Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Ping!
I hear aluminum,
Smacking leather.
It’s T-Ball time.
Winter to spring,
Changing weather.
I feel fine.
Pitchers and catchers
Are warming up.
In Arizona.
Umps and fans are
Are hollering BATTERUP!
In Florida.
Though a grandfather,
I’m a child again.
Playing in the grass.
She’s my granddaughter,
Playing in the rain.
So quickly seasons pass.
Snap!
The early New England spring practice,
with its unrelenting icy wind, has unified
the coach and team into dreaming about
easier, warmer days ahead.
During batting practice and playing first base,
my frozen breath rising to the sky like prayer,
I come to believe I would prefer to run
sprints than stand here for another minute.
Smoothing the infield dirt and blowing bubbles,
The small pink planets rising and collapsing
with a sharp pop, I assess our team’s fortunes
full of wintry candor:
The pitchers don’t throw hard enough,
and if my teammates can’t put the ball
in play against them, what chance will we
have against real pitching. But, if I am brutally
Honest, I am not much better. Surveying this
disaster of pitches in the dirt and a steady stream
of whiffs, the coach takes a few soft swings
with the fungo bat as if daydreaming
About his days as a player when he would have
drilled each tepid fastball over the fence.
Having seen enough or just plain tired
of being cold, he mercifully calls off practice.
For what seems like the first time, he doesn’t
have to encourage us to hustle. We gather
together, happy to huddle, grateful for the shared
body heat and an end to the day’s misery.
Standing just outside the cluster, the coach
pumps his fist as he lays out our goals – win
the conference and make the state tournament.
From there, anything can happen.
He reminds us that after our families and school,
baseball is the most important thing, and how
lucky we are to be part of this team. We fidget.
Not everyone is completely sure of this.
Like an effective preacher, he is believable
because I want to believe him.
I look around and think maybe I’ll be
a little better and most of the team
Was returning. If maybe Todd can throw
his curveball for strikes, and if maybe
that freshman is as good playing baseball
as he was in football and basketball. . .
We just might. If maybe we catch a few
breaks. If maybe the teams in our conference
underestimate us. If maybe we get
the opponents’ second or third best pitcher.
Just maybe if we play a little better,
more like that game last year
against our talent-laden city rival, who was
ranked third in the state. Whenever
they hit the ball hard, it was always
right at someone. Todd’s curveball was
working, and they threw their third best
pitcher, who was wild.
With the infield in and the bases loaded,
I blooped a ball over the third baseman’s head
that hit the chalk for a double. We held the lead
for an inning
Before it all collapsed. Their hard hit balls
found the gaps, and they took the lead.
They brought in their ace for the last two
innings. We were so close
That we talked about it for weeks in between
losses until the rest of the games and practices
were impediments to SATs, proms, graduations,
girlfriends, and finding a job for the summer.
This year, Todd couldn’t throw strikes, and that
freshman dazzled for three games but grew bored
and quit, already tired of losing. Even when the breaks
went our way, we failed to capitalize.
Sure, we won some, but we lost more. In between,
one teammate had his parents divorce, and
the coach’s sister died in a car crash. The memory
of that season is just a few stanzas, yet
It taught me about loss and to see those small
victories within them. A clutch hit. A 6-4-3
double play that squelched a rally. The post-
game hamburgers. Her smile. The kindness
of my parents. The greatest gift given to me
was the joy of sprinting onto the field and putting
the last loss behind me, hopeful for a fresh start.
That season was just
The beginning. Against my expectations there have
been some wins, but I am now riding a 40 plus year
losing streak. Baseball was practice to learn to be
defeated again and again, but now by greater things.*
*The last line is a play on Rilke’s poem “The Man Watching.”
Catchers are a con,
With the masks that they don.
They move outside pitches in,
Making the umpire’s head spin.
Like a leathery snapping turtle,
Their fat gloves makes pitches fertile.
Fingers flash sneaky signs,
Keeping balls out of Wrigley’s vines.
But what catchers really hide,
Is that they have another side:
Their future after catching daily trouble,
May emerge as a post-playing days’ double.
Eyes darting, they see the whole field,
Imagining that someday they will wield
A baton like Connie, Gabby, Girardi, and Bochy,
And, of course, that wise backstop/leader named Yogi,
Who said, “It ain’t over till it’s over,”
Maybe meaning careers evolve forever.
Perhaps suggesting that a catcher is
To a big-league manager,
As a caterpillar eying the blue sky is
To an imperial monarch butterfly.
“It ain’t over till it’s over” is the last sentence of “Double Play,” Dr. Oza’s novel which will be published in 2024 by Chicago’s Third World Press. Dr. Oza is a management consultant and facilitates the interpersonal dynamics of MBAs at Stanford University.
If I could touch what touches everything,
if I could talk to the animals, if I could
remember the Bronx of 1953 as well as you,
the Polo Grounds would be my memory, one
we shared, you in stands, the Say Hey Kid
in center, across the river, in center Mick.
His glove like Willie’s catches the high pop.
I think of base paths, a batter’s box, a dash
third to home. Mantle for speed, power,
Mays for all-around everything in the Polo
Grounds, you remember sitting in stands
and I vaguely seeing Mantle but more so
an old man’s eye bloodied by a line drive
hit off, say, Brooks Robinson’s bat that day
the Yanks hosted Baltimore, Mick figurine-
small way out in center, but step into
the batter’s box, cousin, as the Mick did
and the Say Hey Kid, to touch the width
and breadth of what touches all, everything.
New York at Mantle’s fingertips, New York
in the pocket of the glove of a kid, Willie
Mays from cotton-field Alabama, Mick
from dustbowl Oklahoma, and you from
greenery of Dumont, the country it was
then, to ride in a Buick across the GW,
step into shadows tall brick walls, courtyard
guarded by stone lions and gargoyles
on ledges and with strength of your eight
year old arms open thick, black-glossed
double doors, high on a hill. So many
cobbled hills, down to the wide Concourse,
sprawl of shops on Fordham, canopies,
the RKO marquee, all the while brick walls
burnished red, brown, light tan of five-,
six-story buildings. The hand sets a potted
begonia on a fire escape, no more than dust
today, that in ‘53 when baseball was king,
joined its other hand to clap a storm
for Mays or Mantle. Look at the tiny curls
of blond hairs on his powerful forearm!
A child might have said to himself to herself,
I love Mickey Mantle, or Willie knocks it
out of the park for me, every time. To come
from whatever he was seeing, cotton under
a big sky, Stars Fell on Alabama, uphill,
and in broad light feel something like God’s
hand (if I could touch what touches
everything) on his shoulder and hear a voice
say Willie, or Mick, this is yours, all of it.
Peter Mladinic’s fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, is due out in November 2023 from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.
Au revoir, Dusty
In you did we trusty
Smart, passionate, steady
Toothpick at the ready
Giant, Astro, Dodger, Cub
You always improved a club
You have nothing more to prove
And lots of grandchildren to love
Raise a glass of Baker Wine
And celebrate the good times.
