Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
You can play 18 holes
(and have a good walk spoiled)
You can drive an 18-wheeler
(and get away from it all)
You can pass an 18th Amendment
(so no one can toast, at least legally)
You can watch “18 Again”
(and feel as old as George Burns)
You can rock out to “I’m 18”
(and feel as old as Alice Cooper)
You can, in fact, do any of these things,
But you can’t play ball in October.
Yankees win in romp
gotta wonder ’bout Cleveland
did they pitch Justin?
Cole versus Bieber –
Advertised as “pitchers’ duel”
On pre-game paper.
Then Bang! Judge hit the ball –
And not even a cloud
Of the Cleveland midge
Could stop
The Cleveland hemorrhage.
growing up in a city with a marginally competitive baseball team prepares one for life.
finances are always a problem, a constant lack of supportive friends, and a lifetime of consistent doubt.
the team can never afford the ideal of standard stars, so they have rosters full of talented problem players or those with curious issues with daily living, along with the majority of eager faces with spotty talent, filled in with aged players hoping to qualify for a pension.
mostly people like the ones you will end up working with in your day-to-day existence.
the experience gives you keys to understanding and eventually finding a humorous acceptance of disappointment.
have your championships, give me more vern fullers, duke simms, and joe charboneaus. no wins just smiles at our own shortcomings.
Stan Klein is an artist, gallery director, and former Little League umpire.
Even some well-versed in baseball history
are probably wondering who I am and why I’m here
I’m in the Hall of Fame
I don’t mean to say I was inducted into the Hall;
there is a photo of me in the library there
And that photo of me attending an Indians game in 1937
shows a radio next to me and an earpiece in my left ear
The radio is two-and-a-half feet tall and almost twenty pounds,
which certainly stretches the definition of the word portable
I usually listened to the broadcast of the game I was watching,
though I occasionally switched to broadcasts of Tigers games
I think I was the first to bring a radio to the ballpark,
or at least the first to be photographed doing so,
and that’s why the Hall has a picture of me
Michael Ceraolo is a 62-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet , the author of two full-length books (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press; 500 Cleveland Haiku, from Writing Knights Press), and two more in the pipeline (Euclid Creek Book Two, from unbound content press; Lawyers, Guns, and Money, from Writing Knights Press).