Homers of the Homer

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This was before the days of the flacks and handlers whose job it is to make athletes talk like robots. With owner George Steinbrenner fanning the flames, the Yankees butted heads in the ugliest, most public manner imaginable, then pulled it together to triumph over the hated Red Sox in a one-day tie-breaker play-off that remains one of the most beautiful, jewel-like ball games ever played. Kahn's glittering group portrait paints the Yanks as both goats and heroes, and they are vividly, engagingly, enragingly human in both roles. Kahn is the author of The Boys of Summer — which SPORTS ILLUSTRATED named last year as the second greatest sports book of all time (behind A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science) — and he has been covering the Yankees for 50 years. His prose is the quintessence of the newspaper school of sportswriting — he can epitomize a player with a single swing of the pen, as it were. If you're wondering how that's done, consider his 18-word skewering of Yankees centerfielder John Milton ("Mickey") Rivers: "He may well be the only person named for John Milton who has never heard of John Milton."

Roger Angell, by contrast, comes from the magazine writer's school of sportswriting: calm, meditative, not deadline driven or space cramped, free to follow the fast-and-slow, squeeze-and-relax rhythms of the game. His new book, Game Time (Harcourt; 398 pages), is a collection of pieces written for the New Yorker. Culled from 40 years and around a million words of baseball writing, they have a certain aged, triple-distilled quality: each one has the internal complexity of a novel. Angell likes to skirt the edges of the diamond: he keeps a lonely big-league scout company as he roves bedraggled backwoods ball parks in search of talent, he hunts down the aging grandmaster Bob Gibson in retirement, and he joins Shakespeare-quoting baseball announcer Tim McCarver in the broadcast booth. The pieces are arranged to follow the chronology of the season rather than of the century, a configuration that doesn't make sense until you start reading, and some of the best writing comes at the beginning, in the chapters covering the meaningless, sun-soaked overture of spring training. There, sitting in the stands with the senior citizens in Sarasota, Fla., watching a trio of trainee pitchers share a joke, Angell confronts the hidden pain nursed by every bleacher bum: "We would never be part of that golden company on the field, which each of us, certainly for one moment of his life, had wanted more than anything else in the world to join." It's like being a Muggle with your nose pressed up against the gates of Hogwarts.

Born in 1920, Angell is now one of those senior citizens, old enough to have bumped into a retired Babe Ruth on the street wearing his (Ruth's, that is) signature camel's-hair coat and cap. But in the autobiographical chapter "Early Innings," Angell allows us to glimpse the moment when he, a control-challenged junior-high screwball hurler, gave up his big-league dreams and "took up smoking and irony in self-defense." He must have outgrown the irony too — otherwise how could he describe with such tender eloquence a forgettable player, onetime New York Mets shortstop Tony Fernandez, taking batting practice, "laying each bunt down like a necktie on a bed." Hopping adroitly from decade to decade, backward and forward, Angell blows the dust off such near forgotten minor marvels as the switch-hitting Cleveland Indian Carlos Baerga crushing two home runs in the same inning from opposite sides of the plate, and a game in 1933 (Angell was there) in which one Luke Sewell, catching for the now defunct Washington Senators, tagged out two bunched-up runners at the plate (Lou Gehrig was one of them) with a single grand, sweeping, run-cancelling gesture. Angell writes like an outfielder at the warning track, performing a running plie with outstretched glove, gracefully saving priceless wonders like these from the bleachers of oblivion.