Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
From my mother’s basement I fell into the Friendly Confines,
And I hunched in its bleachers till my beer-soaked hair froze.
Six miles from first place, loosed from its dream of October,
I woke to black caps and the nightmare Sox fans.
When I puked my guts out, they washed them off the seats with a hose.
Paying homage to Randall Jarrell…
Posted 5/13/08
by James Finn Garner
You say your batters can’t swing it?
Their whiffing gives you chills?
I got an old-school remedy for
Fixin’ all your ills.
Take all your Louisville Sluggers,
Arrange ’em in a stack,
Then get set for a mighty hoodoo
(There ain’t no turnin’ back).
Now get yourself some love dolls–
You know the kind I mean,
Those cuties made of polymerized
Isobutylene.
Inflate them gals and set them ’round
Your mighty pile of sticks
And pray for their blow-up blessings
And soon you’ll get your licks.
You’ll feel your eyeballs quicken
And your pencil fill with lead,
And by August your White Sox will be
Twenty games ahead.
But don’t blaspheme the rubber gods
Or disrespect their medicine,
Or they’ll do to you just what they did
To Brian Anderson.
Posted 5/12/08
Plutocrats were once the Detroit ideal.
Henry Ford and William Briggs
Living high in posh digs
While Ty Cobb rented a house during the season
In a middle-class hood.
When the city started to “change”
And white people moved out,
Somehow it was all the fault of those left behind.
Out of sight, out of mind
For those in Grosse Point and Warren
Who’d come into town a few times a year,
(Of course on Opening Day, where they’d still cheer
For Bunning, Kaline, Cash, Lary,
Willie Horton.)
When the car makers misread the market and made more gas-guzzlers,
One of the puzzlers was apportioning blame
Away from the carpetbaggers, shills, morons, and thieves
And onto the wage-slaves and winos
And others who remained in the city
Without trust funds, mobility,
Pedigree, or nobility.
The Lions upgraded to an oversized Tupperware tub in Pontiac
And the Pistons shuffled to Auburn Hills
But at least the Tigers stayed and played at Michigan and Trumbull
The ballpark half-full
And Ernie Harwell perched above home plate
Telling tales of Sweet Lou and Tram and Senor Smoke
While the city learned to choke on its own exhaust
And the bums sat, cracked and sauced,
In fine brick slums held together by a paste of broken windows and fatherless children.
Now the old ballpark sits, forgotten and overgrown,
Tigers overrun by dandelions.
Structure and seats rusted, torn to chunks,
At the hands of Ilitch raped and scorned,
But mourned
By the lower-level bleacher drunks stuck in hell
And imprisoned by the ghost of Charlie Maxwell.
The whole league fears our great armada,
Contenders in each year’s regatta.
But now it’s fear, we got a lotta,
Adrift without Jorge Posada.
We always reach that upper strata
And chase The Biggest Enchilada.
But now we’re hopeless: nothing, nada.
That’s life without Jorge Posada.
Great glory? We shall never win it,
If forced to send out Kelly Stinnett.
There is no chance with Sal Fasano,
If Jorge’s down, like Carl Pavano.
I’d rather use than Mike Piazza
Some cashier from a K Mart plaza,
Our only power would be solar,
If batting sixth we use Chad Moeller.
The fans won’t come to our arena
To watch us with Jose Molina.
Our chances shall be rank and smelly,
The day we sign Doug Mirabelli.
It brings great pain for me to say,
We’re even thin at Triple A.
And we will watch with great dismay,
Until we see our man… Jorge.
Posted 5/6/08
Hart Seely is the author of the hilarious Mother Goose Goes to Washington, as well as Oh Holy Cow: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto, newly released in a 15th-anniversary edition. He often hangs around the Yankee website, It is High, It is Far, It is….caught, offering tasteful and constructive comments to management and players alike.
By Gary Gillette
Winter Meetings blues.
Gray twi-nighter — Disney sucks.
Pestilential swamp.