Angell, who turns 80 this year, has been writing about baseball for the New Yorker since 1962, though until recently he devoted much of his time to other tasks at the magazine. A fiction writer whose collected volumes of New Yorker-published work include "The Stone Arbor and Other Stories," published in 1970, Angell was for years chief fiction editor. He made a name for himself as a champion of clarity, and nurtured such major talents as Garrison Keillor, William Trevor and John Updike.

As Keillor told the Atlantic in 1997, Angell was an "old-fashioned seigneur of an editor," the type "who was terribly generous with his praise and apologetic for his criticism and who, if a month passed without submissions from me, would write the most wonderful encouraging letters."

Angell praises current New Yorker fiction and literary editor Bill Buford, the former Granta editor, for putting his stamp on the magazine's fiction more than any previous editor has, but Angell's stamp is there too, and even if he no longer writes his annual Christmas poem for the front of the magazine, the unaffectedly worldly perspective it conjured remains part of the magazine's voice.

Angell edited a recent collection of New Yorker love stories, and also wrote an introduction to a new edition of "The Elements of Style," the classic little book on writing by his stepfather, E.B. White, and William Strunk. But it is in his patient, resourceful baseball writing, which only the cloddish put down as "baseball poetry" (a term he detests), that Angell has touched the most lives. "I've been accused once in a while of being a poet laureate, which has always sort of pissed me off," Angell told me one afternoon in his office at the New Yorker. "That's not what I was trying to do. I think people who said that really haven't read me, because what I've been doing a lot of times is reporting. It's not exactly like everybody else's reporting. I'm reporting about myself, as a fan as well as a baseball writer.

"And I am a baseball writer now. I really have learned a lot about the game after all this time. I don't know everything. But I know a few things. I know what to look for. It's a great game for writers because it's just the right pace. You can watch the game and keep score and look around and take notes. Now and then you even have time to have an idea, which in many sports you don't have room for.

"The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the 'Field of Dreams' thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie. It's mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons. In 'Fields of Dreams' there's a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good, and they're talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition. What is that? That dreaminess, I really hated that."

Angell, always wary of nostalgia, often points out that baseball gets better all the time, its players bigger and stronger and faster, though he does not disguise his misgivings about the home-run glut disfiguring the game. "The modern game is all bangs and effects: it's summer-movie fare, awesome and forgettable -- and extremely popular with the ticket-buyers," he wrote in a recent New Yorker. But overall, baseball is probably better than ever, and so is sports writing. Top papers, especially the New York Times, have worked hard in recent years to beef up their staffs with hungry, young talent, and the rise of Web journalism has opened up a vast smorgasbord of offerings. The typical fan can go to a site like Sportspages.com that can steer him to some of the best columns and stories published around the country on a given day.

Amid this proliferation, Angell stands out as even more of an original. He's no insider, wondering if a backup catcher has strained toenail ligaments, yet he knows the game. He has never been a cardholder in the Baseball Writer's Association of America, and therefore is unlikely ever to have a Hall of Fame vote, yet he has had long, insightful conversations with dozens of Hall of Famers and passed them on to readers. He's a fan of the game, and proud to say so, yet he almost never lets that fact warp his lucid awareness or interfere with his sure instincts into personalities.

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