To Two Absent Friends - Ray Liotta and Roger Angell

The Grandstander cannot let the month of May end without acknowledging the passage of two significant people through life's Departure Lounge.

The first is actor Ray Liotta, dead at the too young age of 67.

As Tony Kornheiser notched on his podcast last week, Liotta appeared in one of the greatest American movies ever,  Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" (1990).  In a cast that included Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Paul Sorvino, Liotta was the least among equals of the four leads, but he carried the movie, and was terrific in it as mobster turned informant Henry Hill, who ended up eating "egg noodles and ketchup like a schnook" in the witness protection program.  That movie, and Liotta's performance in it, is one of those that makes up drop the remote when you happen upon it on television, and you watch it until the conclusion.

Liotta's 120 acting credits in IMDb stretch back to 1980 and include afternoon sap operas, TV series, and TV movies, as well as feature films.  One of his interesting credits is the role of Sacha in a short lived TV series version of "Casablanca" in 1983 that ran for all of five episodes.  (That show starred David Soul as Rick, Hector Elizondo as Capt. Renaut, and Scatman Crothers as Sam, for you trivia buffs out there.)  He also played Shoeless Joe Jackson in 1989's "Field of Dreams".

I last saw Ray Liotta playing - what else? - a mobster in last year's Sopranos prequel "The Many Saints of Newark" and he might have been the best part of that movie.

He was a working actor to the very end.  He died in the Dominican Republic while fuming a movie on location.  A video tribute to Liotta from ABC News can be seen HERE.

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Less surprising was the news of the death of writer Roger Angell at the age of 101.

Angell was primarily and New York City based writer for the New Yorker  magazine where he would, two or three times a year, contribute lengthy essays on the subject of baseball.   In 1972, a collection of those essays was published in book form.  The book was "The Summer Game".  It became a best seller, and Angell's fan base spread far beyond the readership of the  New Yorker from that point forward.   Other books followed, as did his inclusion in Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary.  One of his more highly regraded essays documented the mystifying fall of Pirates pitcher Steve Blass.  In 2014, he was honored by the Baseball of Fame with its prestigious Spink Award for excellence in baseball writing.

Angell was of the "baseball-is-played-on-an-emerald-chessboard" school of writing, and sometimes you could get lost in the schmaltzy nature of that, but he was smart, witty, and, as was noted in just about every obit, lyrical when writing about the game.

RIP Ray Liotta and Roger Angell.

Roger Angell on Being a Fan

Later this month, writer Roger Angell will be honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award that recognizes excellence in sports writing, specifically, baseball writing.

Angell has covered baseball for the New Yorker magazine for over fifty years by writing long and very literate essays on the topic several times each year.  Over the years, many of those essays have been gathered together in book form and have become huge best sellers.  If you are a baseball fan and enjoy great writing, you need to visit the library, bookstore, or Amazon and start reading Mr. Angell's works.

Anyway, to celebrate Angell being given the Spink Award, Sports Illustrated has a lengthy story about him in the week's issue.  In the story, writer Tom Verducci quotes a passage from one of Angell's essays that I think perfectly summarizes why people are sports fans. It references baseball, of course, but I think it applies to all sports.  This is taken from the New Yorker piece that Angell wrote in 1975 about that year's Reds - Red Sox World Series and makes reference to Carlton Fisk's famous 12th inning home run in the sixth game of that epic Series.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know the look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.  And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or how foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the hap-hazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

Yeah, that's what being a fan is all about!