In June, 1975, just after Blass was forced into early retirement, the great New Yorker editor and writer Roger Angell profiled him for the magazine. For half a century, until his death in 2022, at the age of a hundred and one, Angell wrote about baseball with unmatched elegance, companionability, and knowledge. Pitchers may have supplied his best material. He called their showdowns with batters “a permanent private duel over their property rights to the plate.” The men on the mound, Angell liked to point out, tended to have the upper hand. They knew what they were throwing, whereas batters could merely react. “A great number of surprising and unpleasant things can be done to the ball as it is delivered from the grasp of a two-hundred-pound optimist,” Angell once wrote. “The first of these is simply to transform it into a projectile.”