Game Time: A Baseball Companion (Hardcover)

~ (Author), (Editor), Richard Ford (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Game Time, Roger Angell’s essays illuminate baseball’s heart and history in careful prose that New Yorker readers have grown to anticipate each spring. The collection spans the forty-plus years of Angell’s baseball writing career and includes many of his favorite pieces as well as never-before-published material.

Rather than stringing the selections together chronologically, the book's editor, Steve Kettmann, groups them by the three seasons of the game—spring, summer, fall. The structure works well to expose the breadth and depth of Angell’s writing across the years. As Richard Ford promises in the introduction, "It is by getting those. . . baseball essentials (strategies, nuances, protocols) down onto the page, and cementing the hard foundation without which sporstswriting can’t earn your time away from the game itself, that Angell has made his bones."

The downside of this approach, however, is that some selections feel dated or misplaced for readers who did not live through the seasons in question. Many of the rookies scouted or players traded have long since faded into the obscurity. And for essays like "Distance," which profiles pitcher Bob Gibson, placement in "Summer" seems forced, the piece beginning as it does with recollection of Gibson’s seventeen strikeout record set in the 1968 World Series.

But these are faults to be expected in a collection that represent the vastness of Angell’s contribution to baseball. In Angell, baseball is blessed to have found its perfect fan: literate, humble, and always eager for spring.--Patrick O’Kelley

From Publishers Weekly

Baseball, a linear game with undulating peaks and valleys, has always attracted more writers than other sports, and of those many writers few have captured the essence of the game better than Angell. This collection of new and previously published writings edited by sports writer Kettmann is a testament to Angell's unquestioned writing skills and love of the game. Chronicling unlikely people and places-a pitcher uneasy in his retirement, a struggling former star, Fenway Park from the bowels of the right-field grandstand, the faceless scout-Angell often eschews the stories in the glare of the spotlight to examine the core values of the national pastime. Like a switch hitter, he deftly commands poetic descriptions (describing Dan Quisenberry's delivery: "a swallowlike, harmless-looking thing that rose abruptly... then changed its mind") and insightful analysis (on records being broken: "this erosion of the game's most famous fixed numbers... makes baseball statistics seem alive and urgent") to create essays that rise and fall like the very action on the field. Unlike many baseball writers who remember watching the likes of Lou Gehrig play at the Polo Grounds, Angell is able to convey his love for the game of yesteryear while still appreciating the stars, achievements and intricacies of the modern game. He manages all of this by not hiding his passion for the sport under the guise of journalistic detachment. On the contrary, he wears his heart on his sleeve, rooting his way through this collection of poignant and personal slices of Americana.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; 1 edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151008248
• ISBN-13: 978-0151008247
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #838,977 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Pair--Baseball Season and Roger Angell, April 1, 2003

By	C. W. Emblom "Bill Emblom" (Ishpeming, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you are familiar with past baseball books of Roger Angell you know you are in for another treat with his latest offering. Part of the book includes passages from past books, but, at least to me, it doesn't detract from this book at all. A good part of the book covers recent playoffs and World Series including 2002 and if you followed the games during the past several years, these parts of the book will have additional meaning to you. A lengthy section on former Cardinals' fireballer Bob Gibson and a visit with Smokey Joe Wood while viewing a college game between Yale and St. Johns with Ron Darling and Frank Viola matching up against one another are included as is a section on broadcaster Tim McCarver "There's a lahn drahve!", and another on a scouting mission with California Angels scout Ray Scarborough. Some of these offerings go back to the early 1960's until through the year 2002. In describing playoff and World Series games, Angell doesn't merely recite game facts as to who got hits and scored runs. He has a knack for making the reader feel he is there and tells the story with colorful prose. Here are a few examples: "The hankie hordes were in full cry at the Metrodome, where the World Series began." "We repaired to Milwaukee, where, on a cold and blustery evening in the old steel-post park, County Stadium, Willie McGee staged his party." Regarding Dennis Eckersley: "His eyes burning like flashlights as he spoke." "Luis Sojo, a Venezuelan, is thirty-four but looks as if he'd put on a much older guy's body that morning by mistake." After working on a screwball in high school to imitate Giants' pitcher Carl Hubbell, Angell said, "I began walking around school corridors with my pitching hand turned palm outward, like Carl Hubbell's, but nobody noticed." I could go on and on and on with colorful tidbits found in the book, but I don't want to spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, if you buy this book you are in for a treat. Don't speed read it. This isn't a book to be gulped. It is like a Godiva chocolate bar. This book is to be savored.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Lovely Reintroduction, June 2, 2003

By	BluesDuke "A sacred cow is worth but one thin... (Huntington Beach, California) - See all my reviews

The only reason I took off a star is because...well, I have bathed in the warm waters of Roger Angell's baseball chronicling since the publication of his first such anthology, "The Summer Game," and I have bought every last one of the successor books ("Five Seasons," "Late Innings," "Season Ticket," and "Once More Around The Park"), and I really didn't need to see a lot of the essays contained in this volume all over again. Even if I think "Distance" is the absolute best and most humane essay you'll ever read about Bob Gibson, please: A third anthologising (it debuted in "Late Innings" and was recycled in "Once More Around The Park") was as excessive as some would consider a stolen base in the eighth inning when the thief's team was on the winning side of a 12-1 blowout.

But if you have never before approached even the edge of those waters, this is the book with which you want to begin; the editing and arranging of the material, appropriately enough into seasonal sections, is even better than "Once More Around The Park's" had been. Don't let my harrumphing about over-repetition of some choice essays deter you (I certainly didn't let it keep me from adding this to my library). If you are a newcomer to Mr. Angell's virtuosity (and if you are a newcomer, you should probably ask yourself where you've been all your life), from the loveliest book of baseball letters of the year. Peter Golenbock, in his oral history of the Boston Red Sox, called Mr. Angell "baseball's Homer," but Golenbock has it backward. With apologies to no one, Homer shall have to settle for having been ancient Greece's Roger Angell.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A literate baseball treat, August 22, 2003

By	Chris Vallancourt (Maynard, MA United States) - See all my reviews

Pound for pound Roger Angell is the best baseball writer living today. Sure, you can follow the stat geeks and daily columnists (and I do), but Angell uses the stats as only part of the story. Writing for the New Yorker has afforded him the luxury of telling the stories behind the game, and it was in the pages of the New Yorker that I first discovered his penchant for weaving great yarns out of the game of baseball, in particular David Cone's disastrous 2000 season with the Yankees which is recounted in GAME TIME.

Whether it is tracking down Bob Gibson, attending a College World Series match up between Frank Viola and Ron Darling with a nonagenarian Smoky Joe Wood, following a major league scout, or sitting with the owner of the San Francisco Giants to simply watch and talk about a game, Angell finds the humanity of the people that make the game so great. He even comes close to making me like Tim McCarver, but, alas, McCarver is still the worst broadcaster in sports.