It's baseball season and Roger Angell must be happy

The Nationals may have been pounded yesterday by the Phillies, and the Redskins may have picked up a new QB, but let's not let any of that diminish our excitement about the new baseball season. For me, baseball has always meant one thing: Wondering where Roger Angell was roaming with his notebook. Angell, a fiction editor at The New Yorker for many decades, is for many sportswriting aficionados the most pristine baseball writer in the country. His essays on the game have been collected in several books, the best of which is "The Summer Game."

In honor of the new season, and of Angell, I offer something a little different today. The Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania has a wonderful program that brings star authors to campus to hang out with writing students. Angell was there in 2005, and I caught myself listening this week to his conversations with students. On the subject of baseball, he speaks about box scores as miniature narratives, Jackie Robinson, steroids, and catchers. These are stories about baseball, but they are tales about writing. Play ball.