Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Inside the Mets’ locker room
Is a future Hall of Fame pitcher,
Probably the only one ever
With a losing record:
The great Jacob deGrom.
He wouldn’t do it –
If you knew him, not his style –
But someone should be advertising
Somewhere, anywhere,
For non-existent Mets’ run support.
Theo’s decision:
time’s right–leave Friendly Confines
work magic elsewhere.
In this bubble-ball age,
Anything can happen —
Including a socially distanced
Rivalry between two teams
That actually hate each other.
I grew up hearing about crimson stuff
Just like this — you know,
New York vs Boston, and the like, and
It made going to school easier then.
New York vs Tampa now does the same.
It may be a new world, now, what
With social media and a pandemic,
But some gut things just don’t change.
I was the first owner who wasn’t handpicked by Johnson,
and I was the first owner to remind him
that he worked for us, not the other way around
Two strikes against me
Most of the transactions I made
were not thought of poorly at the time;
it is only in retrospect that some look bad
And even among these I wasn’t always to blame:
it was years after I sold the team
that one of the players we acquired
in one of the so-called bad moves, Lefty O’Doul,
was sent elsewhere and became a quality player
Even selling the Babe was defensible:
we finished sixth in the standings and fifth in attendance
even with him; he wanted more money,
and it’s extremely doubtful
he would have become in Boston what he became in New York
And I sold the team to Bob Quinn in 1923,
so their finishing last seven of the next eight years
wasn’t my responsibility: remember,
there were no farm systems back then
Every year you had to acquire some new players
in order to improve your team;
if Quinn didn’t have the wherewithal
to do the job, that was on him,
not on me or any supposed curse
But Quinn was a baseball guy, not a theater guy,
and so he escaped the blame from sportswriters
Strike three against me:
having my baseball reputation in the hands of sportswriters
No one should ever have his reputation in such hands
Ted Williams despised Yankee Stadium
The size and shadows persist
Built on a glacial wetland
Underlined by polished schist
So the outfield was sub-irrigated
Into a slow and swampy sod
Naturally moist and ever green
On which Mickey Mantle plod
All the people sitting around Updike
at Ted’s final home win
In the moist autumn wetland ballpark
In Boston’s Post-Cambrian Fens
The chain-smoking Boston babes, the B.C. humor
The insecure insouciance of the Harvard freshmen
Knowing all, knowing nothing
A place we all have been.
But the Ted hypotheticals are a little thin:
What if Mickey Mantle was healthy
and didn’t drink like a fish
or if DiMaggio was not so wealthy.
The tired timeless comparisons
with Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson
A game played at glacial pace.
Another era. Another eon.