Angell's naturally good eye has been helped by decades of digesting each season in his New Yorker pieces and learning a little more. This puts him in a much different category than some other established writers who have taken a crack at baseball. "People would drop in and write a book," he told me. "There was a sort of intellectualization of baseball and where it fits in the American scene, which was probably overdone, and probably some unduly flowery and poetic or romantic writing about the game. I hope I wasn't contributing to that."

He wasn't. His writing is too rooted in the particular for that. Angell may at times be profligate with his emotions, but he turns this into one of his central themes, pored over at length -- and often with self-mocking humor. "I've noticed that almost all baseball writers are fans in the end," he told me. "If they think their team is in it, they get as excited as anybody. I think they may be acting a little more cynical and hardened about the whole thing than they are. If there's anything different about what I've done, it's that I have been able to write in the first person and to switch over and to become a fan right in the middle of a piece. I've never had to put that on, because if I watch any team for three or four games in a row, I begin to think about this team kind of like a fan.

"The widening gap between players and beat writers must be a hard thing to accept. I'm 79 and I go to talk to ballplayers and they call me 'Sir,' and I start with a huge handicap. Once they call you 'Sir,' you're in big trouble. I remember when Bob Boone was playing late in his career as a catcher, he was talking about what it's like to be an older player. He said, 'The main thing for me is to have a bad day and not to say 'I'm getting old,' because I had a lot of bad days when I wasn't old. They're going to tell me when I'm too old to play. If I have a slump, I have to tell myself it's just a slump.'

"And I said, 'What else are the problems?'

"He said, 'It's so lonely. All my friends have left. All my teammates have disappeared. No one else in this clubhouse is the same age. They're the same age as my son. I won't go drinking with my son.' I feel a lot of that, too. I'm at an age where a lot of my closest and dearest friends have died. It happens a lot. It's a very strange feeling."

One place Angell always feels comfortable, and connected to baseball, is at the legendary Pink Pony steakhouse in Scottsdale, Ariz. The Pony is no longer the hot spring-training hangout it once was. Gone are the days when five Hall of Famers would be waiting for tables and trades would be inked on a napkin in a corner booth. But the place is still a baseball shrine. It's where Angell heads every spring and where he was in March for the 85th birthday of his longtime friend Charlie Briley, who took over the place 50 years ago. "My wife, Gwen, and I have been with Johnny McNamara twice on nights when he was fired, once by the Angels, another time by the Padres," Briley once told me.

Behind the bar framed caricatures run nearly the length of the wall. Some are of Scottsdale locals, but most are of baseball people: Billy Martin and Bill Rigney; Angell, looking very blue-eyed, peers out from a spot next to Kenny (Downtown) Brown, the bartender. Heading the other way are Sports Illustrated writer Ron Fimrite, San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter David Bush and Mickey Morabito, the Oakland A's legendary traveling secretary. Against the wall, behind the big jar of pickled onions, is a pile of old Baseball Encyclopedias.

Like Angell, the place is serious but doesn't take itself too seriously. Like Angell, it lives and breathes close contact with something private and incommunicable about the game, something in danger of being lost. Like Angell, it just keeps going, year after year after year. And like Angell, it lives up to our memories of it at its best. "Sometimes I think baseball preserves its memories too much and is unwilling to change," Angell told me. "I think we all cling to the Pony because we had such a good time there. You always wondered if it would be as good as it was. Surprisingly, it often was."

Brilliant Careers: Sound and Vision Audio and video highlights of our Brilliant Careers profiles