Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
This season’s new sheer slacks
Provide some things the game now lacks
A visible swing, a casual sashay
As sometimes seen in the NBA
New fans may be attracted!
Other players (no names, please) distracted
Gabby coaches will look like fools
When yapping about a player’s tools
And the evidence will add a new wrinkle
To discussion of anyone’s “launch angle.”
With apologies to Percy Shelley
Reprinted from October 11, 2019.
I met a traveler in La-La Land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the Ravine . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half a ton of Gator-Ade cups lie,
And blue playoff towels now still,
And B-list actors hoping to flog their dreck
To Smoltz and the odious Buck,
And a mangled manager in a heap;
And on a whiteboard, these words appear:
‘My name is Kershawmandias, Ace of Aces;
Look on my season only, dammit, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the meltdown
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level field stretches far away.”
For the story behind this photo, visit Atlas Obscura.
Eight post-season games
an oscillation between
delight and torment
All baseball season
night after night
I listen
And here’s the pitch . . .
Who wins or loses
no longer matters
despite what
The most rabid
fans and sports
radio hosts tell me.
I try to pay
attention to
the spaciousness:
The way
each moment opens
green
Like the smell
of freshly
mowed grass.
Often, I get lost
remembering who taught
me how to love the game:
Backyard catch
sandlot games
grandfather, father
uncles, cousins,
friends, teammates.
We know the best
hitters fail more often
than they succeed
At their craft.
I, as a listener,
am no different
On deck is . . .
I look ahead to
warmer weather,
an upcoming game
When I will be
on vacation,
the World Series.
The crack of the bat
always returns me
to the beauty
Of players in motion,
of fans living and dying,
and the open field of green.
Tom lives in Connecticut, the battleground state split between Red Sox and Yankee fans. His baseball short stories have appeared in The Feminine Collective and Turnstyle: The SABR Journal of Baseball Arts.
I want to see if the poet
is going to have me speak in dialect
as the sportswriters of my day did;
I spoke English better than they
spoke another language, and sometimes
even better than they spoke English
The great thing about baseball
is that your ability speaks for itself,
it’s not dependent on how someone else
chooses to portray you
And it also allowed me to do things
for other people, one of our reasons for being
