Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Inside the Mets’ locker room
Is a future Hall of Fame pitcher,
Probably the only one ever
With a losing record:
The great Jacob deGrom.
He wouldn’t do it –
If you knew him, not his style –
But someone should be advertising
Somewhere, anywhere,
For non-existent Mets’ run support.
Obviously Not Suitable for Work
When the Federal League filed their anti-trust suit in my court
because of my reputation as a trust-buster,
they failed to realize that I considered baseball
a national institution,
and that I would not brook radical action
against a national institution,
no matter what the law might say on the matter
(you saw what I did later to other radicals)
I sat on the case until the two parties
could settle the matter amongst themselves
(The suit that later reached the Supreme Court
was filed years later in a different court)
Baseball was grateful, and a few years later
offered me the position of single Commissioner,
a dream job:
many times my judge’s salary,
free admission to all baseball games,
and best of all, no annoying appellate judges
to overturn any of my decisions
I fought a losing battle against the growing farm systems,
but otherwise did what I was hired to do:
clean up the game’s image with the fans and writers,
and put in their place anyone who dared
to attack the game’s economic structure
To honor the birth and death of the Bard of Avon on April 23:
His spirit having shed this mortal clay,
Consider Shakespeare doing play-by-play.
With artful language, could he break the code,
Or just “stand like a house by th’ side of th’ road”?
To hear, egads, of someone “going yard”
Might sow farming tableaux within the Bard.
A “dying quail” or “Texas Leaguer”, s’truth,
are chestnuts we might hear the playwright uthe.
The redhead like old Barber might repeat
A phrase like “sitting in the catbird’s seat.”
Shout “Holy cow!” he’d not, nor tipsy sing,
Though quaffing Falstaff would remove the sting.
Arrives the pitch both high, tight and inside,
Quoth he: “With patience do such things betide.”
Having Shakespeare on the broadcast team!
Faith, t’would be the sweetest wordsmith’s dream!
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”
Rings brighter than, “These two teams came to play.”
To catch, though, baseball’s phantom ballyhoo,
He’d trail stout Ernie: “Let us playeth two!”
From the Cincinnati Times-Star, 1937, on announcer Red Barber’s consistent hawking of Wheaties cereal:
Red Barber has charm and he shows it,
And over the air he sure throws it–
But with all his entreaties
To munch those damned Wheaties
He eats ham and eggs and he knows it!