Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
First-ever pitch clock,
Elimination of the shift,
Pickoffs and “disengagement”
From the rubber
By the pitcher on the mound —
To name but a few of the new rules.
Sure I get it, MLB
Wants to attract new faces
And they figured it’s about time
To speed up the game …
But I still have trouble with the new bases.
They’re now the size of pizza boxes,
And I’m waiting for the moment,
That moment during a game,
When a hungry player on base
Tries to lift the lid.
We watched it together, community
We saw it through a black & white screen
No. 44’s smooth delivery
No. 44’s elegant swing
Buckner at the fence
Tom House in the ‘pen
715
Aaron met at the plate
Kissed by his mother forever
Cheers for a black man
in the South
“You can hear Georgia
around the world.”
When I was young, in the ’60s,
baseball was a snore in the winter.
I used to take my grass-stained bat
to bed with me,
and smell summer ’til I slumbered.
Other times I’d take my glove
to bed when the smell of oiled horse hide
lead to dreams of heroic runs for a fly ball.
60 years later,
the internet has replaced
my baseball gear late into the night.
Now, there’s free agency to speculate into exhaustion.
Who will sign where?
Why?
For how much?
Which teams are selling?
Who’s buying who?
What will your team look like next year?
Who’s going to greener grass?
Who’s loyal to their fan base?
Now, I’m old enough for my 2nd childhood,
I might wander the aisles of a thrift Store,
seek out an old glove to sleep with,
and see if dreams of dreams come back to me.
But I can already tell that metal bats don’t carry
the allure of grass stains on ash.
We started out fresh
in April
with a new ball
a ‘league’ ball
we called it
ivory colored
smooth
round
red stitching
we couldn’t get our nails
under
games went till dark
innings uncounted
till an dispute ended
them
or a lost ball
it survived
mud, dust, the smell
of gutters
disappearance in the hedge
or was it a jinx
by mid-July
it wore the unlucky face
of a sharecropper
a face lined with betrayal
fighting a losing war
with time and rain
by late September
embalmed with electrician’s tape
soggy, half-dead
lopsided
an oblate spheroid
it welcomed last rites
on that cellar shelf
as another cockeyed
semi-round object
took its place
not cowhide
but pigskin
Jackie and Willie and many others
helped bring the stolen base back to the game;
I did my part, especially in the Series
I saw the asterisk nonsense
the Commissioner pulled
with Maury Wills and Roger Maris
and I vowed that wouldn’t happen with me
I know it was a different commissioner,
but I wasn’t taking any chances
on him issuing a similar ruling,
and I succeeded.
