Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
After Skubal slaps, shouts and shoves,
Hinch’s lineup card says “Any of the above.”
Starters, middle, bullpen?
“Pitching chaos” is in
A squad cardiac doctors can love.
Catching young Tiger pitchers, ol’ Jake
Rogers knows what each at-bat takes.
Low and out, high and in
He has learned what will win
When he calls for a pitch, please don’t shake.
They’re getting pumped in Motown
For the torrid Wild Card race!
If they rack up division wins,
They’ll surge up to second place
Enough to struggle in October
By God’s and Minnesota’s grace,
And clear the stench of summer
Unless they fall on their whiskered face.
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.
Your favorite athletes move from team to team
The hitters, hurlers, fielders all chase bucks
Old-time fan loyalty is but a dream
As players drive their wealth away in trucks
Free agents’ names and faces give no clue
So raise your voice for the best color scheme
Choose purple, crimson, orange, green or blue
Urge on your favorite sports apparel theme
Or pick the mascot that’s most bold and fierce
The one inclined to slash and slice and slay
With jaws that chomp and bloody claws that pierce
My Tiger dines on fricasseed Blue Jay
What’s more, our park serves only the best ale
No better motive could there be to cheer
And though our squad may flounder, flop and fail
Hip hip hooray! Let’s hear it for our beer!
When you select the club that you’ll support
The nine athletes for whom you’ll choose to root
Ignore the friendly confines of the sport
And contemplate the price in hard-earned loot
The cost is high each time you disembark
So back the team that charges less to park
Tom’s collection of comic verse, Get the Hell to Work, was published by Kelsay Books in 2020.
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
