Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
When you paint your masterpiece
Monsieur Gauguin Webb
We will be in Thrall
Utah or parts unknown
As well as in Awe
Wowed by the sweep
Of your slider
Biting off batter’s swings
Showing that swagger
Shades of Lincecum
And his immortal
F*ck yeah
To the world
And to the Kingdom of Doubt
Strutting off the mound
En route to Victoryland
Logan Webb fumbled once with his hand
Yet the rest of his night was outstand.
Buster barrelled Bueller
Kapler’s crew was cooler
and the Dodgers got straight up San Franned.
Michael X. Ferraro is the author of CIRCUS CATCH and TASED & AMUSED: The Shocking Poetic Recap of the 2010 MLB Season.
Pitch me, says the movie mogul.
Walk-off homer, I nervously gargle.
Bah, been done before. New twist?
Actually rare? But I get your gist…
Come-from-behind Cinderella tale?
More like a team that shouldn’t fail.
Scrappy underdogs? Ragtag bunch?
Favorites from way back in March…
So who’s next up? These “Giant” guys.
That squad can actually surprise.
It’s a mess! Disaster! Optics all wrong!
Not if framed like: Godzilla vs. Kong.
Okay, green light! You’re in luck,
But you’ll need star power–get that Joe Buck.
The oracles erred:
Not-so-great expectations
“Suhwwiinng and a miss”
(Cue Kuiper)
It’s a year of the Yaz
And razzmatazz
A Wade into wonder
Hitting in the pinch
Going for the clinch
They might be Giants
Indeed they are
Homer-ic team-sters
An arc of anonymity
Pining for posterity:
LaStella oh so stellar
Longo launching long ones
Into Baseball’s Starry Night
Posey, Belt, and Crawford
Renascence Men
Solano Flores Bryant
Rogers Disco McGee
Watson Wood Webb
Gausman Casali Garcia
Duggar Cueto Slater
Dickerson Doval Dubón
Littell Leone Quintana
And Kazmir redux!
On and on
Names forgotten?
No matter.
A roster
For Gabe Kapler
O captain our captain
Anonymous
Synonymous
With eponymous
Giants
Ever and anon.
Twenty
Twenty-one
Fun salute.
Paul Kocak is the author of Baseball’s Starry Night and World Serious, as well as the poetry collections Rounding Third and Tipp Hill Litanies.
Herman Franks
We stole signs from the Germans and the Japanese,
and it wasn’t wrong for us to do so
While baseball isn’t life or death,
winning instead of losing is part of our way of life,
so it wasn’t wrong to steal signs in ’51
When Leo suggested it,
and Hank Schenz volunteered his telescope,
I was happy to be the spy relaying the signs
And if that could always assure victory,
we would have won a pennant or two
doing it while I was managing San Francisco,
instead of finishing second four years in a row
Bobby Thomson
Because of the way I was raised,
I struggled for years to justify what we were doing
I finally realized that,
even if you knew what pitch was coming,
you still had to hit it squarely,
and I deserved credit for doing so
Ralph Branca
I was among those taunting the Giants
earlier in the season, so some might say
I got a deserved comeuppance
in giving up the homer to Bobby;
I don’t think so, because of the spy
Bobby got more credit than he deserved
and I got more blame that I deserved
We’ll be linked as long as baseball is played,
and I’m at peace with my role in the drama