Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Swing!
watching — eyes:
perfect,
brown bat
— swingng,
above brown dirt,
(above my bare brown feet).
The ball pops!
Whistling seams widen my eyes;
I hear my Dad (jumping off the mound).
He’s really twenty thousand people
cheering for me,
and my home run
(that went all the way over the dugout).
I round the bases
and he still hasn’t fetched the ball.
The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign and out comes the lighter and with a flick and a dip the birthday cake is aglow and in the arms of the attendant with an enhanced chest followed by the power hitter with enhanced pecs, the guy no one likes, and everybody now happy birthday dear skipper and of course there’s the lefty bullpen specialist or whatever in the vestibule with a camo koozie and matching trucker hat hitting on the other very good looking attendant in fact look at that all of them are All-Stars that’s no coincidence because even in this day of time’s up I’m not here for you there’s still more work to do especially in the big leagues but we’re getting there and hey now batter up everyone’s got a chance the night before opening day and tonight’s flight is the time to feel good because tomorrow afternoon at about the time hats cover hearts for the rockets’ red glare comes the spotlight of expectancy right in the eyes but not now, right now this is the feel good express and the coaches they all feel it especially the hitting coach, guy thinks this is a seventies British rock band, and shortstop batting leadoff he feels it, mister happy peeking over the seat in front of him eyeing this curious celebration, and the dad-bod married guy with three kids what’s he even play now anyway left field now he’s two years postpeak and two years yet on his contract you know he’s hoping he can keep it together that long, oh but what’s that, did you see Arañita coming out of the can just now, looks like he puked his guts out, skinny guy with rubber arm and baconsizzle fastball, poor guy all the tools save location and he’ll lay it up for you, that cockhigh fastball and he knows he doesn’t have that tool yet that’s for the vets with meat on their bones, drives him to the can it does, but he’s a bet for the future that he can pull it together and turn in something nice, a good career, and isn’t that what this flight is, a manifest of all the hopefuls here together at once on board at six hundred knots and thirty thousand feet, an earthbound missile at the apogee still up in the clouds, trajectory of the bombs off Arañita, peanuts and Cracker Jack happy birthday to you.
Ken Derry is a former editor for the New York Yankees and has an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Some fiction credits include HAD, Danse Macabre, and The Carolina Quarterly.
The American League East
Is a self-eating beast
With no team below .500.
And the way these teams go,
As they consume one another,
It does make me wonder:
When the regular season
Is finally over
And the dust has settled,
It’s possible — it just may be —
That the last one on this list
Of baseball carnivores
May still get a wild card berth.
Who did they think they were
Traipsing through here
Laying waste
Smashing baseballs
Shutting us out
And sending us home
Home to wallow
Home to pine
Lick our wounds
Bow out heads
But before we left
They handed us brooms
Detritus and debris
To sweep and to clear
Memory to erase
Shame to shun
They mighty be Giants
We defeated be Dodgers
Writing poetry gave me a different satisfaction
than what playing baseball provided me
The biggest difference, interestingly enough,
was that, the lower the stakes,
the more power the critics had:
no amount of their vitriol
could take a save away from me
or change any game’s result,
unlike in poetry
