Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Eloy was my boy
His power was a gimme
A South Side homeboy
Just like Pico and Timmy.
These faces are all gone — oy!
Ruined, traded, DFA’d.
The advice of Sox coaches, boy,
Should make any player afraid.
Now there’s no joy
At 35th and Shields
Hope is destroyed
At Fill-in-the-Blank Field.
Should we ask the batboy?
Maybe he has a solution.
The EPA should deploy
To contain this pollution.
One for the South Siders.
Tarik Skubal
Is always hungry for noodles.
Chow mein, soba, udon, ramen–
He just tells the waiter, “Keep it comin’!”
Garrett Crochet
Thinks those edible bouquets
Are a colossal waste.
“How much cantaloupe can one person taste?”
Seth Lugo
Reads a lot of Victor Hugo
Daydreaming of an understudy job
With “Les Misérables.”
Shōta Imanaga
Loves the generosity of Chicaga.
He never has to scrounge
To pay for a beer at the Nisei Lounge.
“Say it ain’t so,”
a kid once asked Shoeless Joe
the year the White Sox turned to black
The same could be asked
of the current Sox cast
filled with the lame, the halt and hacks
So laughter erupts
when owner Reinsdorf instructs
he’ll move the team south to Tennessee
If a new stadium isn’t built
and financed to the hilt
with Illinois taxpayer’s sucker money
But a record-setting pace
in a season of historic disgrace
makes 120+ defeats a bona fide threat
So Jerry, pack your hitless wonders
and move instead to baseball’s dumpster,
next to the more lovable ‘62 Mets.
I was one of the Clean Sox,
but that doesn’t mean I was perfect:
at the start of my career
I played professionally under an assumed name
in order to try to keep my college eligibility,
and I was a contributor to the pot gotten up
to reward Detroit for beating Boston in ’17,
something that the Dirty Sox later
tried to make out as part of a fix
Such rewarding was common at the time,
though I can see now how it could be misconstrued
I should have taken the job as Yankees manager
when it was offered to me;
I thought I was going to succeed Mr. Mack
when he retired, and that retirement would be in a few years
When that few years passed without his retiring,
I took the job with Mr. Yawkey,
and what I did and didn’t do in that job
has justifiably dimmed my reputation,
something that I now see in retrospect
