Ironic distance has become not just a hip style but a survival strategy. It gets harder and harder to see that another approach still offers itself. But it does. This is the Angell approach, which is never shy about soaking in the pleasure there is to be had in a good ballgame or a good story. Sometimes this makes for writing that feels soggy, deft as it is sure to be. But taken as a whole, Angell's accounts and his sensibility are courageous in their unwillingness to bend to cynicism. They enrich any baseball imagination. "I think every baseball writer's goal is to one day write as well as Roger," said Baseball Weekly columnist Bob Nightengale. "But that's like saying you hope to hit home runs like Mark McGwire. You're asking the impossible. So we do the next best thing. We read him as much as possible, knowing that we're privileged. He's not only one of the finest writers in America but one of the classiest men I've ever run across."

Angell is looking for something out there, and he wants you to look along with him. Nothing seduces him like the giddy sense of community that comes when a team pieces together a long-awaited victory, as he wrote in his 1975 account of the classic World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. The Sox lost in seven, but thrilled their fans with a great Game 6, the night Carlton Fisk so famously worked his sorcery to ensure his game-winning homer stayed fair and struck the left-field foul pole at Fenway. Angell, no bloodless stooge, exulted along with all of New England.

I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them -- in Brookline, Mass., and Broolin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damriscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont, in Waland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all five Manchesters; and in Ramond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives) and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway -- jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I supposed, and on the back-country roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night) and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy -- alight with it.

Such sentences just don't get written anymore. The word-processing software would deface it in green underline, horrified that anyone could midwife a 194-word sentence. Most any Web editor would picture all the people tumbling away in cyberspace, heading off in search of something shorter, snappier and saltier to snack-read. And it's true, the sentence almost needs a voice-over: "Do not try this at home! Mr. Angell is a trained professional!" But even more striking than the length and grandeur of the sentence is how openhearted it is, almost embarrassingly so.

That's Angell. He did not become a sports fan by watching the "SportsCenter" crew wax glib every night. He did not fall in love with sports by tuning in to talk shows like the Razor and Mr. T in San Francisco that are more likely to devote an hour to fart jokes than to spend a minute talking about sports as if they mean it. Angell grew up a fan, pure and simple. He was 16 when Joe DiMaggio became a Yankee, and he joined much of New York in falling for the gangly, graceful Italian-American. That sense of seeking to identify with something in sports, neither stingily nor provisionally, has stayed with him.

"What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for," Angell wrote in that 1975 piece.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naiveté -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

Angell was not so much born with a silver spoon in his mouth as silver words in his ears. His father was Ernest Angell, a Harvard Law grad and World War I veteran who went on to a career in law in New York. His mother was Katharine Sergeant Angell, whom Harold Ross hired at the New Yorker in 1925, where she was to continue working until she was 68. She was later head of fiction for the magazine, and edited famous writers of her time such as Mary McCarthy, John O'Hara, Alexander Woollcott and Vladimir Nabokov.

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