Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
Now that the Wild Card
Smoke has cleared
And my team has just lost,
There’s one that I’ve learned,
Something in my brain
Like a Pythagorean theorem:
“In the postseason war
There is a reason for
Pitching, pitching, pitching.
No matter how gaudy
Your at-bats have become,
There is a reason
You’ll always be undone:
Pitching, pitching, pitching.”
The crack of the bat is more addicting than crack
or crackerjacks, for that matter,
as the batter cracks a jack
into the third deck, oh heck!
It clips the end of my glove,
my beer, obliterated on the big screen above.
While down on the diamond, bat flip, mad pride,
silver or gold bobbing with the swag of each stride
as some Bronx Bomber rounds the bases,
all those loud, elated New York faces.
And me, in my Twins hat
wishing just once that
1991 would come again,
Homer Hanky, Minnesota zen.
Me, still thinking about Chili Davis, Kirby Puckett.
Another sub-500 year; you know what? Fuck it.
James Callan grew up in Minneapolis. He lives on the Kāpiti Coast, New Zealand and is more than likely the biggest Twins baseball fan in the country. He lives on a small farm with his wife Rachel and his little boy Finn.
Herb Score
No tragedy here,
just one of those unfortunate incidents
that are sometimes part of the game:
Gil’s line drive didn’t end my career,
though I was out for the rest of the season;
it was arm trouble that did me in
And if I hadn’t been a player
I never would have become a broadcaster
I have to thank Bob Neal,
my first broadcast partner;
he never made me look bad
while I was learning on the job,
and I had a steep learning curve
Gil McDougald
I’m glad Herb doesn’t blame me;
I couldn’t have continued if he did,
or if that had ended his career
I think it did affect me;
I wasn’t as good a hitter afterward
A few years later I heard rumors
the Yankees were going to leave me unprotected
in the upcoming expansion draft,
so I said I would retire
rather than go to another teams
Yankee management feared this was a threat
to their absolute control and said so publicly
I think they were greatly surprised
when I stayed retired
There is no clock.
The games could last forever,
Even as September suns sink sooner every day.
This is suspended-animation baseball time.
If a team is 30 out, and nobody watches,
Did the game even happen?
Maybe only in your mind,
But this is the best place for a baseball game anyway.
Cups of coffee and last gasps,
Careers come and go in a flash,
Before the eyes of the true devotees,
Miles from a pennant race.
.
Originally posted 9/28/2009
On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting. I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line. I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eyes off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.
Years passed, three leagues of organized ball,
no few lives. I could homer
into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,
and still you stressed the same technique,
the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing
just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch
about basics never changing,
and I never learned what you were laying down.
Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap,
let this be the sign
I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.
David Bottoms, the Poet Laureate of Georgia from 2000 to 2012, currently holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished
Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta.