Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
The Yankees this year will never be
As good as yesterday season-memory.
In New York, expectations always run high –
and less-than-perfect, it’s tabloid banner.
Win-or-lose, even with honor,
Is not an option. Which explains why
The blue sky is full of “ifs & buts.”
On a score card yesterday players –
So many fill the dugout,
A garage of rust, of classic cars –
Make a difference? Tradition does.
Garage emptied, the team will reload.
I’ve never been much for numbers, I’ve always preferred words.
Fractions, sets, and integers lose out to nouns and verbs.
But this time of year I find myself in a mathematical dance
Trying hard to calculate the Indians’ playoff chance.
If KC can beat Detroit, the Tigers drop a game
But that won’t help us out at all ‘cuz then the Royals gain.
If the Twins can beat the A’s (and there’s frost in hell),
We’ll move up in the Wild Card and that would be just swell.
Percentage-wise, our playoff chance is not quite one in five
(Okay, nineteen point three percent in sabermetic jive).
That’s down from Wednesday but up from last week so it’s not a tragedy.
Overall our chances show a slight upward traject’ry.
All this talk about the odds and match-ups and the rest
Doesn’t address the simplest solution that’s the best:
Just have the Tribe win every game in a run-inducing flurry,
I’ll buy my playoff tix and leave the other teams to worry.
Susan Petrone regularly posts on the Indians at It’s Pronounced Lajaway.
The Asian bird flu,
From what I remember,
Was easier to get rid of
Than Sox tix in September.
The Pontiac Aztek
And White Castle sliders
Have more satisfied fans
Than Chicago’s South Siders.
With the Bears suited up and
Hockey season not far,
The Cell now won’t have fans
Enough to jump your car.
Long gone’s the excitement
Of AJ, Oz and Buerhle.
At 35th and Shields,
Winter’s come early.
The briefest love is sometimes sweetest,
and so my ardor for the nap.
But the litany of each
that’s ever cupped me in its lotus palm
would put you in a stupor,
and so I will not mention
the most pitiful of naps—
that of the invalid,
who lies swathed in a blanket on the couch
while the world slips past in flickering frames—
or poorer yet, the dirt nap, the specter of which hunkers
at the end of the sofa,
tactlessly licking a mossy lip.
Better to tell of the “power nap,”
all the fashion a decade past:
bears do it, blokes do it,
even preppy Greenwich teens do it
(let’s do it—let’s fall asleep).
Of course, last century we were all
hungry for power: military, electric, personal.
New to my list
is to doze upon the maple floorboards,
the narrow face of one dog
on my thigh, the head of the other
on my arm as they bathe me
in a kind of elixir
of kibble-scented breath
and the musk of waxy ears.
But easily the pleasantest of naps
is that on a Sunday afternoon—
in the summer, if at all possible—the fragrance
of new-mown lawn filtering through an open window,
a fat fly tapping at the screen,
and Pat Hughes, Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
intoning the stats like a chant,
which sets you adrift, for a moment,
like a pharaoh in a boat,
paddling toward heaven
with all the things you love.
The worst thing I can think of
(Besides painful boils)
Is Rex Hudler and Steve Physioc
Announcing the Royals.