Memories

By Paul Gray

LATE INNINGS: A BASEBALL COMPANION by Roger Angell Simon & Schuster; 429 pages; $17.50

Readers who follow both The New Yorker and baseball have grown accustomed to the routine of Author Roger Angell. Each spring, usually in April, he appears in print with his impressions of the Florida and Arizona training camps, early warmups for the major league season ahead. Midsummers often bring his reflections from far off the beaten base paths: he has spent some time with a former star or picked up on the fortunes of an obscure semipro pitcher. After the World Series, he recaps the autumn games and the various heroics leading up to them. Now another pattern is emerging. His pieces were collected into books in 1972 (The Summer Game) and 1977 (Five Seasons). No fan will have trouble interpreting these statistics. It is 1982, time for another quinquennial classic.

And here it is. Late Innings moves gracefully and eclectically over five more seasons, some of the most turbulent in the history of baseball. The first class of free agents appears in 1977, a few of its members bemused recipients of multimillion-dollar contracts. Hearing cries of alarm from owners and a few fans, Angell remains calm: "The startling new salaries may represent both a contemporary reality and a historical inevitability, and are thus perhaps best approached with curiosity rather than horror." But four springs later he is horrified at what money is doing to baseball. The owners are trying to curb their own profligacy by shackling the players, who are threatening to strike. The Yankees have promised to pay Dave Winfield something like $20 million for ten years of play. Angell mourns: "The top salary figures, whatever their explanation, are beyond ignoring and beyond rational defense, for they deform and shame the sport."

He is not siding here with baseball's troglodytes but with its fans. He roots for the players up to the point at which their paychecks obscure their talent. Thanks to a well-publicized contract, Angell argues, "Dave Winfield is no longer a ballplayer but a celebrity. We have lost him, and we will lose more and more like him, as the subtle, ancient bonds of imagination and appreciation and expert knowledge that have connected each true fan to each player of this beautiful and difficult sport become frayed or severed by distraction or greed."

Despite the glare of big bucks, Angell manages to look keenly at another kind of green, the elegant space where the game goes on. Late Innings is crammed with vivid snapshots (Pete Rose: "round, hard, firmly packed, resilient, interesting--a bag of basketballs"). Unforgettable contests are meticulously restaged. The Yankees and Red Sox meet again at Fenway Park to decide, in nine innings, the 1978 A.L. Eastern Division championship. Angell watches and listens to the Boston fans: "The cheering, when it came, was savage but abrupt, quickly terminated again and again by the weight and anxiety of the occasion. It was a game played for the most part in a profound, crowded silence." Such passages do full justice to baseball's Keatsian overtones: joy semisweetened by the certain knowledge, every game, every season, that all the careers of all the young players will end, victims of winter and old age. Thanks, in part, to Angell, the memories linger. His book helps the mind to hold the past and look forward to the rebirths of spring . --By Paul Gray

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