me, also involves a simpler kind of happiness. The Mets are refreshing to every New York urbanite if only because they are unfinished. The ultimate shape, essence, and reputation of this team are as yet invisible, and they will not be determined by an architect, a developer, a parks commissioner, a planning board, or the City Council. Unlike many of us in the city, the Mets have their future entirely in their own hands. They will create it, and in the meantime the Met fans, we happy many, can witness and share this youthful adventure." (P. 54-55)
"...events on a sporting field are so brief that they belong almost instantly to the past." (P. 57)
"What does depress me about the decease of the bony, misshapen old playground is the attendant irrevocable deprivation of habit - the amputation of so many private, repeated, and easily renewable small familiarities. The things I liked best about the Polo Grounds were sights and emotions so inconsequential that they will surely slide out of my recollection. ... Demolition and alteration are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that we may not possess the scorecards and record books to help us remember who we are and what we have seen and loved." (P. 57-58)
"The bright colors of the stands are cheerful, I guess, but women in the field boxes are not going to be pleased with their complexions during night games, when the floodlights bouncing off those yellow seats make the section look like a hepatitis ward." (P. 60)
"The homing fans on the IRT sounded like children returning from a birthday party that featured a good magician: 'Did you see that!'" (P. 62)
"As one sportswriter has observed, the only thing the Mets have to fear is mediocrity. This year, the Mets cause reminds me of nothing so much as a party of young radical vegetarians who find they are on the point of being taken seriously and, somewhat anxiously, begin to understand that they are on the printed ballots at last and are thus capable of being beaten, instead of merely insulted and brushed aside." (P. 68)
(P. 95)
"It must be assumed that baseball executives will do almost anything to climb aboard this gaudy bandwagon, and that the ultimate shape of baseball in the next ten years or so - its size, its franchise locations, and even its rules - will be largely determined not by tradition or regard for the fans or regard for the delicate balances of the game, but by the demands of the little box." (P. 101)
"The ability to find beauty and involvement in artificial commercial constructions is essential to most of us in the modern world; it is the life-giving naivete." (P. 101)
"I dug down with my fingers and found the spine of one of the hidden foul-line-to-foul-line zippers that hold the new infield together; I had the sudden feeling that if I unzipped it, I might uncover the world's first plastic worm." (P. 130-131)
"'This park keeps 'em interested enough so they don't have to keep busy with a pencil and scorecard. Why, in most other parks you got nothing to do but watch the game, keep score, and sit on a hard wooden seat. This place was built to keep the fans happy. They've got our good seats, fine restaurants, and our scoreboard to look at, and they don't have to make a personal sacrifice to like baseball. ... We're in the business of sports entertainment. Baseball isn't a game to which your individuals come alone just to watch the game. They come for social enjoyment. They like to entertain and be entertained at the ballpark.'" (P. 134)
(P. 183 - P. 186)
"I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ball game: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be." (P. 214)
"...for he went everywhere with a small attendant cloud of out-of-town and local sportswriters. Their task was unenviable. Every one of them was there to ask what is, in effect the sportswriter's only question - the question that remains unanswerable, because it scratches at the mystery that will always separate the spectator from the athlete: 'How does it feel to be you?'" (P. 264)
I'll try to keep my gushing to a minimum, but it's just really nice when something so completely lives up to the hype. I tried my absolute hardest to not include the entire book in my Notable Quotable but the endeavor became nearly impossible once Angell started waxing poetic about the terrible, lovable 62 Mets. It's also really nice when someone takes something you love so much and can tell you exactly why you love it, across the spans of time and space.
Time and space? Well, yes - Angell wrote this book over the course of 10 seasons between 1962 and 1971, but if you had instead labeled those years 2011 to 2020, I wouldn't have noticed. The Mets were a terrible, embarrassing team at the start but later challenged for a World Series, teams threatening relocation in the name of (theoretical) financial gain at the expense of their fan bases, and baseball itself went through a talent-based existential crisis while featuring some of the greatest players to ever take the field.
Despite being so tickled by the accounts of the 1962 Mets (I've previously read "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?", but the fan perspective was an extra feather in the cap of the story of that wonderful team), what I'll remember from this book is how eerily similar conversations about the game are 50 years later and just how prescient Angell was watching this game as a fan. He adequately captured the new model of stadium, The Astrodome, that sought to capture the fan's attention with bells and whistles rather than the product on the field. The crisis invoked by the "Year of the Pitcher," in 1968, was broken down so comprehensively in just three pages that I had to mark it (183 - 186) even though I couldn't reproduce the totality of the quote.
Ultimately, though, this book serves as proof that once something good can be exploited for financial gain by people who are already richer than anyone ever needs to be, it will be a diluted and worse product as a result. Expansion - a necessity to bringing the Mets into the league! - meant it became much more difficult to follow the sport as a whole, more players (read: worse) playing the game than ever before, all in the name of making the sport more money than ever before; taxpayer-funded stadiums built to exploit the attention of upper-income fans, which increased the base of people to draw from but diluted their interest in the product; relocation, or to put it more bluntly, the shell game where a team that "doesn't make enough money" might make a little bit more for a few years by switching cities, alienating their fan base and present community.
All that said, this book also serves as proof that the game of baseball has survived the money-grubbing tomfoolery to still exist as a product worth watching. Sure, there's a group hoping for expansion to some cities that do really deserve a team. Sure, two teams are threatening relocation for financial gain. Sure, the commissioner's office is threatening tradition-altering rule changes in the name of making the game more entertaining. In fact, they've already done that. Sure, the change in emphasis on run-scoring and run-prevention has likely rendered pitchers to be mere throwers and batters to be mere swingers.
None of this has yet killed the game of baseball or what makes it so great. If tonight is a night between April and October, I'll surely be tuning in to watch the Mets.
Notable Quotable:
"'It don't seem any time at all since spring training last year.'
'That's because we're older now. You take my grandson, he's always looking forward to something. Christmas and his birthday and things like that. That makes the time go slow for him. You and me, we just watch each day by itself.'" (P. 11-12)
"What cheered me as I tramped through the peanut shells and discarded programs and out into the hot late sunlight was not just the score and not just Casey's triumph but a freshly renewed appreciation of the marvelous complexity and balance of baseball. Off hand, I can think of no other sport in which the world's champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every home-town fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy." (P. 15)
"I was pained for the Mets, and embarrassed as a fan. 'Baseball isn't usually like this,' I explained to my daughter." (P. 36)
"Instantly, however, I learned how wrong I had been. Gil's homer pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full, furious, happy shout of 'Let's go, Mets! Let's go, Mets!' There were wild cries of encouragement before every pitch, boos for every called strike. This was no Dodger crowd, but a huge gathering of sentimental home-towners. Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible." (P. 37)
"Sandy Koufax and I had learned the same odd lesson: It is safe to assume that the Mets are going to lose, but dangerous to assume that they won't startle you in the process." (P. 38)
"During this exciting foolishness, I scrutinized the screamers around me and tried to puzzle out the cause of their unique affliction. It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand-man audience made up exclusively of born losers - leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines - who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless cause. ... Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try - antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultation yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me." (P. 40-41)
"(The Mets, like France in the nineteen-twenties, have a missing generation between the too old and the too young.)" (P. 43)
"Good pitching in a close game is the cement that makes baseball the marvelous, complicated structure that it is. It raises players to keenness and courage; it forces managers to think about strategy rather than raw power; it nails the fan's attention, so that he remembers every pitch, every throw, every span of inches that separates hits from outs. And in the end, of course, it implacably reveals the true talents of the teams on the field." (P. 43)
"I entered the fiasco in my scorecard, nodding my head sadly; same old Mets." (P. 48)
"Watching baseball at the Polo Grounds this spring has made cruel demands on my objectivity. The perspiring earnestness of all the old and new Mets, their very evident delight in their own brief flashes of splendor, their capacity for coming up with the unexpected right play and the unexpected winning game, and the general squaring of shoulders visible around the home-team dugout have provided me with so much fun and so many surprises that my impulse is simply to add my voice to the ear-rendering anthem of the Met grandstand choir - that repeated, ecstatic yawp of 'Let's go, Mets!' backed by flourishes and flatted arpeggios from a hundred dented Boy Scout bugles. Caution forces me to add, under the yells, that this is still not a good ball team." (P. 50)
"The noisy, debris-throwing, excitable Met fans have inspired a good deal of heavyweight editorial theorizing this year. Sportswriters have named them 'The New Breed.' Psychologists, anthropologists, and Max Lerner have told us that the fans' euphoria is the result of a direct identification with the have-not Mets, and is anti-authoritarian, anti-Yankee, id-satisfying, and deeply hostile. Well, yes - perhaps. But the pagan apres-midi d'un Met fan, it seems to me, also involves a simpler kind of happiness. The Mets are refreshing to every New York urbanite if only because they are unfinished. The ultimate shape, essence, and reputation of this team are as yet invisible, and they will not be determined by an architect, a developer, a parks commissioner, a planning board, or the City Council. Unlike many of us in the city, the Mets have their future entirely in their own hands. They will create it, and in the meantime the Met fans, we happy many, can witness and share this youthful adventure." (P. 54-55)
"...events on a sporting field are so brief that they belong almost instantly to the past." (P. 57)
"What does depress me about the decease of the bony, misshapen old playground is the attendant irrevocable deprivation of habit - the amputation of so many private, repeated, and easily renewable small familiarities. The things I liked best about the Polo Grounds were sights and emotions so inconsequential that they will surely slide out of my recollection. ... Demolition and alteration are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that we may not possess the scorecards and record books to help us remember who we are and what we have seen and loved." (P. 57-58)
"The bright colors of the stands are cheerful, I guess, but women in the field boxes are not going to be pleased with their complexions during night games, when the floodlights bouncing off those yellow seats make the section look like a hepatitis ward." (P. 60)
"The homing fans on the IRT sounded like children returning from a birthday party that featured a good magician: 'Did you see that!'" (P. 62)
"As one sportswriter has observed, the only thing the Mets have to fear is mediocrity. This year, the Mets cause reminds me of nothing so much as a party of young radical vegetarians who find they are on the point of being taken seriously and, somewhat anxiously, begin to understand that they are on the printed ballots at last and are thus capable of being beaten, instead of merely insulted and brushed aside." (P. 68)
(P. 95)
"It must be assumed that baseball executives will do almost anything to climb aboard this gaudy bandwagon, and that the ultimate shape of baseball in the next ten years or so - its size, its franchise locations, and even its rules - will be largely determined not by tradition or regard for the fans or regard for the delicate balances of the game, but by the demands of the little box." (P. 101)
"The ability to find beauty and involvement in artificial commercial constructions is essential to most of us in the modern world; it is the life-giving naivete." (P. 101)
"I dug down with my fingers and found the spine of one of the hidden foul-line-to-foul-line zippers that hold the new infield together; I had the sudden feeling that if I unzipped it, I might uncover the world's first plastic worm." (P. 130-131)
"'This park keeps 'em interested enough so they don't have to keep busy with a pencil and scorecard. Why, in most other parks you got nothing to do but watch the game, keep score, and sit on a hard wooden seat. This place was built to keep the fans happy. They've got our good seats, fine restaurants, and our scoreboard to look at, and they don't have to make a personal sacrifice to like baseball. ... We're in the business of sports entertainment. Baseball isn't a game to which your individuals come alone just to watch the game. They come for social enjoyment. They like to entertain and be entertained at the ballpark.'" (P. 134)
(P. 183 - P. 186)
"I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ball game: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be." (P. 214)
"...for he went everywhere with a small attendant cloud of out-of-town and local sportswriters. Their task was unenviable. Every one of them was there to ask what is, in effect the sportswriter's only question - the question that remains unanswerable, because it scratches at the mystery that will always separate the spectator from the athlete: 'How does it feel to be you?'" (P. 264)
petergarthwaite's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
thomcat's review against another edition
5.0
A collection of essays about baseball, from 1962 to 1971. This era saw expansion, a new round of playoffs, dominating performance from pitchers or hitters, and the first hints of free agency. His prose is often poetic. The last essay is the best, looking back at baseball in his father's era and describing the true timelessness of the game.
Much of this book focuses on the Mets, from an expansion cellar dweller to the amazing season of 1969. Baltimore, a dominant team in this era, also receives plenty of ink. This book is not just about the teams, though - he looks at the fans, the stadiums, the media, and even sport in general. His comments on growing homogenization and increasing playoffs also ring true in our era.
Already a writer, these essays represent his first foray into baseball, and start (appropriately enough) with spring training. His observations are from a perspective that Ring Lardner and others didn't have, as embroiled as they were in the game. The last essay was partially about what the 70s would bring, and also reflected on what the 20s held for his father's generation. This is a quote from that essay:
“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. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.”
I look forward to reading (and rereading) more from this author.
Much of this book focuses on the Mets, from an expansion cellar dweller to the amazing season of 1969. Baltimore, a dominant team in this era, also receives plenty of ink. This book is not just about the teams, though - he looks at the fans, the stadiums, the media, and even sport in general. His comments on growing homogenization and increasing playoffs also ring true in our era.
Already a writer, these essays represent his first foray into baseball, and start (appropriately enough) with spring training. His observations are from a perspective that Ring Lardner and others didn't have, as embroiled as they were in the game. The last essay was partially about what the 70s would bring, and also reflected on what the 20s held for his father's generation. This is a quote from that essay:
“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. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.”
I look forward to reading (and rereading) more from this author.
castlelass's review against another edition
4.0
Compilation of Roger Angell’s essays about baseball, written for the New Yorker during the 1962 – 1971 seasons. He recaps each year’s World Series, but most of the highlights for me were the sections of local flavor, such as visiting Spring Training, describing the rollercoaster ride of a New York Mets fan, covering the early days of the Houston Astrodome, observing the arrival of “sports as entertainment” (which continues to this day), recounting the French terms used by the dual-language Montreal Expos, putting forth views on expansion and the attendant increase in playoffs (which was just beginning back then), and relating the sights and sounds of what it was like to attend games in various stadiums across the country. The last essay, The Inner Stadium, explores the timelessness of baseball, and how events and players can be clearly recalled from memory no matter how much time has passed. Angell’s prose is top notch, evoking the spirit of the period in a vivid manner. His love of the game shines through. Published in 1972, it is a product of its time, so there are a few references that may not sit well with women or other groups. Highly recommended to baseball fans, especially those interested in reading about the history of the game.