Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
By Stuart Shea
Is it worse when an umpire blows a call
Or when a player–in righteous anger–makes a mockery of it all?
It’s hard to support bad umpiring work
But who wants to watch some player act like a jerk?
Why don’t we even it out.
Let’s increase fan applause-o.
Let’s make umpiring-baiting legal
And let plate umpires call batters out like Enrico Palazzo!
Published 7/20/09
by Jonathan Eig
My daughter grabs the pink plastic bat
And steps up to the chalk-drawn plate.
Who am I to stop her if she wants to hit lefty?
Let’s see what you’ve got, I say to myself.
The kid’s maybe three or four and
I’m maybe forty-three.
I lean in and pretend to look for the signs.
She squeezes the bat and grimaces
Like Annie in the scene where she rescues Sandy from bullies.
Then she takes a couple of practice swings.
I take my time.
“Come on, Meat!” she yells.
So I stick my fingertips in two of the holes in the ball
And go with the sidearm sinker
That used to get my brother every time.
Filthy stuff, absolutely filthy.
She misses so badly that
I think she’s going to cry,
But she doesn’t.
She just cocks her head, looks up at me,
And says, ““That’s one, old-timer.”
Published 7/5/09
Jonathan Eig is the author of Opening Day: The story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season and Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig. You can read more about him, and his upcoming book, Get Capone!, here.
by Charles Ghigna
The slits of his eyes
hidden in shadows
beneath the bill of his cap,
he watches and waits
like a patient cat
to catch what comes
his way.
Crack!
and he pounces
upon the ball,
his hands flying
above the grass,
flinging his prey
on its way
across the diamond
into a double-play.
Charles Ghigna is the award-winning author of more than 40 volumes of poetry for children and adults, including Score: 50 Poems to Motivate and Inspire. Find out more at his website, Father Goose.
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Posted 7/2/2009
by Doug Fahrendorff
Last week
My brother returned
My copy of
The 1959 Mutual Baseball Almanac.
He had given me the book for my birthday
That year.
I paged through the articles
Describing how to play each position:
Roberts on pitching
Campanella catching
Musial the outfield
Statistics of yesterdays heroes
The book a mirror
Into a time long past
When baseball was still
Only a game.
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Posted 7/1/2009
By Stuart Shea
I beg of you,
Please don’t say that in his last nine at-bats he’s hitting .222.
Please don’t mention a two-game win streak,
Or how many homers he hit in one week
Or other meaningless stats
Like his career record in four games against the Rays,
Or his ERA on Wednesdays.
Even those of us without degrees in statistics
Can tell when “conclusions” are not realistic.
Between announcers making mountains of data molehills
And old-time players saying on-base percentage isn’t very important
Because walks clog the bases
Or being patient is wimpy
And waiting for walks erodes a hitter’s skills,
It’s enough to make you want to SCREAM
And grab the remote
And turn off Jamie Campbell, Thom Brennaman, or Rory Markas
And ponder the end of the world in darkness.
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Posted 6/30/2009