Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
In the Midwest we’re not prone to bragging
We like socks with sandals and double-bagging
We like a 30-pack and jerky from Kasey’s
And are still suspicious of Macy’s.
We don’t get too big for our britches
Unless the subject is hot dishes.
We take our time reaching decisions
And are in no rush to win the division.
Ian Happ
Prefers to use maps
Thinks GPS
Is tracked by the Feds.
Shohei Ohtani
Likes his kosher salami.
In fact, he thinks nothing beats
Encased meats.
Emmanuel Clasé
Will the batters assay
Then still launch a 101-MPH pitch
Bitch.
Jazz Chisholm
Thinks all our actions are a prism
Through which we disperse the One True Universal Light–
All right, man, all right….
Walter was, by far, the greatest pitcher I ever saw,
but he could be maddening as a manager and a man
He had enough confidence in me
to name me the interim manager
when he was hospitalized briefly in ’34,
in large part because he saw me giving young players
the benefit of my experience
So I was taken aback when he got rid of me
early in the ’35 season,
saying I was undermining his authority
by giving advice to young players!
I couldn’t let stand the implication
that I had done wrong and so deserved my fate,
so I requested a hearing with Commissioner Landis
The Commissioner determined I had done nothing wrong,
but he upheld management’s right to get rid of a player
for any reason, or no reason at all,
and that was the end of my major league career
The pressure never lets up.
Doesn’t matter what you did yesterday.
That’s history.
It’s tomorrow that counts.
So you worry all the time.
It never ends.
Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.
You saw what I did coming up in my mid-thirties,
so you can imagine what I could have done
if I’d come up a decade or so earlier:
if that writer had ever heard of Big Luke
he might have based the character Hobbs on me,
at least in part,
the part about getting a late start in the bigs,
though my reasons were different:
the war took years away from everybody,
they weren’t hiring us in the white majors,
and even the Negro Leagues
didn’t find me until after the war;
it wasn’t getting shot like in the book
I did get shot decades later
and it ended my life, but that
wasn’t the stuff of literature,
it was during an ordinary robbery.
