ladder stretching for the house eaves.” The Baltimore Oriole relief pitcher Dick Hall pitched “with an awkward, sidewise motion that suggests a man feeling under his bed for a lost collar stud.” Mr. Angell (pronounced angel) described Willie Mays chasing down a ball hit to deep center field as “running so hard and so far that the ball itself seems to stop in the air and wait for him.
”The baseball season didn’t seem complete until, as he did late each fall, Mr. Angell wrapped up its multiple meanings in a long New Yorker article. Many of his pieces were collected in books, among them “Late Innings” (1982) and “Once More Around the Park” (1991).
“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,” he wrote in his book “Five Seasons” (1977). “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 an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”
For Mr. Angell, The New Yorker was, to some degree, the family shop. His mother, Katharine Sergeant Angell White, was among the magazine’s first editors hired by Harold Ross in 1925. His stepfather, the essayist E.B. White, was a frequent contributor. Mr. Angell published his first piece in the magazine, a short story, in 1944 and went to work therein
Mr. Angell was known, too, for his annual page-long holiday poem, titled “Greetings, Friends!” The poem, a New Yorker tradition, began in 1932 and was originally written by Frank Sullivan. Mr. Angell wrote “Greetings, Friends!” from 1976 until 1998 when it went on hiatus and restarted in 2008. In recent years, the poem has been written by Ian Frazier.
In his holiday poems, Mr. Angell mixed the boldface names, from high culture and low, that had filtered through that year. Here is a snippet from 1992:
Here’s where hearts grow rife or rifer, Near Donna Tartt and Michelle Pfeiffer, With B.B. King and his Lucille, And Dee Dee Myers and Brian Friel!
Some of his rhymes could be read mischievously. “Yo! Santa man, grab some sky,” he wrote in 1992, “And drop a sock on Robert Bly.”
“I’m not sure there’s ever been a writer so strong, and an editor so important, all at once, at a magazine since the days of H.L. Mencken running The American Mercury,” David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. “Roger was a vigorous editor, and an intellect with broad tastes.”
Mr. Angell became a baseball writer by accident. He was already a fan in 1962 when he told an interviewer for Salon, that he was asked by William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, to “go down to spring training and see what you find.”
It was an auspicious year to be a young baseball writer: the first season of the New York Mets. “They were these terrific losers that New York took to its heart,” Mr. Angel
The tone of his baseball writing, he once said, was inspired by a now canonical John Updike article, written in 1960, about Ted Williams’s final game at Fenway Park in Boston. “My baseball writing was still two years away when I first read ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’” Mr. Angell wrote, “and though it took me a while to become aware of it, John had already supplied my tone, while also seeming to invite me to try for a good sentence now and then, down the line.”
Mr. Angell was sometimes referred to as baseball’s poet laureate, a title he rejected. He called himself a reporter. “The only thing different in my writing,” he said, “is that, almost from the beginning, I’ve been able to write about myself as well.”
He disliked sentimentality about sports. “The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the ‘Field of Dreams’ thing, gives me a pain,” he once said. “I hated that movie.”
He was alert, however, to what he called the “substrata of nuance and lesson and accumulated experience” beneath baseball’s surface. And his humor flashed above all this.
He once referred to Ron Darling as “the best right-handed part-Chinese Yale history major among the Mets starters.” He wrote that Carl Yastrzemski, “like so many great hitters, has oddly protuberant eyes.” And he noted, about a skinny Houston Astros team, that “they sometimes suggest a troupe of gazelles depicted by a Balkan corps de ballet.”
He was born in Manhattan on Sept. 19, 1920. His father, Ernest Angell, was a graduate of Harvard Law School, a World War I veteran, and a former semipro pitcher who in 1950 became the national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. After his parents were divorced, Mr. Angell continued to live in Manhattan with his father.
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