Roger Angell has combined his lifelong enthusiasm for baseball with a talent for composing stylish, intelligent prose to craft masterful essays admired by sports fans and general readers alike. In 1962 he accepted an invitation from the editor of The New Yorker to travel to spring training in Florida. The pieces he wrote during the next decade attracted a fairly select audience that multiplied when his work was collected in a book. During the course of more than thirty years he has been chronicling the sport he loves as a fan, writing with a rare and caring eloquence while taking his readers deep into baseball's elegant complexity.

Angell was born in New York City on 19 September 1920 to Ernest and Katharine Shepley Sergeant Angell. He attended a progressive grammar school, Lincoln School of Teacher's College, and lived with his father after his parents divorced in 1929. "I saw a lot of...