Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
That angry young Cub named Zambrano
Takes aim at team mano-a-mano.
.     Their Triple-A game
.       Fills Carlos with shame
And his rage will not wait till next anno.
.
Hilary Barta handles his rage by posting limericks every day at LimerWrecks.
Adam Dunn can’t hit his weight.
In the AL, the DH job
Don’t get done at .168.
A hit man working for the mob
Posting such an average
would end up in a trunk, well plugged.
By even elfin Lillibridge
Is this day-old pot roast outslugged.
With warmer weather, heaven willing,
The Sox’ll wield more potent lumber.
Adam, a tip from TV’s Tom Skilling:
In Chicago, it’s already summer.
Though Alex Rios is glad to see
A “slugger” choking worse than he.
The Red Sox started off in slings,
But now they’re in the thick of things.
This is the team that I remember–
Giving us hope until September.
There’s a question of ageing
Waging within the team’s locker room
Is in the tabloids & elsewhere
Wherever it is a pastime’s chatter
But tell how Mariano Rivera
Still scares batters how
One pitch crafted over years
& delivered to perfection
Still splinters ash still confounds
Batters makes managers scramble
After a record 1000 games
His home is still the mound
One
of the 10,342 baseball cards in my parents’ attic
sneezes in the dampness, remembers
sweaty hands.
He calls to me across hundreds of miles:
Remember me, Jake Wood, 1964, 2nd base, Detroit Tigers,
Series 2, No. 272?
He wants to stretch his legs, climb out
from between Wilbur Wood and the 4th Series Checklist
wants to outsail all the other cards
in a game of farthies, float down
on Jose Tartabull in a game of tops.
He wants to smell like fresh from the pack
wants to be perfumed again
with the pink smell of bubble gum.
.
Jim Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has taught creative writing for 30 years.