Roger Angell

Legendary baseball writer passed away yesterday at age 101. This quote has been making the rounds on social media so I'm posting it here, too. Context is Carlton Fisk's "waved-fair" home run in the 1975 World Series, but applicability is much broader.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look--I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring--caring deeply and passionately, really caring--which is a capacity or emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté--the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball--seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

(Yes, that's a New Yorker dieresis.)