Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
BALTIMORE
The Orioles soared…
Does anyone believe they
Can fly high again?
BOSTON
With no Valentine,
Can the Olde Towne Team win back
Bleeding Boston hearts?
NEW YORK
Old Yankee soldiers
May not die, but do tend to
End up disabled
TAMPA BAY
Rays fans hold out hope
That good pitching can make up
For that weird infield
TORONTO
When blue jays make noise
It signals that something is
Wrong in the forest
Everybody’s on the skids
Yankees, maybe Baltimore too
Throw in hot Tampa as well
And one wonders about Toronto
“Skidding” being short rides
in September – and who
comes out on top, well
a skid is a slide through
September, anybody’s guess
Players missed when it counts
wild pitches now a measure,
late-season swoons and rallies
and who plays in October
Safeco perfection
The Mariner’s King Felix
His game historic
There’s no reason to argue
or to spew
The American League East
is the best
competitively
realistically
Boston? New York? Tampa?
Baltimore too?
(And Toronto in the mix as well?)
But to shift gears
and memory/years:
Despite all the hiccups
the HGHs and PEDs
baseball the purity of it
continues to confound/explain
why a summer day or in rain
ball-to-bat glove-and-ball
fascinates us all
Stephen Jones is a contract writer/editor with a firm in New York City.
Maybe I am the phantom of baseball
I will do anything for one more at bat
I know I can still hit MLB pitching
I can still hit a golf ball 380 yards
I have the hips of a 20 year old
I can
I have
I have a medical condition:
I love the game so much
Even in exhibition
Invite me for an old timers game
I will play
Anything for a look
Still dreaming of that one last
Trip of imagination
Back to the big leagues
I miss everything where did it go
Patrick Dubuque blogs regularly for Pitchers & Poets, where this first appeared.