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No Ties, No Ticking Clocks: April 18, 1981

by Barbara Gregorich

There are no ties in baseball,
there is no ticking clock.
The game could continue forever.

One night in Rhode Island
the Rochester Red Wings
face the Pawtucket Red Sox.

A fierce wind invades the stadium,
numbing fans and players alike.
Make this one quick, everyone hopes.

Lights generate no warmth.
Fans applaud, the game begins.
Six scoreless innings, then Rochester drives in

a single run. Bottom of the ninth,
the PawSox also score a single run.
There are no ties in baseball,

there is no ticking clock. There are only
more chances. The extra innings creep
like icicles: tenth, eleventh, twelfth arrive

and depart with nothing but snowballs
to show: big, round, cold zeros.
At the end of eighteen innings

the score remains one-one.
The temperature drops to bathyspheric depths.
Players light bonfires in trash barrels,

burning broken bats as fuel. Fans go home
to furnaces that blast hot air.
Players long to go home, too, but first

one of them must cross home.
The stadium sells out of food. Clubhouse men
deploy into the frigid night and return

with chow the players bolt down. The game
goes on — four hours . . . five . . . six.
There are no ties in baseball,

there is no ticking clock.
And then, top of the twenty-first inning —
Rochester scores a second run.

Hallelujah!
The game will, at long last, be over.
Completed.

No. Not meant to be.
Pawtucket also scores a second run
in the bottom of the twenty-first. Game tied,

Continue reading “No Ties, No Ticking Clocks: April 18, 1981”

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Baseball . . . Soon

by Stephen Jones

Sure ’nuff baseball starts
fan-world balanced on
a new season
by game beer brats

The season-to-be first
pumped by fist
then applause dismays
& maybe applause again

The moments/the pitches
the at-bats & skewed recoveries
brilliant plays or errors by inches
or a bunt called fair

Anticipate whatever
moments of baseball & history long
a long time is April-October
& a baseball song

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Holy Cow!

by Susanna Rich

Once you’ve been saved
by the Church of
St. Baseball—the
game is All: the
Hot Dog! grill’s the
altar; bases
are stations of
the moss; the pope’s
on second; cheers
are chants; every
hit aches for the
sky; every word
is—Say Hey!—a
prayer for home.

Susanna wrote and narrated this poem for “Cobb Field: A Day at the Ballpark,” Craig Lindvahl’s documentary, for which she was nominated for an Emmy.  The film can frequently be seen on the MLB Network.  Susanna has been published numerous times in Spitball and read frequently at the Yoga Berra Museum at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

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A Hot Dog

by Stephen Jones

Baseball baseball . . .
& who cares for wieners?

Mustard relish & steamed bun
In hand like on-going history

A snap! when bit
As play is done

(Best part of the “dog”)

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The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park

by Martin Espada

– Boston, MA, 1948

The Chilean secret police
searched everywhere
for the poet Neruda: in the dark shafts
of mines, in the boxcars of railroad yards,
in the sewers of Santiago.
The government intended to confiscate his mouth
and extract the poems one by one like bad teeth.
But the mines and boxcars and sewers were empty.

I know where he was. Neruda was at Fenway Park,
burly and bearded in a flat black cap, hidden
in the kaleidoscope of the bleachers.
He sat quietly, chomping a hot dog
when Ted Williams walked to the crest of the diamond,
slender as my father remembers him,
squinting at the pitcher, bat swaying in a memory of trees.

The stroke was a pendulum of long muscle and wood,
Ted’s face tilted up, the home run
zooming into the right field grandstand.
Then the crowd stood together, cheering
for this blasphemer of newsprint, the heretic
who would not tip his cap as he toed home plate
or grin like a war hero at the sportswriters
surrounding his locker for a quote.

The fugitive poet could not keep silent,
standing on his seat to declaim the ode
erupted in crowd-bewildering Spanish from his mouth:

Praise Ted Williams, raising his sword
cut from the ash tree, the ball
a white planet glowing in the atmosphere
of the right field grandstand!

Praise the Wall rising
like a great green wave
from the green sea of the outfield!

Praise the hot dog, pink meat,
pork snouts, sawdust, mouse feces,
human hair, plugging our intestines,
yet baptized joyfully with mustard!

Praise the wobbling drunk, seasick beer
in hand, staring at the number on his ticket,
demanding my seat!

Everyone gawked at the man standing
on his seat, bellowing poetry in Spanish.
Anonymous no longer,
Neruda saw the Chilean secret police
as they scrambled through the bleachers,
pointing and shouting, so the poet
jumped a guardrail to disappear
through a Fenway tunnel,
the black cap flying from his head
and spinning into center field.

This is true. I was there at Fenway
on August 7, 1948, even if I was born
exactly nine years later
when my father
almost named me Theodore.

Martin Espada teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published 17 books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator.  You can read more about his work at his website.