Roger Angell Quotes

• 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.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Time, Forever

  FaceBook post by Roger Angell from May 10, 2017

  73 Copy quote

• I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Two, Three

  Roger Angell (2004). “The Summer Game”, p.214, U of Nebraska Press

  23 Copy quote

• Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers' youth, and even back then ... there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Father, Moving

  Roger Angell (1991). “Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader”, Ivan R Dee

  31 Copy quote

• Hold a baseball in your hand ... 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.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Hands, Games

  Roger Angell (2013). “Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion”, p.5, Open Road Media

  28 Copy quote

• Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance - thrown hard and with precision.

  Roger Angell

  Beautiful, Baseball, Distance

  Roger Angell (2013). “Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion”, p.5, Open Road Media

  27 Copy quote

• 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 exultant 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.

  Roger Angell

  Yankees, Perfection, Half

  22 Copy quote

• I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.

  Roger Angell

  Men, Air, Scripture

  "This Old Man" by Roger Angell, www.newyorker.com. February 17, 2014.

  15 Copy quote

• Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions.

  Roger Angell

  Loyalty, Baseball, Beer

  Roger Angell (2013). “The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket”, p.1294, Open Road Media

  19 Copy quote

• Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time.

  Roger Angell

  Writing, Hard

  Roger Angell (2015). “This Old Man: All in Pieces”, p.18, Anchor

  21 Copy quote

• What really makes baseball so hard is it's retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game.

  Roger Angell

  Sports, Baseball, Games

  13 Copy quote

• Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

  Roger Angell

  Loss, Glimpse, Faces

  Roger Angell (2007). “Let Me Finish”, p.2, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  18 Copy quote

• Baseball’s absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Unpredictability, Absolutes

  "Almost Over" by Roger Angell, www.newyorker.com. October 29, 2014.

  10 Copy quote

• What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.

  Roger Angell

  Phones, Mind, Breakfast

  "Over the Wall" by Roger Angell, www.newyorker.com. November 19, 2012.

  14 Copy quote

• The best defense against partisanship is expertise.

  Roger Angell

  Defense, Partisanship, Expertise

  "An Interview With Roger Angell: 'They Look Easy, But They're Hard'". Interview with Jared Haynes, thestacks.deadspin.com. 1992.

  20 Copy quote

• Losing is the bane and bugbear of every professional athlete's existence, but in baseball the monster seems to hang closer than in other sports, its chilly claws and foul breath palpable around the neck hairs of the infielder bending for his crosshand scoop or the reliever slipping his first two fingers off-center on the ball seams before delivering his two-and-two cut fastball.

  Roger Angell

  Sports, Baseball, Athlete

  11 Copy quote

• I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Book, Reading

  10 Copy quote

• Infield practice is more mystic ritual than preparation, encouraging the big-leaguer, no less than the duffer in the stands, to believe in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that playing ball is a snap.

  Roger Angell

  Sports, Believe, Practice

  9 Copy quote

• Friends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television close-up of Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all.

  Roger Angell

  Men, Games, Tears

  12 Copy quote

• The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.

  Roger Angell

  Different, Catchers, Great Things

  20 Copy quote

• Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and lowlights, dingers and shutouts, streaks and slumps.

  Roger Angell

  Sports, Baseball, Slumps

  15 Copy quote

• We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

  Roger Angell

  Reading, Book, Almost Perfect

  Roger Angell (2015). “This Old Man: All in Pieces”, p.20, Anchor

  8 Copy quote

• I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Player, Want

  20 Copy quote

• Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

  Roger Angell

  Trying, Fiction, Stories

  Roger Angell (2007). “Let Me Finish”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• I've been lucky. I've met a lot of baseball people, and I've learned to value people who talk - people who talk well and in long sentences and even long paragraphs.

  Roger Angell

  Baseball, Long, People

  6 Copy quote

• Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching - mostly watching on television - we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.

  Roger Angell

  Sports, Eye, Goal

  Roger Angell (2013). “The Summer Game”, p.348, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

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