It was almost natural for Angell to make his mark at the magazine, starting with his first piece the year after he graduated from Harvard in 1942. He was in the Army Air Force at the time. "I was just out of college and I wrote a little casual," he told me. "They used to have back-of-the-book, short fiction pieces. And it was bought. It meant a lot to me. In 1956, I guess, my mother had retired and [William] Shawn asked me to come to work. Shawn wanted more sports in the magazine and I think I'd already written a hockey piece on the Rangers. In 1962 he said, 'Go down to spring training and see what you find.'

"That was just like him, not to plan what the story was and see how it would develop. I went on with it because I enjoyed it so much and I seemed to find a way of writing about baseball that was easy for me, kind of like myself. You know, that's a key thing for a writer, to be yourself. It was the first year of the Mets, and that was very lucky for me when I thought it out. It occurred to me fairly early on that nobody was writing about the fans. I was a fan, and I felt more like a fan than a sportswriter. I spent a lot of time in the stands, and I was sort of nervous in the clubhouse or the press box. And that was a great fan story, the first year of the Mets. They were these terrific losers that New York took to its heart."

If Angell's baseball writings have almost always been a pleasure to read in the magazine, they also age well. He had room to sound like himself, as he puts it. The self that comes through sounds old New Yorker at times, but never really dated. His was always the voice of the smart fan talking for all of us, living with the same sort of anxieties we all face.

Angell worked closely with Shawn, and his mother worked closely with the rough-hewn [Harold] Ross, but he's not one to idealize the past. He even smiles when he talks about the controversial Tina Brown. "Tina was great to me," he said. "She encouraged me and published baseball without knowing anything about it. She let me go on. I remember once after a World Series piece, she said, 'Wonderful piece. I really understood it.' "And I said, 'No you didn't.'

"She was very compelling to work for, very seductive. You really wanted to write for her. There was this aura of hers to bring writers out and make you want to do more ... Every writer needs a good editor. All of them, even the best. It's interesting that the older and best-known and most professional writers are the ones who really appreciate an editor. Young writers are terrified. They think, 'What I've done should not be touched.'"

Angell has always shown the working stiffs of the press box the outsize admiration of someone who came to baseball a different way. "I've never been a beat writer or a daily writer," he told me. "I don't know if I could do that." This respectful attitude, expressed so many times in his writing, took on a new meaning for me in 1994 when the San Francisco Chronicle sports editor wanted to move me from hockey to baseball. He wanted me to replace the longtime A's beat writer whom Angell had so often mentioned in his writings. A piece in 1987, for example, looked back on spring training this way: "A friend of mine, a beat man with the San Francisco Chronicle, came along and fell into step beside me. Smiling a little behind his shades, he nodded toward the field and the players and the filling-up stands and murmured: 'You know, it's a shame to have to mess all this up with a regular season.'"

I spent more than four years covering baseball for the Chronicle, and fittingly, the glimpses of Angell I recall most vividly were all from spring training. Some young Oakland A's player would ask me, "Who's that?" as Angell huddled in a corner, talking at length to a coach or an established player. Great reporters, like great point guards in basketball, usually have a relaxed alertness as they look ahead, making eye contact, yes, but always half-thinking about -- whoosh -- where they might be headed next. Angell always had that look when he was deep in conversation, but he balanced it with a warmth and modesty everyone could feel, a sense of being glad to be just where he was.

"What you notice about modern-day ballplayers is they don't talk baseball very much," Angell told me. "They don't pay that much attention. They pay attention to the game when it's being played. But the moment the game is over, they don't talk baseball and they don't think baseball. As recently as 10 years ago, some of the older players were noticing this, the older ones noticing the younger ones aren't hanging around to learn about baseball. Tom Seaver told me that when he was just starting up, he spent as much time as possible in the clubhouse because he'd learn something about baseball just by talking. I don't think that that's still there.

"It's a different time. I don't want this to sound sort of dreamy. I don't sit around mourning this loss. But our attention span generally is much shorter than it used to be. We all move from subject to subject basically because of television. The biggest change in my lifetime by far has been television. That has been a much bigger change than the computer. It's changed the way we see things. It's brought a complete change, I think, in our demand for new material. It's very hard to remember things because we expect a replay, and I mean in baseball but really in every other area. We look for the replay. That's how we remember.

"One of the great lines about this from a ballplayer's point of view came from Carlton Fisk. I asked him if he had any personal memory of that home run in the '75 World Series, that famous, famous home run and the gesturing, and he said, 'It's very interesting you asked that because, you know, I've only seen that shot four or five times in my life. Every time it comes on my television set, I turn it off or leave the room because I'm trying to keep a crystal memory of what that was like.'"

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