Roger Angell may be the best baseball writer of his era. For more than thirty years, and in five books, he has expressed a youthful enthusiasm for the American game in mature prose. He has managed to make rooting for the Los Angeles Dodgers or the Chicago White Sox or even the last-place New York Mets seem intellectually respectable. When not writing about baseball Angell is likely to be writing about other, more recognized arts. He recently published in The New Yorker an admiring profile of eighty-seven-year-old author-illustrator William Steig as well as a lyrical little essay on time and the river in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885). But whatever the subject, his prose always possesses the hyperclarity of a ball game played under the lights. He might have been speaking of himself when he said in the Steig profile, "Good writers and painters . . . compliment their audiences by expecting...