The Summer Game was published by Viking Press in 1972, collecting the baseball essays Angell (stepson of E.B. White, fiction editor of The New Yorker for decades) had been writing for the magazine since 1962. The book established a new form: literary baseball writing that was neither journalistic recap nor statistical analysis but the application of a great prose stylist’s attention to sport as lived experience.
Angell’s method is presence: he goes to games, sits in the stands (or the press box, or the dugout), and observes — not merely the game’s results but its textures: the quality of afternoon light on the grass, the sound a fastball makes hitting a mitt, the particular tension of a seventh-inning rally, the way a crowd’s attention focuses and disperses. His sentences do what the best sentences always do: they make the reader see what they had merely looked at.
The essays cover the 1962–1971 seasons — a period that includes the Mets’ first terrible years, Sandy Koufax’s perfection, the Cardinals’ dynasty, the Impossible Dream Red Sox of 1967, and the Miracle Mets of 1969. But the games are occasions rather than subjects: Angell uses them to explore how time passes, how memory works, how pleasure is constituted, and what it means to pay attention to something beautiful and transient.
The book’s influence on subsequent sports writing is impossible to overstate: every literary sportswriter since 1972 works in Angell’s shadow.
Collecting The Summer Game
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1972): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $5–$12