By Stuart Shea
It’s once again chic
To follow the Freak.
While San Diego hitters
Would probably rather be someplace like Mozambique.
“Say Hey Willie” by Dennis Massa
Don Zimmer, RIP
by James Finn Garner
Old Zim
When I think of him
Looks like chaw and tar
And a grand har-har
To those squares
Who don’t care
About baseball
And giving your all
For what you love.
And when push comes to shove,
Had Martinez been 70,
Zim would’ve pounded him plenty.
You’re our kind of guy.
Goodbye, Popeye.
Ballad of Bitter Words
by John Kieran
Why, Mr. Terry, oh! why did you ever
Chortle the query that made Brooklyn hot?
Just for the crack that you thought was so clever,
Now you stand teetering right on the spot!
Vain was your hope they forgave or forgot;
Now that you’re weary and bowed with fatigue,
Here is the drama and this is the plot:
Brooklyn, dear fellow, is still in the league.
Sir, if they can they will blithely dissever
Giants in segments unequal or not.
Homicide, Bill, is their plan and endeavor;
Staring on Ryan and Jackson and Ott,
You they expect to reduce to a blot.
La guerre a la mort! (Or in German “Der Krieg!”)
Vengeance they want to the ultimate jot:
Brooklyn, dear fellow, is still in the league.
Detroit awaits you? Says Lopez: “Ah, never!”
Pennant for Terry? Says Casey: “What rot!”
Using your scorn as a club or a lever,
Brooklyn will labor and chisel and swat.
Prize in the bag — now it may go to pot!
(Furnish sad music by Haydn or Grieg),
Bill, you won’t like it a bit or a lot;
Brooklyn, dear fellow, is still in the league.
At the start of the 1934 season, NY Giants manager Bill Terry made the off-hand jab about his local opposition: “Brooklyn? Are they still in the league?” The Dodgers used it as a rallying cry and kept the 1933 champs from repeating, beating the Giants down the stretch in dramatic fashion and helping the Cardinals take the pennant.
Published in the New York Times, September 29, 1934
Baseball Canto
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem,
with some Irish tenor’s voice piped over the loudspeakers,
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little
black caps pressed over their hearts,
Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender,
and all facing east,
as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to
appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776.
But Willie Mays appears instead,
in the bottom of the first,
and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes
off, like a footrunner from Thebes.
The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him
as he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic.
And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointy shoes.
And the right field bleechers go mad with Chicanos and blacks
and Brooklyn beer-drinkers,
“Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito!”
And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that don’t come back at all,
and flees around the bases
like he’s escaping from the United Fruit Company.
As the gringo dollar beats out the pound.
And sweet Tito beats it out like he’s beating out usury,
not to mention fascism and anti-semitism.
And Juan Marichal comes up,
and the Chicano bleechers go loco again,
as Juan belts the first ball out of sight,
and rounds first and keeps going
and rounds second and rounds third,
and keeps going and hits paydirt
to the roars of the grungy populace.
As some nut presses the backstage panic button
for the tape-recorded National Anthem again,
to save the situation.
But it don’t stop nobody this time,
in their revolution round the loaded white bases,
in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics,
in the territorio libre of Baseball.