Well, this was a treat. Surprisingly, the best baseball writing I have read all year comes in a book written about baseball writing. That new book is called “No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing” by Joe Bonomo. In it, Bonomo takes the reader on a scenic journey through the annals of Angell, baseball’s preeminent philosopher-scribe. Nearing a hundred years old, Angell no longer writes much, and “No Place I Would Rather Be” evokes more than a little sadness at the prolific insight we once had access to as fans of America’s pastime.
This book comes out at a time when there are high profile clamors (including from the commissioner himself) of a crisis in baseball. A view of baseball history through the lens of Angell, whose first encounters with the sport occurred when its headliners were Ruth and Gehrig, alleviates this concern. Baseball is always in flux, and if something is eternally in crisis mode then there is no crisis at all.
What we do have in today’s day and age is a crisis in baseball writing, a fact little acknowledged throughout the game. Perhaps it is unfair to compare modern sportswriters to Roger Angell, since he was always sui generis, but even if Angell does not like to be lumped into such a group, past generations also had talents such as Grantland Rice, David Halberstam and Roger Kahn. Today’s readers, on the other hand, get to read an army of bloggers whose greatest strength is missing the forest for the trees.
Modern baseball writers can be divided into two categories. On one hand, you have the statheads, supremely knowledgeable about the way baseball is now played and how rosters are currently constructed, conversant not just in the alphabet soup of WAR and wRC+ and xwOBA but also in more immediately useful information such as batted ball profile and swinging strike percentage. This faction, sometimes called “the nerds,” is obviously ascendant and clearly has useful information to impart. (Fangraphs writer to MLB front office is now a legitimate career path). Unfortunately, its practitioners too often rely on numbers to do the talking for them, occasionally aided by graphs and GIFs. In combing through troves of data to find topics to write about, these authors have a tendency to lose track of the sportswriter’s prime directive — craft a compelling narrative for the reader to follow.
On the other side of today’s chasm, you will find the traditionalists, the old school BBWAA members whose work has appeared on the back page of your local sports section for at least two decades. This type of baseball writer has no time for baseball’s analytical revolution. Yet, instead of sensing an opportunity when the big brains of the baseball writing corps had trouble converting numbers to text, these writers went the opposite direction, lowering their standard to appeal to the lowest common denominator of baseball fan. Apparently thinking that any knowledgeable fan was already lost to the statheads, these traditionalists began filing stories so banal it is a wonder they get paid to write them (usually quite a bit more than the nerds).
Getting to relive Roger Angell’s heyday through Joe Bonomo’s book is a reminder that baseball writing can be intellectual and accessible. But it is also a reminder that the combination is rare and that save for some propitious circumstances we might not have been blessed with it in the first place. Although “No Place I Would Rather Be” is not a biography, it succeeds in exploring the conditions that made Roger Angell Roger Angell.
The son of a union leader and the first fiction editor of the New Yorker magazine (and stepson of E. B. White), Angell was born and reared in an environment in which words mattered. He also grew up in a city that featured the two best baseball teams of the first quarter of the 20th century, the Giants and Yankees, whose domination in their respective leagues would be enough to catch the attention and devotion of the lonely child from a broken home.
Unlike most so-called journalists, Angell did not set out to be a sportswriter. In fact, he did not pen his first baseball piece for the New Yorker until 1962, when he was over 40 years old. When given his first assignment, he brought his background in fiction-writing to the task and the rest is history.
With Joe Bonomo, this history is in good hands. For the book, Bonomo drew both from the vast archive of Angell’s published work and from the writer’s copious notes. Putting the two together, he is able to add color to the sketch that Angell has provided himself through all these years of confessional baseball writing. An anecdote about the 1986 World Series and Angell’s conflicting allegiances is most revealing in this regard.
“No Place I Would Rather Be” is a great read for devoted fans of Roger Angell as for those who are only obliquely familiar with him. Either way, it will make you pine for his take on the game. The good news is that even if another Roger Angell is not likely to grace us with his presence anytime soon, he has given us thousands of pages to revisit whenever we have the need to reminisce.
