Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Fish for sale! Yo, fish for sale!
Marlins produce never goes stale!
A new rebuild set in motion,
A sinking team near the rising ocean.
In the glaring Miami sun
Any squad will come undone.
Don’t fall in love with Luis Arráez.
He’ll disappear before your eyes.
Burger, Bell, and Tanner Scott
Could be gone when summer’s hot,
And things won’t get calm later:
Come fall, bye-bye, Skip Schumaker
Root for the Marlins? Don’t forget:
A time-share is all you’ll ever get.
In baseball news, I’ve got a hunch
That the Tigers will finish first, that bunch.
Mistakes of the past
They will remedy fast
And there’s no more saying, “They’re out to lunch!”
As all us plebs pay the tax man,
You owners need to face some facts, man.
In suites with well-heeled sponsors and friends,
You claim your team pays civic dividends
Then you say you need new parks resplendent?
We fans should claim you as a dependent.
Taxes and slush are your basic income,
We ask for returns and you play dumb.
When voters at last come to their senses,
You scream and whine and talk moving expenses.
Pigs at the trough, courting our elected hoes —
Whatever way it’s adjusted is gross.
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.
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.