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Fantasy Baseball Nightmare

by James Finn Garner

Signing up for another hitch
To field a nine to hit and pitch
My squad last year just up and died
Reckless with my baseball pride

Where’s my Mantle off the farm?
My rotation always finds bum arms
And my whizbang keystone pair
Can muster neither clue nor prayer

.    In my fog all the stats
.    Become an acronym loop
.    WHIP, FIP, GO/AO, BABIP–
.    Wait, isn’t BABIP Korean soup?

Every morning, I link in,
Despite my trades, always sinking.
Why should I let it get me down?
Someone’s gotta be the Browns.

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The Career of Lou Proctor

by Gary Fincke

A press-box telegraph operator added his name and stats to one box score and was subsequently listed in six editions of the Baseball Encyclopedia.

In 1912, for St. Louis,
his name was in the box score.

He batted once — drew a walk,
was left stranded — but at the end

of the season that base on balls
fixed itself in records

as the career of Lou Proctor.
This Bible tells us so.

Six editions in all
where he’s near the one at-bat

of Earl Pruess, who stole
a base after his walk, who scored,

Unlike Lou Proctor, a run.
Holding this sixth edition,

we’re dreamy with lies, though
even here, there’s nothing

about birth or death, home town;
whether he batted right or left.

St. Louis Browns, we read,
American League; in the next

revision he’s gone. This text
is the one to love: we learn

the modesty of Lou Proctor,
the accomplishment of fiction.

 

Gary Fincke writes and teaches at Susquehanna University. Reprinted with permission of the author. Found in Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).

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MLB All-St. Patrick’s Day Team

1B  Hank Greenberg
2B  Grant Green
SS  Pumpsie Green
3B  Andy Green

LF  Mike Greenwell
CF  Lenny Green
RF  Danny Green

C     Charlie Greene

LHP  Chris Green
RHP  Clarence Beers, Jameson Taillon, Suds Sutherland

MGR  Dallas Green

 

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Baseball

by Wyatt Prunty

About the time I got my first-baseman’s mitt
I heard that Dizzy Dean was sacked
Because he made a dirty comment
Over the air. Camera zoomed and locked
On a young couple kissing, something slipped
With Dizzy, who then made the call:
“He kisses her on every strike,
And she kisses him on the balls.”

In a century banked with guilt and doubt
Sometimes the telling moments come
As inadvertently as Dizzy’s joke,
Like Hitler’s code before Coventry was bombed,
Or Valéry’s remark about Descartes:
“I sometimes think, therefore sometimes I am.”

Wyatt Prunty is the author of nine collections of poetry and served as editor of the essay collection Sewanee Writers on Writing. He has taught at The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, Louisiana State University, Washington and Lee University, and Sewanee, where he is presently the Ogden P. Carlton Professor of Literature. He is a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Johns Hopkins and Brown Foundation fellowships.