"Angell is the grand master of the first-hand observation, which is why his baseball writing in T"he New Yorker" is so original and lively and has been for 50 years." (Image by George Grantham Bain.)

The opening of “Still at the Top of His Game,” Michael Bamberger’s excellent new Sports Illustrated appreciation of nonagenarian New Yorker legend Roger Angell, who continues to write some of the most eloquent and incredibly visual sentences you could ever hope to read:

“Roger Angell’s memories of Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium are moving pictures in his head, deposited there when he was a boy absorbed by the pastime and the world around him. The Babe’s big bat, his heavy flannel uniform, the men in fedoras watching him: You and I, way late to the party, have been fed these black-and-white snaps by PBS specials and Hall of Fame exhibits, but that’s not the case for Angell. For him, they’re in color. Angell is the grand master of the first-hand observation, which is why his baseball writing inThe New Yorkeris so original and lively and has been for 50 years.

They say if you watch baseball long enough you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. Maybe that’s what has kept Roger—he’d invite you to call him that—so young, the promise of what the next game might bring. Reading him, you’d never guess his age. He’s 90.

Whatever he wrote in hisNew Yorkerblog last week, you won’t see anywhere else. His pieces get published, on the magazine’s website and in its pages, with no predictable pattern, and every time you come across one, it’s a delight. If you want a traditional ode to the new season, don’t read Angell. Only once, in 1963, did he compare the return of newspaper box scores in April to spring flowers. Only once, in 1988, did he call Bart Giamatti, then the president of the National League, a ‘career .400 talker.’ Only once did Angell compare Tim Lincecum’s stride to ‘a January commuter arching over six feet of slush.’ That was last year.

In his little 20th-floor office in the sleek Condé Nast building in Times Square, Angell—trim and fit in the tweedy uniform of the gentleman farmer—has a pile of Mead spiral-bound notebooks.”