BARDBALL wants to resurrect the connection between baseball and poetry, between the love of the game and love of language. A century ago, most baseball columnists regularly published poems in the paper about the players, the personalities, the action and the game itself. “Casey at the Bat” might not be Shakespeare, but if Shakespeare were alive today, we bet he’d be looking for rhymes for “Acuña”, “Kershaw” and “Ohtani”.
BARDBALL is a community of fans who capture the thrill and beauty of baseball in poetry, limericks, haiku, song lyrics and other formats. We need your contributions, from all over North America, to make it work. By the end of each season, the entire campaign and every big event will be covered in verse form.
Our contributors include regular fans, grade-school enthusiasts, award-winning novelists, songwriters, journalists, esteemed poets, learned academics, and even the first Poet Laureate of Canada — all united in a love for the greatest game. We live by your submissions, so send them in today!
HEAVY HITTERS
James Finn Garner is the co-founder and custodian. He’s the author of the Politically Correct Bedtime Stories trilogy, as well as the clown noir mystery series starring “Rex Koko, Private Clown”: Honk Honk, My Darling; Double Indignity; The Wet Nose of Danger; and the forthcoming Notorious-ness. He is also the co-creator of the webcomic, Single White Vigilante.
Stuart Shea is the co-founder of Bardball. He’s the author of many baseball books, including Wrigley Field: The Long Life and Contentious Times of the Friendly Confines and Calling the Game: Baseball Broadcasting From 1920 to the Present. He served as editor of Fantasy Baseball Index for four years, worked as an MLB.com game reporter for a decade, and co-created the successful FAQ series of music and entertainment titles for Backbeat Books.
Jim Siergey is a cartoonist and writer from the Chicago area, and the creator of the comic “Cultural Jetlag.”
Michael X. Ferraro is a lifelong Phillies fan stuck in LA, a writer/producer and author of Tased and Amused, a poetic recap of the 2010 MLB season, along with Circus Catch, the funniest football novel since Moby-Dick Butkus. Read his alternative reality story of a zombie Connie Mack saving the A’s for Oakland by clicking below.
Hilary Barta is comics artist and writer who has worked for years with comic publishers. Under the pen name “Surly Hack”, Hilary writes limericks every day on comics, movies and pop culture at LimerWrecks. You can view and purchase the rest of his art at HilaryBarta.com.
Michael Ceraolo  is a 62-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has two full-length books, Euclid Creek from Deep Cleveland Press and 500 Cleveland Haiku from Writing Knights Press.
Stephen Jones is a writer and legal aide whose poetry has been published in The New York Times and elsewhere.
Thank you so much, Jim Daniels. Your poem moved me. Is it about Grandma, Ernie Harwell, or you? All, I suspect. Well done.