Game Time: A Baseball Companion » (First Harvest Edition)

ROGER ANGELL is a writer and fiction editor with the New Yorker. He lives in New York.

STEVE KETTMANN has covered baseball for the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. He lives in Berlin.

Roger Angell has been writing about baseball for more than forty years . . . and for my money he's the best there is at it," says novelist Richard Ford in his introduction to Game Time. Angell's famous explorations of the summer game are built on acute observation and joyful participation, conveyed in a prose style as admired and envied as Ted Williams's swing. Angell on Fenway Park in September, on Bob Gibson brooding in retirement, on Tom Seaver in mid-windup, on the abysmal early and recent Mets, on a scout at work in backcountry Kentucky, on Pete Rose and Willie Mays and Pedro Martinez, on the astounding Barry Bonds at Pac Bell Park, and more, carry us through the arc of the season with refreshed understanding and pleasure. This collection represents Angell's best writings, from spring training in 1962 to the explosive World Series of 2002.

Time

One of Game Times many virtues is that...Angell never for amoment forces the game to carry a meaning, metaphorical or otherwise, that it doesn't ask for. A deep thinker he may be, even an intellectual, but whatever baseball's true meaning, he has the good grace to write around it: he leaves the unutterable unuttered.