Late Innings is [Angell's] third collection of baseball pieces, and on the whole it reaffirms his position as the most astute and graceful chronicler the sport has known. I say "on the whole" because, at the risk of seeming to deface a national monument, I find Angell somewhat short of his best in many of these articles, which appeared in The New Yorker between 1977 and 1981. He has, perhaps, stayed too long at the fair; especially in his by-now-traditional spring-training and post-season pieces, he too often seems to be going through the motions—brilliant and inimitable motions, to be sure, but familiar ones all the same. This may cause no ennui on the reader's part, but I sense some on Angell's; he is repeating himself, as in his repeated references here to "the foolish and dispiriting winter baseball news." With the exception of a fine profile of the great...