Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
A weatherman on Beantown TV
Described it this way:
“You start here,” a flat hand
measuring height in the air.
“This is chilly. Okay?
Then you drop it to here.
This is freezing,
Just thirty-two degrees.”
He went on: “But it gets colder,
Down here…”
He ducked below the camera eye.
“… Is zero, and it’s so cold …
You freeze fruit and it shatters.
But there’s one more level …”
He looked the camera in the eye.
“… Colder still: Red Sox hitting.”
The Red Sox lose to the Yankees,
It has lately occurred to me,
How Hemingway says people go broke–
Gradually, then suddenly.
I was a better pitcher and a better writer than Bouton,
but he had played for the Yankees and so received
all the superlatives from those who hadn’t heard of me
and even if they had, probably didn’t realize
I actually wrote my books myself
I had had a good year for the White Sox in ’63,
but when they wanted to put a clause in my contract
prohibiting me from writing without their consent,
I retired from baseball
Years later I testified for Curt Flood in his suit
and I was proud to have done so, though he lost
And that led me to my one regret in baseball:
that I, perhaps having an even better case,
hadn’t been the one to challenge baseball
Base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character.
—Walt Whitman, quoted by Horace Traubel, Sunday, September 16, 1888
Our scribes used hyphens to effect
The link of “ball” to “base.”
It took a bard, though, to connect
The game to time and place,
To claim that bonds of fellowship
Bound “character” to sport,
Each clutching other in its grip.
We’re privileged to report
The name is safe, the hyphen out,
Walt got the call correct,
Bard, umpire, manager, and scout,
Our leadoff intellect.