Authors: Roger Angell
ISBN-13: 9780803259515, ISBN-10: 0803259514
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Date Published: March 2004
Edition: Reprint
Roger Angell is a writer and fiction editor with the New Yorker. His works include Five Seasons (available in a Bison Books edition), Game Time, and A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone.
The Summer Game, Roger Angell’s first book on the sport, changed baseball writing forever. Thoughtful, funny, appreciative of the elegance of the game and the passions invested by players and fans, it goes beyond the usual sports reporter’s beat to examine baseball’s complex place in our American psyche.
Between the miseries of the 1962 expansion Mets and a classic 1971 World Series between the Pirates and the Orioles, Angell finds baseball in the 1960s as a game in transitionmarked by league expansion, uprooted franchises, the growing hegemony of television, the dominance of pitchers, uneasy relations between players and owners, and mounting competition from other sports for the fans’ dollars.
Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Brooks Robinson, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Carl Yastrzemski, Tom Seaver, Jim Palmer, and Casey Stengel are seen here with fresh clarity and pleasure. Here is California baseball in full flower, the once-mighty Yankees in collapse, baseball in French (in Montreal), indoor baseball (at the Astrodome), and sweet spring baseball (in Florida)as Angell observes, Always, it seems, there is something more to be discovered about this game.”
“A decade’s worth of meditations and observations . . . searching for the Higher Game, the cosmology behind each pitch, each swing, each ‘shared joy and ridiculous hope’ of summer’s long adventure.”
Foreword | ix | |
1. | Rustle of Spring | |
Box Scores | 3 | |
The Old Folks behind Home | 6 | |
The Short Season | 19 | |
2. | Amazin' | |
The "Go!" Shouters | 35 | |
S Is for So Lovable | 46 | |
Farewell | 57 | |
A Clean, Well-Lighted Cellar | 59 | |
3. | Classics and Campaigns--I | |
A Tale of Three Cities | 71 | |
Taverns in the Town | 83 | |
Two Strikes on the Image | 95 | |
West of the Bronx | 109 | |
4. | The Future, Maybe | |
The Cool Bubble | 125 | |
5. | Classics and Campaigns--II | |
A Terrific Strain | 143 | |
The Flowering and Subsequent Deflowering of New England | 158 | |
A Little Noise at Twilight | 181 | |
The Leaping Corpse, the Shallow Cellar, the French Pastime, the Walking Radio, and Other Summer Mysteries | 197 | |
Days and Nights with the Unbored | 215 | |
The Baltimore Vermeers | 234 | |
Part of a Season: Bay and Back Bay | 252 | |
Some Pirates and Lesser Men | 269 | |
6. | The Interior Stadium | |
The Interior Stadium | 291 |