A chronicle of our national pastime’s most unforgettable era from the bestselling author of The Summer Game—“No one writes better about baseball” (The Boston Globe). Classic New Yorker sportswriter Roger Angell calls 1972 to 1976 “the most important half-decade in the history of the game.” The early to mid-1970s brought unprecedented changes to America’s ancient pastime: astounding performances by Nolan Ryan and Hank Aaron; the intensity of the “best-ever” 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox; the changes growing from bitter and extended labor strikes and lockouts; and the vast new influence of network television on the game. Angell, always a fan as well as a writer, casts a knowing but noncynical eye on these events, offering a fresh perspective to baseball’s continuing appeal during this brilliant and transformative era.

This New York Times bestseller “takes you into the heart of baseball as it was in the 1960s, conveyed with humor and insight” (Tim McCarver, The Wall Street Journal). Acclaimed New Yorker writer Roger Angell’s first book on baseball, The Summer Game, originally published in 1972, is a stunning collection of his essays on the major leagues, covering a span of ten seasons. Angell brilliantly captures the nation’s most beloved sport through the 1960s, spanning both the winning teams and the “horrendous losers,” and including famed players Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Willie Mays, and more. With the panache of a seasoned sportswriter and the energy of an avid baseball fan, Angell’s sports journalism is an insightful and compelling look at the great American pastime.

From “the clear-eyed poet laureate of baseball”—a definitive collection of three nonfiction classics chronicling MLB into the modern age (New York Post). In these three classic volumes, legendary New Yorker sportswriter Roger Angell chronicles the triumphs, travails, heroes, and history of America’s favorite pastime. In The Summer Game, Angell covers ten seasons in the major leagues from the 1960s to the early 1970s. With his signature panache, Angell captures the flavor of the game and the spirit of legends such as Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Willie Mays. In Five Seasons, Angell covers the mid-1970s, which he calls “the most important half-decade in the history of the game.” From the accomplishments of Nolan Ryan and Hank Aaron to the rising influence of network television, Angell offers a fresh perspective on this transformative period. And in Season Ticket, Angell recounts the larger-than-life narratives of baseball in the mid-1980s. Diving into subjects including the notorious 1986 World Series and the Curse of the Bambino, Sparky Anderson’s Detroit Tigers, and performance-enhancing drug use, Angell offers insights that are crucial to understanding the game as we know it today.

The acclaimed New Yorker sportswriter examines the inner working of professional baseball, in these essays from the spring of 1977 to the summer of 1981. Late Innings takes fans far beyond the stadium view of the field and into the substrata of baseball as it is experienced by the people who make it happen. Celebrated as one of the game’s finest chroniclers, Roger Angell shares his commentary on the money, fame, power, traditions, and social aspects of baseball during the late seventies and early eighties. Covering monumental events such as Reggie Jackson’s three World Series home runs and the bitter ordeal of the 1981 players’ strike, Angell offers a timeless perspective on the world of baseball to be enjoyed by fans of all ages.

This essay collection covers more than forty years of history, fandom, and insider analysis from “the best baseball writer of our time—maybe ever” (Newsweek) The celebrated baseball chronicler has selected his favorite pieces from the last forty years to create Once More Around the Park, a definitive volume of his most memorable work. Here are the extraordinary games Roger Angell has witnessed and written about, as well as compelling insights that deepen our love and understanding of the sport. This book includes such timeless essays as “The Interior Stadium,” on the complex attractions of baseball; “In the Country,” on a friendship that began with a fan letter and took Angell far from the big stadiums and big money; “The Arms Talks,” on contemporary pitching strategy and the arrival of the split-finger delivery; and many others. Angell’s conversations with past and present players and managers, scouts and coaches, rookies and Hall of Famers enhance his expertise and critical appreciation, defining him as “baseball’s most eloquent analyst” (The New York Times Book Review).

Roger Angell, the acclaimed New Yorker writer and editor, steps up with a selection of writings that celebrate a view from the tenth decade of an engaged, vibrant life. Whether it’s a Fourth of July in rural Maine, the opening game of the 2015 World Series, editorial exchanges with John Updike, a letter to a son, or his award-winning essay on aging, “This Old Man,” what links the pieces is Angell’s unique perceptions and humor, his utter absence of self-pity, and his appreciation of friends and colleagues encountered over a fruitful career unlike any other.

Baseball's best writer offers an extraordinarily candid and thorough exploration of the inner craft of pitching from one of the game's best, David Cone. There is no big league pitcher who is more respected for his skill than David Cone. In his stellar career Cone has won multiple championships andcountless professional accolades. Along the way, the perennial all-star has had to adjust to five different ballclubs, recover from a career-threatening arm aneurysm, cope with the lofty expectations that are standard for the games highest paid players, and overcome a humbling three-month, eight-game losing streak in the summer of 2000. Cone granted exclusive and unlimited access to baseballs most respected writer Roger Angell of the New Yorker. The result is just what baseball fans everywhere would expect from Angell: an extraordinary inside account of a superstar.

DIVDIVWitty and deftly drawn parodies from a literary legend/div Roger Angell has a long history with the New Yorker: the son of fiction editor Katharine White and the stepson of E. B. White, Angell has spent decades writing and working for the magazine, to which he has contributed across genres and gained special renown for his essays on baseball. With A Day in the Life of Roger Angell, the author’s gifts as an urbane humorist come to the fore. The pieces here include two of Angell’s famous Christmas poems, parodies—of horoscopes, sports broadcasts, and Lawrence Durrell—and a tense correspondence over a short fiction contest that pays only in baked goods. Combined, these miniatures form a funny and charming chronicle of Manhattan life, as experienced both on the ground and in the city’s most literary circles. /div

Essays from the award-winning New Yorker writer and author of This Old Man: “Witty, worldly, deeply elegiac, and…heartbreaking.”—The Boston Globe For more than fifty years, as both editor of and contributor for The New Yorker, Roger Angell has honed a reputation as a master of the autobiographic essay—sharp-witted, plucky, and at once nostalgic and unsentimental. In Let Me Finish, Angell reflects on a remarkable life (while admitting to not really remembering the essentials) and on its influences large and small—from growing up in Prohibition-era New York, to his boyhood romance with baseball, to crossing paths with such twentieth-century luminaries as Babe Ruth, John Updike, Joe DiMaggio, S.J. Perelman, and W. Somerset Maugham. He discusses his dread of Christmas, a revealing recurring dream, and his stepfather, E.B. White. He recalls glorious images from the movies he saw as a child (for which Angell has a nearly encyclopedic memory), the sheer bliss of sailing off the coast of Maine, and the even greater pleasure of heading home to the perfect 6 p.m. vodka martini. Personal, reflective, funny, delightfully random, and disarming, this is a unique collection of scenes from a life by the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Game, “one of the most entertaining and gracious prose stylists of his…generation” (Time). “A lovely book and an honest one…about loyalty and love, about work and play, about getting on with the cards that life deals you. It's also a genuinely grown-up book, a rare gem indeed in our pubescent age.”—The Washington Post

This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the colour barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book fathers and sons and about the making of modern America. 'At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.' Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. The team is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience.