The best baseball writer ever was also an inspirational friend. He taught me so much, right up until his last breath.
News of the death of Roger Angell jarred me like a thunderclap. Shock may seem incongruous with the passing of someone who was 101 years old with clear memory of Babe Ruth in his camel hair coat walking the streets of Manhattan. As Michener’s Gray Wolf tells his adoptive son in Centennial, “Only the rocks live forever.” But the brutal finality of it—the best, most eloquent, most observant baseball writer who ever lived and an inspirational friend suddenly gone—arrived without mitigation from age.