Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Does a Baby Bull have Buddha nature?
Not even the wind,
fluttering prayer flags
in the abandoned grandstand,
can say.
Peanuts and popcorn
in your begging bowl,
a pinecone nestled snugly
in your glove.
How many times being hit by a pitch
until you gained enlightenment?
379 homers? Or
379 drops of rain
pelting a temple bell?
Photo by the author’s sister.
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.
This shit don’t count.
This shit don’t go
on the bubble gum card.
He’s paid, in a sense, to refrain from swinging
High heat, sliders in the dirt — he will not chase
If off the mark an opponent’s hurler is flinging
He’ll watch four wide ones, then jog to first base
His patience calls to mind a vintage mystic’s
So chill at the plate, get him an iced tea
This ain’t an opinion — just check the statistics
That’s how you earn such a high OBP
Twenty-six now, he’s been like this forever
Doing that shuffle after taking bad pitches
He’s made restraint a lucrative endeavor
Homers and walks — he knows what his niche is
It’s true, his contract’s huge, it’s not even funny,
But have you heard how Steve Cohen made his money?
Kevin Canfield’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications
Ichiro made Hall
unanimous but for one
there’s always THAT guy
