Lexicon Valley

Roger Angell’s Love of the Word Tatterdemalion Is Contagious

Roger Angell speaking to a crowd with a New Yorker cap on.
Writer Roger Angell attends the New Yorker Festival on Oct. 16, 2009, in New York City. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New Yorker

On the July 21, 2014, edition of Slate’s sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen,” Stefan Fatsis discussed the writer Roger Angell’s affection for the word tatterdemalion. Last week, the 95-year-old Angell used the word again. An updated transcript of the recording is below, and you can listen to Fatsis’ original essay here.

In 2014, Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated wrote a glowing profile of the incomparable baseball writer—incomparable writer, really—Roger Angell, who was finally being honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame. Angell was 93 years old and, we learned, still showing up an hour or two a day at the New Yorker offices to peruse fiction submissions or write the occasional piece about baseball or aging or, let’s be blunt, death. His most recent effort—and with Angell they never seem like effort, but of course they’re Herculean, each and every one—was a brief eulogy for the bald, bowling ball-bellied baseball lifer Don Zimmer. It started thusly: “Don Zimmer, who died yesterday at eighty-three, was an original Met and an original sweetie pie. His sixty-six years in baseball were scripted by Disney and produced by Ken Burns.”

Before that, haikus about his dog, Andy. Before that, on triple plays. Before that, a wry little meditation on a photograph, shot by his stepfather, E.B. White, of a 10-or-so-year-old Roger pitching to his mother, Katharine White. Before that—and all of this in six months, from a man in his 90s—before that, “This Old Man,” 5,175 words about what it’s like to be a man in his 90s. Here’s how that one began:

Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.

Every hubristic sports writer has read Roger Angell and thought: “Boy, I wish the place I work would let me write like that.” Or: “If the place I work let me write like that I know I could.” Or: “I wonder when Roger Angell will die so I can try to write like that.” But none of us can or will write like that, and we all hope Roger Angell never dies, though he is intensely aware—5,175 words aware—that one day, sooner rather than later, he will. “It shouldn’t surprise me,” Angell wrote, “if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now.” In addition to Candy Cummings, Angell name-checked Derek Jeter and Robinson Cano, and quoted Casey Stengel. His lineup card of baseball predeparted included Bart Giamatti and Dan Quisenberry.

Open to any page in any book collection of Angell’s baseball writing and you will find a sentence worth reading aloud and reading again, and you’ll peel a mental Post-it to copy that one someday. I’m trying to copy him here—slightly arch, gliding along, commas in tow, a quick punch at the end. You’ll also find a word that will stop you cold, because of its context or simply its existence. One such moment came for me in December 1987, while reading “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” a recap of the Minnesota Twins-St. Louis Cardinals World Series six weeks prior and the season that produced it. Here’s the passage:

The semi-anonymous fifth-place Pirates were in fact a rising and spirited club by the end of the season, but this sort of anarchic downthrowing of a champion by some sansculotte band is standard September melodrama, of course. The lowly, tatterdemalion Mets used to do it all the time, and I can still remember how much fun we had back then, when defeats almost went unnoticed and each little win was like a party.

Nope, not downthrowing or sansculotte, though those are pretty great too. The word was tatterdemalion. I had to look it up. A person dressed in ragged clothing. Being in a decayed state or condition. Broken-down, dilapidated. Beggarly, disreputable. Dates to 1608, according to the OED. From tatters or tattered; “ending unexplained.” I joked about the word in a letter to a friend, signing off “Never tatterdemalion.” But it stuck. It’s my Roger Angell word, my point of connection, my personal tribute. I put it in my last book—“I lace up the tatterdemalion Umbro soccer cleats that I’ve had since college, the right toe unglued from the sole”—and also later in a Slate piece about the NFL, where I referenced “the lowly, tatterdemalion Lions.” I thanked Angell that time.

But it turns out that Angell loves tatterdemalion as much as he made me love it. He appears to have first labeled the New York Mets that in October 1973. “Mets Redux” begins (with a terrific opening line):

All sporting memories are suspect—the colors too bright, the players and their feats magnified in our wistful recapturing. The surprising rally or splendid catch becomes incomparable by the time we fight free of the parking lot, epochal before bedtime, transcendental by breakfast. Quickly, then, before we do damage to the crowded and happy events of the late summer and early autumn, it should be agreed that this was not absolutely the best of all baseball years. The absorbing, disheveled seven-game World Series that was won by the defending Oakland A’s, who had to come from behind to put down the tatterdemalion Mets, was probably not up to the quality of the seven low-scoring games contested by the A’s and the Cincinnati Reds last year, or even comparable to three or four other classics we have been given in the past dozen Octobers.

The 1973 Mets were tatterdemalion because, Angell noted, they “finished their season with a won-lost percentage of .509, the lowest ever recorded by a winner or demiwinner in either league.” (Demiwinner! Because baseball had gone to two divisions per league.)

In April 1978, Angell described “Bill Veeck’s tatterdemalion free-swingers in Chicago.” In November 1980, he mentioned A’s pitcher Mike Norris’ “tatterdemalion major-league record.” Then came the “lowly, tatterdemalion Mets” of 1987. Then, according to my search of the magazine’s online archive, there was a quarter-century benching—followed by a late-innings rally. In a September 2013 post about the final game of the career of Mariano Rivera, the beloved closer for New York’s other team, at the desultory end of a forgettable season, Angell assessed the Yankees’ fate:

Sagging in the tatterdemalion struggle for that second American League Wild Card in the last week of the season, they will be caught by the heels in the next day or two and gobbled up by the statistical werewolf.

Angell is 95 now, and still writing better than you or I ever will. Last Thursday, he wrote “Good Night, Mets,” 682 sweetie-pie words about the team’s season-ending National League wild-card loss to the San Francisco Giants the night before. Titularly, the piece was a bookend, minus the palindrome, to “Not So, Boston,” Angell’s epic 1986 account of the epic fall of the Red Sox to the Mets. But it was the lede, or more precisely the eighth word, that bolted me upright, caused my eyes to bulge, and sent blood surging skullward:

Good night, Mets. We’ll miss you.

The Tatterdemalions lost their one-game wild-card playoff to the visiting Giants, 3–0, last night, and drifted home, their season done.

The Mets weren’t just tatterdemalion anymore. They were the uppercase Tatterdemalions! My first thought: Roger Angell is trolling me. Then I called him. “I don’t remember ever using it before,” Angell said of the magic word. When, like some linguistic stalker, I rattled off the citations, he replied, drolly, “I didn’t know someone would be out there keeping track of my usage of a word over the years.”

I think Angell might have been genuinely embarrassed to have unsheathed an unusual word frequently enough for someone to notice—if six times over 43 years and hundreds of thousands of written words counts as frequently. (Angell was first published in the New Yorker in 1944 and started writing about baseball there in 1962, the Mets’ first season.) He isn’t alone in using tatterdemalion in the magazine; Italo Calvino, Jonathan Lethem, Jay McInerney, and, in his famous profile of Bill Bradley, John McPhee have done so too. Still, Angell told me, “I’ve got to stop using it. It’s off my list forever.”

The last thing I want is to be responsible for breaking up Roger Angell and tatterdemalion. I begged him not to dump this beautiful word, his use of which has meant so much to me. “It’s a great compliment, I guess,” he finally said. Yes, Roger, it is. May your Mets be tatterdemalion forever. And may the statistical werewolf pass you by.