A Yogi Poem

by Ralph Badagliacca

Shakespeare shaped the language.
Some say he invented it.
Wilde and Shaw spun expressions of unrelenting wit.
Whitman taught the mother tongue
How to sing for us;
Yeats scaled the beauty of her lonely peaks.
Joyce uncovered something new,
And so did Eliot.

But unlike Yogi, none of them could hit.

 

Taken from Ralph’s book, The Yogi Poems, available here

My Own Special Frankenstein’s Monster

by Bill Cushing

Before I moved to California to marry in 1996, my wife never paid much attention to baseball, which makes sense. She arrived to the states in 1987 from Peru, so soccer was her focal point in sports, not baseball.

It’s also odd that I introduced her to the game that year — being still upset over the ’94 strike. However, I succumbed that summer as Cal Ripken chased Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game record. I lived in Baltimore during Cal’s rookie year, and even though I leaned to the Yankees as a New Yorker, I admired him as both player and person.

So, I suspended my personal boycott against the pros and watched those games.

Occasionally, Ghisela would stop and watch, asking about the game. While explaining the action on the diamond, I told her the best way to watch baseball was in person, promising to take her to a Dodgers game sometime.

That Fall we got tickets to a home game at Chavez Ravine. In the opening inning, Mike Piazza came up to bat and hit a grand slam, which was not that unusual in those years, but for my wife, was a grand treat.

“You know,” I turned to her, shouting above the crowd while Piazza ran the bases, “I’ve been going to games all my life and have never seen one of these in person. You go to your first and whaddya get?”

Perhaps it was the manic environment, although statistics, the mainstay of baseball, may have appealed to her clinical mindset. Of course, there is the fun in the game’s connection to superstitious beliefs and behavior.

Whatever the cause, she was hooked — on baseball in general and the Dodgers in particular, a love that blossomed into passion — with all the necessary accessories that condition entails: hats, water bottles, shirts, license plate frames. She even forbade me from wearing my old Yankee hats around her.

Now we are season ticket holders for the Dodgers; my wife is a baseball fiend, and I created the monster.

This story first appeared in the collection, Time Well Spent, published by Southern Arizona Press.

Opening Weekend

by Stephen Jones

The Yankees swept the Astros
Thanks in part to Juan Soto
And his late-inning heroics.

I know, I know: one weekend
Doesn’t make a whole season,
But there are smiles in the Bronx.

 

Drenched

by Wayne Burke

5 a.m. chiaroscuro of clouds
dark & light
like day & night
like right and wrong
I climb over the
seat into the back
of the car when
we reach Buddy’s.
“Who is that, Al?” Buddy asks
as he sits, pumpkin-sized head
in silhouette.
I am shadow
on vinyl:
the hum of the engine soothes
like a lullaby.
In Pittsfield a bottle is found
under a seat.
Rain beats on the roof
like knuckles;
the great city, people, buildings, Yankee Stadium
drenched, the crown immense.
Maris hits one out
to right;
a big man in the grandstand catches
a foul ball in his bare hand and
stands like the Statue of Liberty.
After the game is called
we leave:
On the ride home Buddy and
Uncle Al joke, laugh
smoke cigarettes
as I
in the back
become more
invisible
each mile.