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Thanks To All Our Contributors and Readers !

BARDBALL’s rookie season was an experience that went far beyond our expectations. We’d like to sincerely thank everyone who checked us out, submitted poems, came to the “Poetry Grand Slam” in Chicago, and told their friends about us. Through sheer word-of-mouth, news about us spread all over the globe.

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And Ernie Harwell sent us a lovely note. Ernie. Harwell. Can you dig it?

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BARDBALL will be shutting down for the Hot Stove Season and emerge in Spring Training 2008 with new baseball verse, songs, and parody. We plan on some site improvements that will help us show more than one poem a day (to give the casual browser a chance to catch up) and allow video postings. We’ll also retire the “Barry Bonds Limerick Challenge” and keep an eye out for another juicy scandal to exploit. Other changes are also in the works. So bookmark us and check us out again next spring for the 2008 season.

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So long, everybody! See you at game time!

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James Finn Garner

 

Stu Shea

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All Right, a Few More Limericks to Pile on Barry

The Barry Bonds Limerick Trilogy: “Three Strikes and Yer Out!”

by Lou Carlozo

Canto One:
Farewell, Barry Bonds, Mr. Droider!
With a noggin as big as a goiter.

Can you take 30 years
Worth of jailbird jeers

In the prison yard parks where you’ll loiter?

Canto Two:
How many home runs could I pump
If I took 90 shots to my rump?

73 in a season?
It must stand to reason

Ask Barry–that Balco-ball chump.

Canto Three:
If Barry partook of the ‘droids,
It’s a cinch his career is destroyed.

Needles stuck in his ass,
Now he’s in a morass–

Strike three, ’cause the Feds are annoyed.

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The Ho of Fame

by James Finn Garner

If Barry needed any incitement
To confess, now here’s his indictment.

Else, to prison he’ll go
To be someone’s ho,

Where anal rape’s the daily excitement.

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Back in the News

By Doug White

Barry Bonds is back in the news
On CNN, Fox and even “The View”.

Though reporters have hedged
And say “it’s alleged”,

Everyone knows this time he’s through.

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Big Mitt

by Thomas Michael McDade

Which one handled Hoyt
Wilhelm’s fabled knuckleball first
with a mitt so large it looked illegal?
Slow-footed Gus Triandos
or tough guy Clint Courtney?
You’d think John and I were
Oriole fans we used
their names so much!
If there was hostility or money bet
we might have checked it out
at the library but we chose
to keep that dispute
alive as if it were religion or politics
through college and summers
of painting and paving.
Days there was no work
we retreated to the bars
and those names appeared
in the smoke and pool cue dust
at the Wood’s End Bar.
Were the bar stool seats
the size of the glove in question?
At the Ship’s Lantern there were
captain chairs and frosty mugs
to scrawl those two names on
when we weren’t toasting
the procession of braless
Westport women — especially
those with just the right perk
and handful to bring
Hoyt’s flaky pitch to mind.
Years shot by like errant
horsehide before John’s letter
with a clipping came.
In small print it said my pick,
Scrap Iron Clint, had debuted
the trashcan lid of a mitt in 1960.
That bit of newspaper has turned
as yellow as Hoyt’s dainty lobs
must have looked to a catcher
who led the league in brawling.

Posted 11/1/07