The summer game roger angell summary

It begins:. Baseball as seen through the eyes of a great fan and writer. Young died in , and I have no idea how the book ended up in Woodstock a dozen years later. Maybe he had a summer home nearby.

Yankees in a seven game nail biter. Angell writes about this series and even the game I attended. Reading Angell's description of the various players and situations, especially the World Series, over the decade the book covers, was very satisfying as there was hardly a name he mentioned that I didn't recognize. Maybe I'm more of a "addict" than I realize. I suspect that even someone who's a fan but wasn't there in the 60's will recognize many of the legendary names.

Baseball and its statistics are such a part of the American male psyche that understanding what went before helps us appreciate what is happening now. I truly enjoyed this trip into the past. Jan 26, William rated it really liked it Shelves: sports. I liked it well enough, and it certainly did its job of keeping me sane between baseball seasons.

The writing is, by turns, excellent and plodding. He can bring alive the magic of 50 year old baseball and on the next page go into the play-by-play minutiae which I simply cannot appreciate for large doses. The period of essays in question, - , is also a period of tumult in the game. Expansion teams, team moves, expanded schedule, new ballparks, new fans. All of it gets its day in here, al I liked it well enough, and it certainly did its job of keeping me sane between baseball seasons.

All of it gets its day in here, albeit from the nostalgic point of view of someone who seems to appreciate the old days and the old fans a bit more. Very interesting and worthwhile book. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy. Jul 06, Holly M Wendt rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites.

This is the most beautifully written, smartly felt baseball book I've ever encountered, and it's probably in the five best non-fiction collections I've read. I cannot possibly recommend it enthusiastically enough. Angell is a treasure. Feb 22, Thom rated it it was amazing Shelves: baseball-nf. A collection of essays about baseball, from to This era saw expansion, a new round of playoffs, dominating performance from pitchers or hitters, and the first hints of free agency.

His prose is often poetic. The last essay is the best, looking back at baseball in his father's era and describing the true timelessness of the game. Much of this book focuses on the Mets, from an expansion cellar dweller to the amazing season of Baltimore, a dominant team in this era, also receives pl A collection of essays about baseball, from to Baltimore, a dominant team in this era, also receives plenty of ink.

This book is not just about the teams, though - he looks at the fans, the stadiums, the media, and even sport in general. His comments on growing homogenization and increasing playoffs also ring true in our era. Already a writer, these essays represent his first foray into baseball, and start appropriately enough with spring training.

His observations are from a perspective that Ring Lardner and others didn't have, as embroiled as they were in the game. The last essay was partially about what the 70s would bring, and also reflected on what the 20s held for his father's generation.

You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.

Nov 16, John rated it it was amazing. Roger Angell is my favorite writer on the sport of baseball. This is his first published baseball book, containing his pieces from The New Yorker. The time frame is mostly the s, with the book starting out with a visit to spring training in Florida in Angell, like his stepfather E.

White, is a terrific prose writer and brings out the most wonderful descriptions of ballplayers, the sport itself, and what it is like to be a fan. As the book jacket says, the s were a major era of tran Roger Angell is my favorite writer on the sport of baseball.

As the book jacket says, the s were a major era of transition for baseball and it is covered well under the observant eye of Angell and coupled to his elegant prose.

If you're going to read one writer on baseball, then Angell is your best choice. And this book among his several books would be my recommendation on where to start. Aug 09, Jordan rated it really liked it. Beautiful throughout, but the play-by-play recaps of year-old baseball games are a bit turgid when read so far after the fact.

May 28, Jim rated it it was amazing Shelves: top-shelf. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The Summer Game by Roger Angell I'll try to keep my gushing to a minimum, but it's just really nice when something so completely lives up to the hype. I tried my absolute hardest to not include the entire book in my Notable Quotable but the endeavor became nearly impossible once Angell started waxing poetic about the terrible, lovable 62 Mets. It's also really nice when someone takes something you love so much and can tell you exactly why you love it, across the spans of time and space.

Time and s The Summer Game by Roger Angell I'll try to keep my gushing to a minimum, but it's just really nice when something so completely lives up to the hype. Time and space? Well, yes - Angell wrote this book over the course of 10 seasons between and , but if you had instead labeled those years to , I wouldn't have noticed. The Mets were a terrible, embarrassing team at the start but later challenged for a World Series, teams threatening relocation in the name of theoretical financial gain at the expense of their fan bases, and baseball itself went through a talent-based existential crisis while featuring some of the greatest players to ever take the field.

He adequately captured the new model of stadium, The Astrodome, that sought to capture the fan's attention with bells and whistles rather than the product on the field. The crisis invoked by the "Year of the Pitcher," in , was broken down so comprehensively in just three pages that I had to mark it - even though I couldn't reproduce the totality of the quote. Ultimately, though, this book serves as proof that once something good can be exploited for financial gain by people who are already richer than anyone ever needs to be, it will be a diluted and worse product as a result.

Expansion - a necessity to bringing the Mets into the league! All that said, this book also serves as proof that the game of baseball has survived the money-grubbing tomfoolery to still exist as a product worth watching.

Sure, there's a group hoping for expansion to some cities that do really deserve a team. Sure, two teams are threatening relocation for financial gain. Sure, the commissioner's office is threatening tradition-altering rule changes in the name of making the game more entertaining. In fact, they've already done that. Sure, the change in emphasis on run-scoring and run-prevention has likely rendered pitchers to be mere throwers and batters to be mere swingers. None of this has yet killed the game of baseball or what makes it so great.

If tonight is a night between April and October, I'll surely be tuning in to watch the Mets. Notable Quotable: "'It don't seem any time at all since spring training last year.

You take my grandson, he's always looking forward to something. Christmas and his birthday and things like that. That makes the time go slow for him. You and me, we just watch each day by itself. Off hand, I can think of no other sport in which the world's champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every home-town fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.

Gil's homer pulled the cork, and now there arose from all over the park a full, furious, happy shout of 'Let's go, Mets! Let's go, Mets! This was no Dodger crowd, but a huge gathering of sentimental home-towners.

Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible. It seemed statistically unlikely that there could be, even in New York, a forty- or fifty-thousand-man audience made up exclusively of born losers - leftover Landon voters, collectors of mongrel puppies, owners of stock in played-out gold mines - who had been waiting years for a suitably hopeless cause.

Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try - antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. 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 exultation 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. Keep me logged in. Sign in using your Kirkus account Sign in Keep me logged in. Need Help? Contact us: or email customercare kirkus. Books Read in Centenarian Authors 6. No current Talk conversations about this book. Absolutely love this book.

Jimbookbuff Jun 5, I always try to read a baseball book in February. Few works of art are truly timeless. This is a book that is a memoir and meditation on "America" combining the author's musings with a history of baseball in the 's.

DinadansFriend Feb 15, You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data. The Summer Game. New York Times bestseller General For my father. Plimpton, George. Veeck, Bill. References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English 1 Roger Angell bibliography. A classic collection of early sportswriting by renowned reporter Roger Angell Acclaimed New Yorker writer Roger Angell's first book on baseball, The Summer Game, originally published in , is a stunning collection of his essays on the major leagues, covering a span of ten seasons.