Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Kirby Yates
Would follow a website that rates
The performances of Kate Winslet
Based on her accent.
Ketel Marte
Would eat banana cream parfaits
At every meal, but doesn’t because
His contract has a weight-gain clause.
Steven Kwan
Will drone on and on
About investing in Bitcoin
Because he’s got the acumen of a pork loin.
Trea Turner
Is a slow learner
3 times invested with Steven Kwan!
Man, that money’s gone gone gone…
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.
“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
