I am saddened to hear this. Reading his various baseball compilations got me through some hard times as a young adult. I've tried to explain baseball fandom - involving, but also beyond the Red Sox - by pointing people to the last paragraph of
Agincourt and After (his wrap-up of the 1975 MLB season):
“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 this 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 foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—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 haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
I'm not sure how much I'm adding to the board by saying that people don't write this well anymore. Maybe I'm just hoping that other people use this opportunity to seek out Angell's books and articles. They made me feel better in a tough stretch and we could all use a bit of that right now.