“What is startling about memory,” Roger Angell writes in the introduction to “Let Me Finish” (Harcourt, 304 pages, $25), “is its willful persistence and its obsession with detail. ‘Hold on,’ it says, ‘don’t lose this.'” Well, that’s what’s startling about Mr.Angell’s memory, anyway. “Let Me Finish” isn’t quite autobiography, and the title of the book, Mr. Angell tells us, “isn’t about wrapping up a life or a time of life, but should only evoke a garrulous gent at the end of the table holding up one hand while he tries to remember the great last line of his monologue.”

Mr. Angell’s collected autobiographical essays from the New Yorker leap from subject to subject, each constructed around a single mental snapshot that stands in the author’s mind as the defining moment in that period of his life. Fortunately for Mr. Angell, and for us, that life takes in a great deal that is interesting, beginning with a literary childhood. His mother, Katherine, was a respected writer and editor, and his stepfather, E.B. White, wrote the children’s classics “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.”

By nature and nurture, Mr. Angell was to achieve success at the New Yorker, the same magazine his mother and stepfather had worked for. No wonder, then, he is able to write, “Friends my age – I am past my seventies – tell me that they, too, often find themselves caught up in details of their childhood, but I wonder if they ever find, as I do, that they are reliving a parent’s life as well as their own?”

There is an almost G.K. Chesterton-like humility to Mr. Angell’s recollections, such as when he tells us, “I’ve kept quiet about my trifling Army career all these years,” as a segue to a charming essay on his World War II experiences.He never approaches the big issues or the important people directly but invariably in brief, illuminating observations and anecdotes. For instance, at a memorial for the quirky and self-deprecating E.B. “Andy” White, Mr.Angell remarked, “If Andy White could be with us today he would not be with us today.” And those of us who have always wondered what really goes on in the offices of America’s most prestigious literary magazine will be grateful for the description of how Mr. Angell and his colleagues “became world-class push pin flingers,” capable of throwing a projectile with deadly accuracy into a photograph of President Nixon at a distance of 15 feet.

“Let Me Finish” doesn’t break new ground in the field of autobiography and memoir, but it reads fresh and, unlike many recollections of recent vintage, makes you wish the writer had gone on a bit longer.

That being said, even for those of us who have admired Mr. Angell’s baseball writing over the years, there is a slight taste of bearnaise sauce on his ballpark franks. For the mustard, I often go to Roger Kahn. Having written what is probably the greatest baseball book of all, “The Boys of Summer,” could have been a detriment to Mr. Kahn’s career had he not authored several other books (“October Men,” “The Era,” “A Season In the Sun”) nearly as good. If Mr. Kahn has never been precisely one of the sportswriting establishment, it’s because he has always restlessly probed the boundaries of sports and literature looking for connections. More often than not, he has found them.

Mr. Kahn took the title for his book on the Jackie Robinson-era Dodgers from Dylan Thomas, and the title of his new memoir, “Into My Own” (Thomas Dunne Books, 320 pages, $24.95), from Robert Frost. Frost is one of the many subjects fondly recalled in this book. (Others include a pathetic Mickey Rooney and Senator Eugene McCarthy, whom he eulogizes as “a good man in his prime standing against a wicked war.”) While interviewing the great man for a profile, Mr. Kahn asked, “How do you like your baseball played, Mr. Frost?” “Spike ’em as you go around the bases,” the poet replied.

“Into My Own” is the autobiography of a literary life constructed not in drawing rooms or classrooms but in newsrooms. In his job interview with the legendary Stanley Woodward, managing editor for the greatest of all New York newspapers, the Herald Tribune, Mr. Kahn was asked from where he took the phrase “a dubious battle,” which he had used in a story about a pennant race between mediocre teams. “A novel by John Steinbeck,” he replied. “He took the title from Milton: ‘In dubious battle on the plains of heaven.'” “You know Milton and you like baseball,” Woodward observed. “Keep running errands and answering the phone. Something may turn up for you in sports.”

That, of course, was more than half a century ago. If the two literary Rogers have something in common besides a love of baseball, it’s a sadness for what the game and the writing about it has become. “We know everything about the game now,” Mr. Angell writes, “thanks to instant replay and computerized stats. … Thanks to television and sports journalism, we also know everything about the skills and financial worth and private lives of the enormous young men we have hired to play baseball for us …” His father, who took him to see Ruth, Gehrig, and Ott, wasn’t naive because he was a fan in the time before ballplayers’ private lives became Internet fodder and their salaries larger than those of most CEOs, “He was lucky.”

The players of those times were also lucky. They are remembered to us primarily through the eyes of writers such as Roger Angell and Roger Kahn.

Mr. Barra was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.